Fallout - Part 5: Rummaging Through Junktown

First things first, I owe Interplay an apology. I thought they included a super-perverted scene with Tandi, but that was just me jumping to conclusions. It turns out that, if you hit on her, she turns you down, so the dialogue option that gave me the heeby-jeebies was actually the character being creepy, rather than the game being creepy. If I were in the mood to quibble, I might be curious as to why anyone would think that a main character who ineffectually comes onto a sixteen-year-old would be compelling enough to bother writing in the option, but I am so mortified by my mistake that I'm just going to let this lie.

Instead, it is time to further explore the world of Fallout. Where we last left off, I'd failed to find the water chip in Vault 15. From there, I have precisely zero leads. All I know is the names of a couple of Wasteland towns - The Hub and Junktown. Neither has been singled out as more likely to have what I need than the other. So I go to the one that's closest.

I figure that the locations on the side of the navigation screen are arranged in the best order for visiting. This is shameless metagaming, I know, but I literally have nothing else (besides my memories of how to actually beat the game) to go off of.

Strangely, I manage to make this trip without encountering any random enemies. It's like my early death at the claws of mole rats has bought me some extra leeway. I should probably wander around in the wasteland grinding xp, but that feels a little like cheating to me (I couldn't say why, though, probably because this is a roleplaying game and "then the vault dweller spent two weeks wandering in circles hunting for radscorpions" doesn't feel like it's "in-character.")

Thus, in the shortest time possible, I arrive at scenic Junktown.

Once I get past Lars, the gate guard, I explore a little, to see if I can find a lead on the water chip. No one volunteers anything, and, of course, the "tell me about" button is basically useless.

Perhaps I was angered by his sarcastic non-answer, or perhaps I am simply an rpg protagonist, but I poke my nose into the hole behind him, climbing down into the basement to discover a gore-covered little person who is, perhaps, not the most sensitive portrayal in the world.

Because of my high Speech rating, I basically have magical mind control powers, so I'm able to wring from him a sordid tale of disgusting, disgusting deceit.

Iguana Bob, down in the Hub, is buying human body parts from Dr Morbid, and passing them off as Iguana Bits. How this makes sense from a business perspective is unclear, but I do know that if I ever run into this Iguana Bob, he's going to have a lot to answer for.

Sadly, I can do nothing to confront the good doctor himself. When I talk to him about his side business, he just denies everything.

I suspect there is some other event I have to trigger to get this situation to advance, but I can't quite figure out what it is. I do know you can start a fight by poking around in the basement too much, but because I wasn't sure whether that counted as aggression in the eyes of the local law, I declined to pursue that path.

Instead, I sought out the mayor (sheriff?) of this little town, Killian Darkwater.

He seemed like a decent enough fellow, though I never quite know how to navigate these gruff authority types (much like in real life). You can never tell when being sarcastic and causal will cause them to view you as a down-to-earth straight shooter and when it will make them see you as a smart-assed trouble-maker who needs to be rousted as soon as possible. I take the cautious road and be respectful.

It's hard to say whether it was a fruitful approach, because as soon as I exit the dialogue screen, fate intercedes to ensure my destiny is entwined with the town's.

An assassin tries to take out Killian (seen there, dead at my feet, because I forgot about the timing and was too surprised to get a screenshot). I was able to both loot the body (got a rifle out of it, cha-ching!) and get a job from Killian - bring him evidence of the local crime-lord's involvement in the attempt.

I will confess to not knowing how the law and justice system here in Junktown works. I guess it's some kind of constitutional . . . something. Killian needs evidence to deal with people he doesn't like, so he's not an autocrat, yet if there is some kind of popular rule, than it is kind of hard to understand how Gizmo can operate while Killian opposes him. Surely, if Gizmo's operation were popular among the locals, then Killian would not have the support to be a problem, whereas if it were unpopular, then antagonizing a well-loved (and well-armed) figure would hardly be in Gizmo's economic interest.

