Review

Is Fallout fun? As always, it depends on you. For myself, I thoroughly enjoyed playing it. There were times when my interest waned, but never to the extent that playing it turned into work. During those times when the play mechanics felt a little tiresome, the incentive to unveil the story kept me playing without any regrets. Fallout is one of those games that makes you more and more nostalgic about it the longer it's been since you played it. It's like a novel that becomes more appreciated after you've read it. You aren't necessarily ever compelled to read it again, since the most appealing thing about it is it's lasting impression as a whole, and you're not sure you've got the patience to get through it again. When you talk to someone about RPGs and they haven't played Fallout, you say "My God! You're kidding? How can you not have played Fallout?!"

So having said that, I doubt I'll ever play Fallout again. The AI and interface have some teeth-grinding flaws, and I'll never forgive Black Isle for Dogmeat. Never. See - you have to play Fallout just so we can cry in our beers together for Dogmeat.

Since I gave such a low score for the interface I'm inclined to say a few words about it. The inventory management is very irritating. It's inefficient and unaccommodating and only gets moreso as you collect more things. But if managing your own inventory is irritating, then managing the inventory of your party members is doubly so. In fact, managing party members in any way whatsoever is the biggest thorn in the whole game. It almost feels like the topic completely slipped the minds of the developers, and then just before shipping somebody realized that you couldn't do anything with your party members. The solution: just "steal" from them, or "steal" to them, if you need to give them something. Ugh. The sore spot of the AI is all the friendly fire. Stay the hell out of the way if one of your party members has a weapon with burst fire. And God help them if they get anywhere near environmental hazards, such as force fields, since they don't have enough sense to avoid them. These things are bothersome, but don't keep the game from being fun.

Fallout's lasting legacy is its style. The subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) satire that is woven into the artwork, characters, story, and dialogue is so perfect, so appropriate, so poignant. The voice acting is awesome, and there's enough spoken dialogue that it actually matters. For the month or so that it took me to play through Fallout, I was engulfed in the atmosphere of a primitive, post-holocaust society... and loving it. I reveled in the freedom of the loosely constrained civilization, helping those whom I felt deserved help, and shooting gaping holes in those that didn't. I wish I had more patience as a gamer, and could get myself to play Fallout again, taking different role-playing paths, without feeling guilty about all those other games on my shelf that need playing. Maybe I'll come back to it someday, but until then I'll just hold tightly to the affection that I have for Fallout. I don't have to worry about the story ever turning stale or trite. War never changes.

Tips

• To get Fallout to work under winNT/2K, do the following:
  
  1. Copy \program\win\falloutw.___ from the Fallout CD to c:\games\fallout\falloutw.exe (where "c:\games\fallout" is where you installed Fallout).
  2. Then create a text file called fallout.cfg in the fallout directory, or just edit it if it already exists.
  3. Add the following to this text file:

  [system]
  master_dat=d:\master.dat
  critter_dat=d:\critter.dat
  free_space=0
  [sound]
  music_path2=d:\data\sound\music

• [in this example, "d:" is the CDROM drive]
• Now you can run c:\games\fallout\falloutw.exe to play.
  

• To get Fallout to work under winXP, do the following:
  
  1. Set the following value in the fallout.cfg file:
     

     free_space=0

• This should be under the [system] section.

• To see a list of absolutely hilarious quotes from the developers, hold down the SHIFT key when clicking on the "Credits" button. Everyone should have this much fun at work.