Armchair Diplomat

The Brotherhood of Upended Buckets welcomes you

Welcome to a new series of reviews where I (and maybe the others) go trawling the bargain bins of my local games stores to see what kind of entertainment can be had for $20 or less.  We’re going to be calling these “Rewind Reviews”, reviews of games that may have previously passed you by but warrant a second look.

First in the series is a doozy – Fallout, the post-apocalyptic RPG originally released by Interplay in 1997.  For some reason I never got to play it then but it sure got a lot of positive attention from others.  It’s featured near the top of numerous “best games ever made” lists and it’s been highly rated by pretty much every reviewer that’s ever played it.

But how does it hold up some 12 years down the track?

I’ll get a couple of practical matters out of the way first.  The version I bought (for $15) also came with Fallout 2 and the spin-off RTS game Fallout Tactics on the same disc.  I won’t get into those games in this review, but suffice to say that’s some pretty sweet value.  The game installs in a couple of minutes flat, it loads fast and it hasn’t had any problems running on the two XP machines I tested it on.  So far so good.

Character creation is straightforward.  You can either choose one of the pre-configured characters or make your own from scratch.  If you go for the latter option (as I did) you’re given handy prompts explaining exactly what consequences your selections will have and you’ll have to make some careful tradeoffs (less overall damage but more critical hits, for example).

Read more