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Review: Fallout 2Reviewed By: Bill Stiteler Review Date: September 20, 2002
I want you to visualize a classroom. In this classroom, they teach Story. No one can learn, however, because there are two students, jocks, named Quake and Unreal. These two are so popular that for years no one has been able to do anything except talk about how much they love or hate them. Yammer yammer yammer. "What are Quake and Unreal doing today? Which one has more frame rates? Have you see the latest mod?" And finally you begin to give up all hope of ever hearing about the subject of story again, because everyone will just not shut up about these two chunk heads. Then, one day, a man--an old man, freaking geriatric by any standard--walks in. He smiles, adjusts his glasses, and after asking both Quake and Unreal to stand up for a minute, proceeds to kung-fu kick their heads through the wall. He then writes the name of the class, "Story," on the wall, and then his name. Say hello to Professor Fallout 2.
Fallout 2 is a combat-centric role-playing game set in post-apocalyptic America, which is all at once weird, real, funny, and terrifying. Set eighty years after the original Fallout, you play a descendant of the Vault Dweller (the vaguely-named protagonist of Fallout). Your goal is, initially, to save your dying village by seeking a Garden of Eden Creation Kit (GECK)--a device which transforms devastated wilderness into paradise. Leaving the only home you have ever known, you must save your own people, and as so often happens in RPGs, the world as well. You begin with character creation. I believe it's based on the GURPS method, but since I'm old enough to have a wife and a health plan, I try to avoid saying "GURPS" as much as possible. I recommend spending some time thinking about your character. How you choose to imbue him will affect the game. Brutes will have an easier time at the beginning of the game, just beating the crap out of everything, but characters with high intelligence and skilled speakers will be able to find easier ways around problems (often for more experience points), and have more options available to them. In fact, if you're not smart or glib enough, some side quests simply won't be available to you.
Your quest takes you across the landscape of southwestern America making friends and enemies. And it will be both, because if you decide to play the hero, you'll tick off those who like having everyone else under their thumb--people who are often in charge of the towns you enter as you seek the mythic GECK. Alternately, you can chose to aid the Powers That Be. After all, it's a tough world, and maybe the strong should lead. This, of course, will tick off those fighting for freedom in this World Gone Wrong, who are also often heavily armed and more often than not have a vital bit of information or an item that you need to complete your quest. Like I said, it's a tough world. But what a wonderful world in which to adventure. Fallout 2 manages to blend a campy 50's outlook with a postmodern, cynical view on humanity. It is a world which is at once outrageously hilarious and sobering in its grim outlook. One in which Python references exist side-by-side with meditations on drug culture and slavery, and both work.
The grim bits work because they're well thought out. The characters are acting out of believable motivations. A civilization made up of people who went into a fallout shelter in the 50s (Vault City) would undoubtedly be xenophobic to their irradiated neighbors, and would try to have them wiped out rather than help them. Freed from any sort of populist government, organized crime families have taken over Reno, Nevada, and turned it into a haven of rugs, gambling and prostitution, causing people to flock there for the vice, and for the protection that the heavily armed city can provide. Some people object to the rise of slavery, but few actually oppose it; they're not slaves, after all, and it's free labor. The good part, of course, is that this is more than just angsty navel-gazing. You can do something about it. You can be a hero. The world view of the game is jaded, but not outright pessimistic, as you'll find when you run into people inspired by, and monuments to, the Vault Dweller throughout the game. And like the original Fallout, your quest to be a hero (if that's what you decide to be) will eventually take you up against those with other plans for humanity. Your investigations into the mysterious Enclave, with technology that outstrips even the powerful Brotherhood of Steel, leads you into a plot for the resurrection of America which, I'm sad to say, has lost none of its chilling nature in the years since Fallout 2 was originally released.
Second, MacPlay and OMNI deserve kudos for giving you a full port of Fallout 2; even the bugs from 1999 are included. In a one-on-one martial arts competition, your opponents aren't always removed after a fight, leading to a two-on-one fight. Then three. Then four. Hiner tells me that after being told to "Come back within 24 hours," then stopping only to save his game and immediately continue the dialogue, he was told he'd missed the deadline and was promptly shot, forcing him to reload the whole scenario. A pistol starts out with 10mm ammo, but can only be reloaded with 9mm. That aside, the port is fantastic. Saved games take only seconds, not (literal) minutes to load as with the original Fallout, and I had only one crash during my entire time of play. Also... okay, sit down for this... you get a printed manual. I know! When was the last time you saw one of those! The manual not only gives you extensive info on playing the game, but its section on Vault life and what to expect in your new, post-nuclear world is hilarious. Ah, if only Fallout 2 were indeed a new game. Still, its hard to feel bad when you finally get to play a game this great, one which blends combat with a great story, instead of just going for a triangle count so you can "fraggor" your "biznatches." If we could get Anthony Edwards to make a speech at the end, it'd be perfect.
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It has been three years since Fallout 2 came out for the PC. In that time, the only RPG which has come close to touching it is the Baldur's Gate series. Small surprise, since both were created by Black Isle software. I want to have their child..in a, you know, manly way.
Having created your character, you venture out into the wilderness. Save a lot; it's a tough world. So tough in fact, that you'll quickly grow to appreciate an undocumented feature of Fallout 2: you can save in the middle of a combat. Has this ever been in a game before? Anyway, you'll need it. Besides the fact that you routinely run into people carrying plasma rifles and mini-vulcans, a critical hit can kill even the most advanced character with one shot. My advice; save every time something moderately good happens, which--in Fallout 2's turn-based, highly violent combat system--won't be often.
The funny bits work, I think, because like all the best comedy, it's played completely straight. Unlike, say, Sacrifice, in which the designers couldn't wait to point out how zany some the characters were, all the characters in Fallout 2 take themselves (more or less) seriously. Ask a ghoul if that's a branch sticking out of his head, and he'll tell you its name. Enter a brothel in power armor, and the prostitutes will start making fetish jokes.
Bits and pieces: Fallout 2 is presented as a top-down 3D game, but it is sprite based. Some people have a problem with this, for reasons which have never been clearly explained to me. I like sprites. Sprites look like the thing which they are supposed to represent. Some, devotees of Picasso I guess, seem to think that vector graphics and triangles are more realistic, that the human head is indeed indistinguishable from the neck, that the nose is best represented as a dark blotch on the face, and that shoulders end in hard, ninety degree angles. This is the sad effect of playing too much