Now that Kynte's VGM as become established, it is time to start a Hall Of Fame. The Hall Of Fame will be for games and the people who make them. I know this has been done by countless others, but what's a Museum without a famous person exibit.

So, here is the first entry into Knyte's VGM HOF:

1. Fallout



"War. War never changes. The Romans waged war to gather slaves and wealth. Spain built an empire from its lust for gold and territory. Hitler shaped a battered Germany into an economic superpower. But war never changes. In the 21st century, war was still waged over the resources that could be acquired. Only this time, the spoils of war were also its weapons. Petroleum and uranium. For these resources, China would invade Alaska, the US would annex Canada, and the European Commonwealth would dissolve into quarreling, bickering nation-states, bent on controlling the last remaining resources on Earth. In 2077, the storm of world war had come again. In two brief hours, most of the planet was reduced to cinders. And from the ashes of nuclear devastation, a new civilization would struggle to arise. A few were able to reach the relative safety of the large underground Vaults. Your family was part of the group that entered Vault Thirteen. Imprisoned safely behind the large Vault door, under a mountain of stone, a generation has lived without knowledge of the outside world. Life in the Vault is about to change"

Fallout was created by Tim Cain of Black Isle Studios has a spiritual sequel to the EA game "Wasteland". A RPG not dealing with dragons and fairies, but with nuclear holocasts and mutants.

Set in the aftermath of a world-wide nuclear war, Fallout will challenge you to survive in an unknown and dangerous world. You will take the role of a Vault-dweller, a person who has grown up in a secluded, underground survival Vault. Circumstances arise that force you to go Outside -- to a strange world 80 years after the end of the modern civilization. A world of mutants, radiation, gangs and violence.

Your immediate task is to find a replacement for the broken water purification controller chip. Without that chip, your fellow Vault dwellers are doomed to dehydration or be forced to leave the safety of the Vault for the Outside.

The core of the game revolves around your character. When you start Fallout, you can choose or modify one of three pre-made characters, or create your own from scratch. The character creation system allows you to make a vibrant, unique character. We use a skill-based system to allow you to fine tune your character.
As you gain experience (roughly half from combat, the other half is from solving adventure seeds and non-combat based events), your character will grow as you determine. No classes here!

The game played brilliantly. And, felt like a port of pen and paper RPG. The reason being that it was... sort of. Originally Fallout was to use Steve Jackson's GURPS system for all the stats, numbers, and rules. However, after being shown some early work on the game, Mr Jackson was alarmed by the ammount of violence and gore, and wanted elements removed. Black Isle, stood there ground, and refused to alter their content, and so the deal was off, and Black Isle wrote their own "Rule Book" to power the engine.

The stlye of Fallout, with it's dark humor, made it really stand out among RPGs of it's time. The dark, and brutal world was encased with 1950's style "Educational Film" cheesiness that blended together strangely well.

There is no need to go over the plot, because if you are on of the few that have not played the game, then go find it!

Look for the "Fallout Collection" online, or through e-bay. You can usually pick it up for about $25 (w/shipping included).

It contains Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics on a single DVD.

Woohoo!

Also, here's to hoping that Fallout 3 doesn't suck. It's currently being developed by Bethesda Software (Makers of Oblivion), who purchased the Intellectual Property.

I haven't played it, but I do know it uses the "Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance" engine, and plays almost identically to that game. Which wasn't a bad game at all. My and a friend of mine played the crap out of it whenever he came over. We would also be fighting over who got the "Deadly Uber Sword of Something Slaying + (RAND NUM)" we would come across.

It's a hack and slash type game, closer to Diablo, then the Strategy RPG that Fallout I & II were.

Syd Lexia wrote:

Fallout was indeed awesome. One small thing though. Wasteland was an Interplay game. It came on an Interplay game collection that came with the first CD-ROM drive we bought in 1993.

Your refering to the "Interplay's 10 Year Anthology" CD-ROM, which contained the following games:

Mindshadow
Tass Times in Tone Town
The Bard's Tale
Battle Chess
Wasteland
Dragon Wars
Castles
Lord of the Rings
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary
Out of this World

The game was designed by Alan Pavlish, Michael A. Stackpole and Ken St. Andre, programmed by Pavlish, and produced by Brian Fargo for Interplay Productions, and published by Electronic Arts. It was EA who held the rights to the games, as they are the credited publisher. At the time Interplay Productions were only developers, but not publishers in their own right. It was durring this time that they also created The Bard's Tale, which was also published by EA.

They didn't become a self publisher until they released Battle Chess on their own in 1988. Wasteland was released in 1987, a year prior.

It's also interesting to note that the original game included several setup files, which once installed, loaded on to your hard drive (or your floppy disks!) the Wasteland game. One of the options in the setup process is restarting the game with the same characters.

In other words, you can win as many times as you want with the same batch of characters--the setup file can reset the maps only if you want. But only if you have the original version. For some reason, The 10 Year Anthology doesn't have the original files. (One source claims Interplay lost the original disks.) If you look around online, you can find fan-made hacks to correct this feature on the Antology and on the Version EGM gave away in one of the Magizines years ago.

In 2003, Brian Fargo and his new game company, inXile, acquire the rights to Wasteland with the United States Patent Office. He notes the reason he didn't get the rights sooner was that Electronic Arts was sitting on them. When they expired, Konami grabbed it for use with their Yu-Gi-Oh series, but they were kind enough to let him have the trademark back.

Syd Lexia wrote:

One of the more unfortunate features of Dragon Wars and Wasteland was their use of a game manual that provided much of the game's story. You'd step on a space and it would say PARAGRAPH 35 and then you'd have to turn to PARAGRAPH 35 to see what was going on. In Wasteland, there were a few spots where you needed a password, and you could just thumb through the book until you find the paragraph that had it. Sure, there were some decoy paragraphs, but not enough to keep you from finding the real password.

Sounds just like all the "Gold Box" AD&D games made by SSI. Such as "Pool Of Radiance."

All of those games came with an instruction manual and a "Journal." Everytime you would talk to an important NPC you would see: "You recorded the conversation as Journal Entry #XX" And, then you would have to find the entry in the book. I also wondered why my party were such bad journal keepers. The first person in the gam you talk to would be, like, Journal Entry #46, but then towards the end of the game you have to read Journal Entry #02.

That's pretty sweet. But, they better still have Ron Pearlman do the opening voice over.

And, on a side note in all things Fallout, I have just recently the Van Buren Alpha. If you do not know what that is, it was the in-house preview build of Fallout 3 that Black Isle did to show Interplay. There's not much to it, but you can see where they were going with it, and it showed alot of promise. I liked the fact that it was a 3-D modeled version of the classic 3/4 Iso view of the original two games. There are some new Perks, and the combat was a little revised. If anybody wants I can post some screen captures.