The Game That Got Me Into PC Gaming: Fallout 2

Still among my favourite games today.

It was just before I started college, a long time ago when I had my first hand-me-down PC for doing 'coursework' and studying, naturally. Up until that point I'd been pretty much a console gamer, PlayStation, Mega-drive and the like when I started searching for RPG on the PC. The age of playable demos was still in full swing and I stumbled across the demo for the original Fallout, spent far too long downloading it compared to today's lightning fast download speeds and installed it.

I was immediately hooked and spent the next few days of playtime exploring every last nook and cranny of the demo. Then I managed to hunt down a copy of Fallout 1 and 2 in the old White Label budget games section of my local games store and goodbye went so many hours as I explored the wasteland.

For whatever reason Fallout 1 refused to work often crashing out but Fallout 2 did and it did so much stuff I loved it was insane at the time. It was even more epic than even the demo of the first one lead me to believe. An in depth character creation system had me sitting on the character creation screen for a couple of hours pondering just how I wanted to go about surviving the wasteland.

Did I want a dim-witted bruiser who thumped their way out of problems? A charismatic smooth-talker? A gun toting sneak thief? Any and all options were seemingly available and pretty viable (mostly.) True you could select one of three pre-made characters but wheres the fun in that!

So Many Options!

My first character will always stick with me the most, a smooth talking, agile, gunslinger type who suffered from not being very strong so I ended up having to pick and choose what items to carry. The combat system was so satisfying and responsive as well for a turn based one anyway, shoot an enemy in the leg and they were fairly likely to be toppled over, meaning they'd have to spend action points to stand up again. Arm shots could prevent enemies from wielding heavier weapons, all given a dose a black humour from the text speech above their head and the combat log in the bottom left. A vast array of weapons, items and armour further added to that, everything from a cobbled together make-shift pipe-rifle or brass knuckles all the way up to plasma rifles, power armour and lasers often ensuring you'd always find some new toy to play with (and then grumble at finding no ammo for!)

The graphics by today's standards are not really great but I am very much a gameplay over graphics person even to this day. However it had a lot of amusing animations and some downright gory ones (hence the games 'Mature' age rating among other reasons.)

I think a minigun probably is overkill, yes.

The story and quest/mission system certainly kept me playing right til the end as well. Multiple choice conversations with branching dialogue trees, certain skills, traits and attributes giving more or less options in different situations. Add in a karma system tracking whether you were a beacon of hope or an immoral douchebag which further gave more options and it wasn't hard to see why I wasn't the only one who got lost in the vastness of it all.

Even to this day and despite it's more modern and shinier pixel shaded iterations I will at times reinstall it just because I love the game that much. The interface is very archaic and clunky by today's standards of UI design but even that doesn't always dissuade me from firing up this old classic for a jaunt through the wasteland.