And now for another game from Twentieth Century. Fallout is a fairly old game that every other game nerd seems to be continually high on. And by "old game", I mean "game franchise". I wonder how many of them have actually played the first one.

The setting is pretty familiar, since I've played it's sequels before. This game is set more than a hundred years before Fallout 3 and New Vegas. That doesn't make much difference, aside from there not being an NCR or Enclave. You play a resident of Vault 13, tasked with going out into a land that no one you know has ever seen. Your mission: get a water controller chip within 150 days, else your vault friends die of thirst. After that's complete, your are then tasked with destroying the mutant threat. And since this world has been nuked before, there is no compunction against not using the ones left lying around. How fun.

There are familiar things from other Fallout games. Many people drink Nuka Cola, and the bottlecaps are used as money. Deathclaws are as lethal as the name suggests. Mutants can be quite tough to bring down. Then there are the differences. Getting around is different and less atmospheric. You can't take it all in when you can only click points on a map. If you stop in the middle of nowhere, it's one of about 5 layouts.

Gameplay is turn based. If you plan ahead from the start (start being character creation), you can allocate 10 to agility, which means that you can generally shoot twice and move two tiles each turn. Combat becomes much easier with companions. The interface is kind of clunky. The keyboard arrow keys work to scroll through player inventory (but not other's inventory), and the number keys and enter work on quantity dialogs. But that gets annoying when you want to purchase armor worth 21,000 caps with spare guns and rest in caps, 999 at a time.

Feel free to play it, but you will have to put up with a lot of old school design flaws. Oh, and save a lot.