Maybe the two are carefully balanced political rivals, and it is the arrival of this mysterious newcomer that threatens to throw the status quo out of balance.

But enough of that intriguing stuff, I'm off to the hotel.

I meet a prostitute.

It's really weird, in a game ostensibly about choice (so much so that they give you the option to perv on Tandi), that you have no option but to ask Sinthia how much she charges. It's doubly weird that she then tells you that she's too expensive. I can't help but take that a little personally.

I have to find some place to sob myself to sleep, sadly unboned.

I am awoken from my slumber by a commotion in the other room. Sinthia has been taken hostage by a disgruntled john. Naturally, I am such an obvious choice for hostage negotiator (perhaps I have an aura of "ask me to do your dirty work" surrounding me), that the hotel's owner begs me to intercede.

I gab at that guy for a bit, and at first it looks like my magical speech abilities are doing the trick.

But I'm still only level 4, and so I haven't quite reached ultimate mastery. The guy manages to shake off my spell.

The results are kind of gruesome, and honestly more than a little disturbing.

Violence against women is not cool, Fallout. Also, why are you using the most graphic and gory animation for Sinthia's death? I can only imagine it's to punish me, the player, for not adequately saving her. And I don't even want to begin parsing the politics of that reasoning.

Because I don't want virtual blood on my hands, I reload my save and try a different approach. I go for the bribe. It works, and though it somewhat aggrieves my sense of justice to just let a hostage-taker stroll away, not only unpunished but 100 bottle caps richer, it is important not to lose sight of the real goal here - saving Sinthia's life.

And of course I have the option to immediately turn this beautiful moment of selfless heroism into something tawdry and gross. I'm just going to assume this is another Tandi situation and take it as read that the sleazy pick up line doesn't work.

Sinthia's job is being a prostitute. Earlier, she declined to have sex with me in exchange for money, and as much as I found it weird that I had no choice but to solicit her custom, it would not have bothered me if it was an option. However, having suddenly change her mind and be willing to  sleep with me as a reward for saving her life is just . . .

You know what, I have no proof that's how things would have gone down, so I'm going to choose to believe the best. Fallout is like, 95% a fun game. These uncomfortable moments where I'm faced with potentially very weird sexual politics are actually few and far between (only two in three hours, and one of them was not quite as bad as I initially thought).

Next post, I'll be able to deal with Gizmo. A straight-up, old-fashioned political murder. There's no way that can get exploitative and creepy . . .

Oh, for fucks' sake!

Fallout - Part 4 - We're Gonna Need Some Rope

After crossing the wasteland to Vault 15, I reach one of my favorite of the game's locations.

I mean, there's nothing much to look at, and there's nothing valuable to loot, but something about the art direction appeals to me. There's just this crappy little shack in the middle of the desert that hides a ladder to an underground facility.  Nothing heralds it as a significant location. There's something plausibly science-fiction-y about its general blandness.

Crawling down the ladder, I enter . . . another cave.

Inhabited by . . . more rats. Thanks to their general wimpiness and the presence of Ian, I feel secure enough to switch back to my knife. I'm still super-paranoid about running out of ammo because I don't really remember at what point in the game things start to turn around and my income gets high enough to make supplies a non-issue.

Though the rats are individually trivial, their combined xp is enough to bump me up to level 3.

Third level brings with it my first opportunity to select a Perk. You get one perk every three levels, and each one modifies your character in one of a variety of useful ways. The Perk I choose is Awareness, which doesn't do a whole heck of a lot, but does allow me to see the exact hit point totals of my enemies. It was the best choice available at level 3.

I think the thing I love most about Fallout's leveling system is the cute little drawings that accompany all the various character traits. They, more than anything, contribute to the game's satirically cheerful psuedo-50s vibe.

Using my increased powers, I cut a swath through the rats and reached what looks like a dead end.

