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NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2024 15:28:38 +0000
From: Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: FREE GAME: "Fallout Classic" and "Wild Card Football"
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2024 11:28:38 -0400
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On Thu, 29 Aug 2024 18:37:19 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:

>Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Oh God, is it Thursday again? Fine, let's do this. Open the Epic
>> client, figure out what games are available, find the URLs, do a
>> write-up... you know, the usual. Well, I'm sure the effort will be all
>> worth it, right?
>
>Right. ;)
>
>
>> * Fallout Classic Collection
>> https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/bundles/fallout-classic-collection
>>    Just in case you somehow (!) haven't managed to get this 
>>    games yet, here's another chance: this collection includes 
>>    the original Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout: Brotherhood of 
>>    Steel (but if you've been a regular to these posts, you 
>>    probably nabbed them on Epic back in December 2022). Ehn. 
>>    They're good games, I guess, but they haven't aged all 
>>    that well and they're such common freebies that its hard 
>>    to get excited about them anymore.
>
>I'm still a Fallout virgin so this is might chance, but when will I play 
>them? Will I enjoy them? :P
>

I mean, I don't want to denigrate the original Fallout games. They're
considered classics for good reason. But more than many other games,
they feel /old/. 

Or maybe it's not that they feel old so much as poorly made? I
honestly have an easier time playing something like "Bards Tale" or
"Pool of Radiance" than the first "Fallout". Perhaps it's because the
games are on the cusp of modernity that their deficiencies seem more
apparent. I /expect/ "Might and Magic: Secret of the Inner Sanctum" to
be rough around the edges, with poor graphics and a complete lack of
quality-of-life features or respect for my time. It came out in 1986;
even if the developers had thought of it, the hardware of the time
just wasn't up to the task.

But "Fallout" looks so much like a modern isometric CRPG that it's
foibles --its grainy visuals, its uneven difficulty, its shallow
characters-- feel less like something the developers COULDN'T do as
something they chose NOT to do. Even as much as I tell myself, "this
was a game released almost three decades ago!"* I still bump into this
incongruity.

There's a lot to be impressed with the original "Fallout" and it
definitely has had a big influence on modern CRPGs. I'm just not sure
it's actually worth playing anymore, at least not in its vanilla
state.







* Just to give you an idea of how much development and advancement
have passed since then, on release, "Fallout" was closer to the birth
of the IBM PC/compatible (16 years) than the game's birth is to the
present (27 years). Heck, yhe first mass-market home computer was only
20 years prior to "Fallout's" release date. It was born only 8 years
after "Wasteland"!