Recently
Bethesda teased the gamer community with the possibility of a new
Fallout game, they simply showed a "Please stand by" image
and apparently left it there, still unsure if a confirmation was
given or not about what was it but I dismissed the game, I simply
don't like the new series and I tried all of the recent ones, it just
isn't Fallout and even if heretical to some I think the last true
game on the series was Fallout: Tactics.
So
for the purpose of proving myself either right or wrong about how
good was the series back in the day I took the task of installing the
original Fallout and here I found myself in an ordeal I had not dealt
with in many years. I spinned a virtual machine for Windows XP SP3 (I
got legitimate licenses, leave me alone) and was successful on
installing the game there, to my surprise the mouse was going all
over the place with the slightest move so this was not the way to go,
no matter how much I fixed and tweaked I could not get the thing to
do what I wanted.
Next
step was to use Wine and here is where I re-learned what a pain it
was to setup, Wine is a Windows emulator for Linux, you can install
programs and interact with them as you would in Windows, but you’re
on Linux, and the thing does not get any less complicated from there.
Turns out that every time I want to give Wine a chance it’s always
a hassle to setup, installing is simple as the repositories for
Debian contain the packages, but doing the whole thing, getting the
setup right, making sure everything worked, it was trial and error
until I managed to get the thing right and for this I took around
some three hours to figure out what I was doing wrong. (Turns out I
just had to leave the latest version of Wine as the default for the
program to run, silly me eh?)
Once
Fallout was installed I found another peculiar issue, I could run it
windowed but I could not switch to other windows or things on my
desktop while this window was running and I did not want to go
through another hassle to figure out why this was the case, the whole
reason behind this was that I wanted to record a play-through of the
original game and eventually Fallout 2 and Tactics, but I could not
even do something as simple as ALT+TAB to press record, eventually I
figured that if I ran the thing full screen and setup the right
coordinates on the recording program I would get the whole thing and
this is how it will work from now on.
After
this I finally met this jewel again and I have so many fond memories,
everything came back to me (even things that I know I have missed so
far), exiting Vault 13, finding Shady Sands, doing the radscorpion
quest, figuring out that Vault 15 is a pile of rubble and your quest
is going to take you a very long while to figure out and you got less
than 140~ days to get to it before everyone dies on the vault, the
first armor and new weapon you get (that Mad Max leather suit,
because that’s not a jacket that’s the whole thing, and the SMG
that has the lamest sound ever, the handgun sounds far more brutal
than the poor thing and they do the same damage as far as I recall,
unless of course you do burst).
Tweaking
my character was also a personal no-brainer, I found that in the
world of Fallout, a world that was blown to pieces by a nuclear war
many years before you were even born (if memory does not fail me),
you can find a ton of ammunition, way too much, so I never really
bothered with melee as I could always find the ammo I needed for my
weapon, I can’t wait to get the power armor and harden it, the .223
handgun (which is a nod to Blade Runner), fighting some of the
weirdest and toughest bosses of the series, getting the random
encounters that are very random indeed, finding meatdog (eventually,
hope Ian doesn’t kill him as usual or me for that matter).
This
is why I know this game is a jewel, it’s been more than fifteen
years since I first found the dual-case that contained Fallout 1 and
2 for the bargain price of two dollars at a Wal-Mart, I remember
installing them humongous version and my dad being furious at me for
filling up the hard drive on the computer (we had a 3GB hard drive
back then, imagine that!) but managing to run the game so smooth and
fast it didn’t matter, so much I played both games that they skip
from time to time and I think they are at the end of their life, so
sad as it will be hard to find such a bargain again (unless GOG or
Humble Bundle gives them away for super cheap again but I highly
doubt it).
With
all that being said, give it a try, enjoy it, take the time to learn
probably one of the best and easiest systems for a role-playing game
(because AD&D sucked in Baldurs Gate although it was an awesome
game nevertheless).
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