This damned elevator shaft. There's no real hint of what you're supposed to do here. The first few times I played this game, I practically pulled my hair out in frustration. What you're supposed to do is use a mechanic that only rarely comes into play.

You have to switch your cursor over to the action mode and hold down the right button until the various action tiles come up and select the "use item" option.

This brings up a list of your items, and you can select one to activate on the location pointed to by the cursor. This is something you only have to do with great infrequency. The item you have to use is the rope, which has no other use, is only uncommonly found (Seth is one of the few people to have one to trade), and there's no real hint that it even exists if you haven't already encountered it.

Arrgh!

Luckily, I've played this game so much that I already knew what to do, but it's an aggravation that has stuck with me for many years. I mean, I suppose I get it. What you're supposed to do is use real-world reasoning and apply it to your situation. You're faced with a broken elevator shaft. How do you get down? A rope. Obviously.  It's not a hugely difficult puzzle, but it kind of breaks the social contract between gamer and game. It hasn't really signaled that it has adventure game elements. And it doesn't have enough of them to make it a consistent part of your toolkit.

I guess when I consider it carefully, I approve of stuff like this more than it annoys me. Fallout is a rich and detailed game, with a lot to see and do. It embraces the "role" part of "roleplaying game," and if sometimes that feels like a misstep, that's no great sin.

At the bottom of the shaft, I found a bleak and abandoned Vault, filled with . . . rats.

Well, pig rats. These are larger and more aggressive than regular rats, but still mostly harmless. I stick with my knife and let Ian do the bulk of the damage. Going chamber by chamber, I'm able to round up all the Vault's xp and snag myself a neat piece of equipment.

A swanky leather jacket. No longer am I an out-of-place Vault dork. I am now a true wastelander. Raiders and giant rats will fear to cross me. I also picked up a second rope, which comes in handy for descending to the third level of the Vault (again, this is the only place in the game that uses rope).

There are more pig rats down there, but they're no harder to kill than any of the others. When you get to the bottom-right corner, a message displays, informing you that your search is useless due to the Vault's cave in.

Where do you go next? There's no real way to tell. The most obvious destination is Shady Sands.

Where we find out that Tandi is missing!

I guess this is just the natural evolution of the character's abundant uselessness, but it's still one of those "what the fuck" moments. I know you're better than this, Fallout.

However, I'm one of those designated hero types, bound by narrative law to poke myself into every random problem I encounter, regardless of whether it affects me personally (or even whether I have a reasonable chance of helping), so I agree to try and rescue her (although the game's laudable commitment to freedom does allow me to just keep on walking, here, but then I would miss out on xp).

After getting the story from Seth, he directs me to the Khans' base of operations.

It is my abiding good fortune that these are not the type of post-apocalyptic raiders that kill strangers on sight and loot their corpses for valuables, so I'm able to barge my way in to see the leader and do something profoundly ridiculous.

I'm something of an optimist about human nature, so there is nothing prima facie absurd to me about negotiating for the release of a prisoner, even from a deadly gang of low-lifes and slavers. However, the way that Duke goes about it stretches credibility.

"I represent a threat you don't even understand. Do you really want to risk my wrath?"

What is that backed up by? My leather jacket. My fifty some-odd bullets? My fierce reputation as a level three adventurer. ("Watch out guys, he has Awareness").

What's going on here is that I put enough points in Speech last level to be able to trigger the special dialogue. Not for the last time has my character's propensity for bullshit gotten him out of a serious jam (and spared me the tedium of all this nasty "playing the game's content" business). In the Fallout games, being good at talking is less a way to find common ground between individuals and more of a mind-control superpower.

It does have its compensations, though . . .

By which I mean the joys of a young girl's gratitude and the satisfaction of a job well done, and not whatever the hell this middle dialogue option is trying to get me to do. I know it's sort of my responsibility as a let's-player to show off as much of the game's content as possible, but seriously, she's like sixteen. I haven't wanted to sleep with a sixteen-year-old since . . . around the time Fallout was originally released, actually.

