The original Fallout is one of the greatest PC games of all time. But when it came out in 1997, at first I utterly neglected it.
I first came upon it in the aisles of my local Wal-Mart, the only place to purchase PC games at the time in my rural Kentucky town. I was browsing, looking for something new to buy with the money I got from my dish-washing job, when Bill brought the box with the now-familiar power armor on the cover and said, “Hey, caco, how about this one? It seems cool.” I sniffed in dismissal of it by saying, “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of that one.”
Flash forward a few weeks, and Fallout was all over the gaming media as an example of a stellar RPG done right. So, I picked it up. But, in a pattern that would be a habit for me for the rest of my life, I still didn’t feel compelled to play it.
Bill did, however, since he was interested in it from the moment he saw the box, so he started playing it on my computer when he came over. Then, he began pestering me to play it, impressing upon me exactly how amazing it really was. I begrudgingly agreed, and got sucked into one of the best gaming experiences of my life.
It combines everything I love about PC RPG’s: character building, statistical management, random encounters, looting, dialogue choices, multiple methods to success, all in one polished package. The game was also rather unique in the amount of gore it featured, with custom bloody animations for “overkills” with each weapon type, from dudes’ torsos being blown out to them being melted into a pile of goo by a plasma bolt. The only knock I could give it is that the game was rather buggy, and the vaunted NPC “reputation system” was an over-hyped piece of shit. NPC’s would frequently forget that they were supposed to be mad at you, or say the exact same things regardless of whether they were or not. Tim Cain being a salesman, I suppose.
I recently played through the game again, with all the unofficial patches and expansions available in the comprehensive “Fallout Fixt” mod. You can probably find it still if you did a search for it. If you’re interested, that is. The mod adds the ability to equip your NPC’s with armor, as well as the ability to part from Dogmeat so he doesn’t get slaughtered in the later portions of the game. It also fixes a lot of bugs and adds several new quests to the game, so it’s really quite an impressive overhaul. The only problem I had with it was, I had a really high “Speech” score and (possible minor spoiler) I wanted to use it to resolve the final confrontation, like the original game, but a rather nasty crash bug prevented me from doing so. I can only assume that was due to the mod. (I had to turbo plasma rifle the final baddie in the eyes until dead, instead.)
I personally think the game holds up rather well in today’s marketplace of 16-bit throwback apps on smartphones and tablets and the like, but Al said he tried to play it and couldn’t stomach the horrible, pixelated graphics. The “Fallout Fixt” mod comes with a resolution patch where you can customize this somewhat to your liking — you can either set the game to run in HD with the side effect that everything is really tiny, or you can keep it at its original resolution and blow it up two or three times in size to fit your screen. The former looks better but is a little harder to navigate, and the latter is closer to the way the game originally appeared. Whatever your preference.
The game is about ten bucks on most of the digital download services, which is still a little high for one over 15 years old. Still, I recommend you try it out if you’re a fan of classic turn-based strategy RPG‘s, and if you somehow missed this game when it came out originally.