Still, I'm docking the game points for this, because I didn't actually play the game until it had already been out for three or four years, and I didn't discover this little side adventure until just now, and that's just gross.

So, just for the record, I did not try and parlay my rescuing duties into any kind of awkward rpg "sexiness" and simply accepted her thanks and walked away with nothing more than a few hundred xp and my pride as a human being.

Fallout - Part 3: A Detour Through Shady Sands

Traveling through the wasteland presents many hazards, but sometimes you find things you don't expect. Places of refuge and civilization, nestled in the middle of nowhere, and able to accommodate the occasional traveler.

The green circle on the left is Vault 13, my point of origin. The one on the far right is Vault 15, my destination. The green circle in the middle is "unknown." It's an unheralded desert encounter, one which no one told you to anticipate and which has no bearing on your immediate goal. Yet it would be the height of disingenuousness to call it "random." I mean, look at its placement. You might potentially avoid finding it, if you decided to take a weird circuitous route between the Vaults (though actually, doing so would allow you to short-circuit much of the game's plot, at the cost of being insanely dangerous), but seeing as how the game gives you no other direction, what are the odds of that?

Still, it is one of Fallout's virtues that you don't have to go into this location. You could continue on your way and ignore it forever. However, that is both dull, from a story-telling perspective, and a huge missed opportunity for loot and xp, so of course I'm going to explore this mysterious location.

And immediately discover one of the game's more bizarre concessions to realism. It can detect when you have a weapon equipped, and npcs in friendly areas don't like it. I'm not entirely sure what the makers of Fallout thought the player would get out of this system quirk, but it does force me to do some annoying inventory shuffling.

It was worth it, though, because the town of Shady Sands contains valuable information and sidequests. It's also the first opportunity to interact with npcs.

Here's the dialogue screen. Seth here has some basic information about the town, and his fellow gate guard knows about the surrounding area, though neither of them is particularly well informed about the water chip. Seth does tell me about a deadly radscorpion infestation, and because rpg protagonists apparently have some sort of "tell me about your petty problems so I can solve them aura" I make a note of this as something to keep in mind for after I explore the town.

But though the sidequest xp is valuable, the real reason to come to Shady Sands is for a fateful encounter.

Ian, the mercenary, that handsome fellow in the black leather jacket. There is no overstating how much he'll help your early survivability. Though as valuable a companion, he's kind of a terrible mercenary. He joins up with me for a promise of "a share of the action" which is just ridiculously vague (and also has no mechanical weight, and thus is never mentioned again). The reason for this is that I've got a high intelligence, which made the dialogue option show and a good Speech rating, which allowed me to say it without embarrassing myself. You can't rely on diplomacy to the exclusion of other skill, but it does save you a lot of trouble.

With Ian in tow, I explore the rest of the town, meeting Aradesh:

Who is astonishingly useless, considering that he has a special dialogue screen and voiced lines. He gives you some minor information about the town and its problems, but nothing you couldn't infer from talking to Seth.

We also meet his daughter, Tandi:

Tandi is weird because she gives off certain cues. So much about her dialogue says "I am the disaffected daughter of an isolated village elder, do the right sidequest and I will join your party as a spunky sidekick," but nothing ever comes of it. She turns out to be an important character in Fallout 2, and in the subsequent canon, but for now, she's useless. It turns out to be something of a running theme with the animated characters.

With nothing else to do, Ian and I head to the radscorpion caves.

It looks a lot like the rat-infested caves near Vault 13, but I'm going to give the game a pass here. It's obviously a technological limitation. Got to save memory by reusing tile sets.

The presence of Ian makes this cave a lot easier than it would otherwise be, but radscorpions themselves do not fuck around, so I decide to equip my gun and risk some of my precious ammo.

I mean, look at those things. They're huge. Plus they greatly outnumber me (and unlike rats, radscorpions will wreck a low level character if they're underestimated). The upside of this is that they give a very significant amount of xp. Enough that I level up before clearing out the cave.

Thanks to my high intelligence, I get 20 skill points per level. If I hadn't taken the "gifted" trait, I could have gotten as many as 25, but I probably wouldn't have, because I'd have had seven fewer attribute points, and maxing out intelligence would not have been so good an idea.

I put all my available skill points into Small Guns, boosting it by 40 points (due to it being a tagged skill). It might seem foolish to overspecialize like this, but more combat skill helps me immediately, and I'm almost certain to gain another level or two before my other skills become important.

After clearing out the radscorpions, I can loot their bodies, taking their tails.

This is not merely some grizzly trophy. You need at least one scorpion tail to help make an antivenin back in Shady Sands. The rest can be bartered away for essential supplies.

Speaking of antivenin, going back into town reveals another one of the game's less charming mechanics. The doctor will not speak to me at night. Don't get me wrong, I don't have a general problem with day/night cycles in games. Majora's Mask is one of my favorites. However, it actually has to be used to create a living world, with nighttime opening up a whole new set of interactions, quests, and activities. Used thoughtlessly, having night just forces your character to stand around. Like so:

This screen, which opens up off your Pip-boy, gives you a whole slew of resting options. Also, you can see the note there on the left which gives you a deadline for saving the Vault. I don't remember what exactly happens if you fail, but I think it's just a sub-optimal ending.

Despite not having time to waste, I decide to wait around until noon, just to be extra sure that I can get in to see the doctor. I do, and subsequently give him a scorpion tail and receive a dose of antivenin for myself (along with the much more important experience points).

While walking around noontime Shady Sands, I encounter Tandi again, and decide to ask her a couple of questions.

Fallout has a rare dialogue feature, the "tell me about" button (seen on the right of the dialogue window). It allows you to type in a topic and get answers from npcs outside of their normal dialogue topics. It sounds handy, but there's a reason this feature is so rare - it never works.

As seen above, asking Tandi about Vault 15, literally the most notable nearby landmark and the single most important topic to a player character at this point in the game, yields a useless blow-off answer. (You get a sarcastic response if you ask her about herself and minor gossip if you ask about certain people around town, but nothing super-informative). Of course, Tandi faces the unique problem that anything she says has to be voiced, so there's a technological obstacle to her being too chatty, but it just goes to show the general uselessness of the animated characters (despite the fact that they seem like "major" npcs and thus more likely to be clued in to what's going on).

Given the lack of helpful hints, I'm more or less done with Shady Sands for now. I just have one more errand. I need to get rid of all these damned scorpion tails. To do this, I find Seth and hit the Barter button (also seen on the right of the dialogue window). That brings up the barter screen.

The way bartering works is that you've got a ledger divided into two parts, with your inventory on the left and the npc's inventory on the right. You drag the stuff you want to get rid of to the left side of the ledger and the stuff you want to the right side. Then, the game assigns each half of the transaction a value in bottlecaps (based on some objective value for the equipment, modified by each character's Barter skill). If the value of your stuff is greater than the value of the npc's stuff, they accept the offer.

Why barter with Seth and not some other npc? It could be that I psychically sensed that he had rope and then had an amazing premonition that I would soon need rope. Or it could be that I've played this game before and had the necessity of this exact transaction burned into my head by a prior experience of extremely painful frustration and confusion.

Fallout - Part 2: RAAATS!!!

From the very beginning, it is clear that Fallout is not your typical roleplaying game. Once you finish creating your character, you are addressed by the Overseer, who tells you that you must leave the safety of your underground Vault in order to seek out a water purifying chip. The Vault can't build another one, which makes this errand one of dubious utility (clearly, this Vault lifestyle is unsustainable), but you're the only one bold enough (or expendable enough) to brave the outside world.

When you gain control of the character, you find yourself in a cave, standing in front of the sleek sci-fi architecture of Vault 13.

There's no telling what dangers await me out there in the surface world. So I need to equip a weapon. I click on the inventory button underneath that red button in the center.

You start with some sparse, but high quality equipment. The gun is going to be a staple of my combat toolkit for the first few hours of the game. The main limitation here is that I only have 72 bullets, which means I can't afford to waste them on minor threats. That leaves me stuck with the knife, which I'm not particularly skilled in (it's this early paucity of ammunition that makes Max Stone a viable character), but luckily, I'm in no immediate danger because the present threat is . . .

RATS!

So maybe Fallout is a bit like other roleplaying games after all. The first mission is always rats. The interesting thing (for certain values of "interesting") here is that it is played completely straight. In most modern games, you'll fight rats, but the game will wink at it. The rat mission in Morrowind, for example, is self-consciously bizarre. The Bards' Tale openly mocks the concept.

Here, there are just a shit ton of rats. It's kind of weird, when you think about it. These aren't giant, mutated rats. They're just regular rats. Why are they attacking humans, especially one at a time? Why do I, a human, even bother engaging them?

Experience points, obviously. Each rat is worth 25xp and is not particularly threatening, so I could snag an extra 500 xp by clearing them out. It's not particularly sensitive, ecologically, and it helps precisely no one, but it does let me practice the combat system.

The way the fighting works is that you have a certain amount of action points, based off your agility. I've got 9. Each action has an action point cost. Swinging your knife normally costs 3AP, but my fast shot trait reduces the cost to 2. So I can make up to four attacks a turn and still have 1 AP left to either move out of the way (each hex of movement costs 1 AP) or boost my defense (when you end your turn, your armor class gets a +1 bonus for each unused action point you have remaining).

To attack, you right click until your mouse changes into a target, and then you left click on the enemy. While your mouse is hovering over a target, it gives you the odds of your attack succeeding. My chances are 47%, due to my low melee skill. I'd have a better chance with the gun, but rats have terrible accuracy, damage, and defense, so 47% is not at all bad.

I quickly clear out the cave and find myself at the cusp of the outside world.

A whole big, unknown world is out there, filled with god-knows what.

It's not much to look at, but looks can be deceiving. The blue buttons on the right will take you to major locations (such as Vault 15, the most obvious place to search for a new water chip), but you can actually direct your character to any point on the map. The wasteland tiles don't have anything in them (usually - sometimes you can discover new caves and cities and such by moving directly into the unknown, though it's often better to wait until people tell you about a location before going there, sequence breaking notwithstanding), but as you move over them, you have a chance of triggering a random encounter.

This is indicated by a red lightning bolt. I'm not sure if these encounters are procedurally generated or just chosen from a list, but they can vary greatly in composition (and the attendant danger). My first contact with the outside world is MORE RATS

Well, giant mole rats anyway. I stuck with my knife, because I figured it was a starting encounter, and thus not worth wasting bullets. As you can see from the shot above, I was disastrously wrong. The "lesser" mole rats tear me apart, because this is an old-school game and it is not at all forgiving of sloppy mistakes like "using an inferior weapon" or "being level one."

The end result is that my bones will bleach in the unforgiving sun of the post-apocalyptic waste.

I'll be seeing that screen a lot.

Fallout - Part 1: The Character Createning

Fallout has the most incredible opening cinematic. Screenshots cannot do it justice, so let me just post a link to youtube:

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Right away it sells the game, telling you everything you need to know about the world, and your place in it. The maniacs blew it all up, and the game knows they were maniacs, and it is going to make fun of them. I remember playing this game for the first time, almost 15 years ago (fuck, I'm old). I bought in a two-pack with Fallout 2. It had already been out for a couple of years, but this was before I had anything like regular internet service (and, indeed, at least a year or two before the world really caught on to the value of such), so I didn't know anything about it. I came into the game almost completely blind, and then the music started playing and I saw a cheerful 50s-ish propaganda mascot juxtaposed with this grim-as-fuck subject matter, and by 30 seconds in, I was hooked.

But enough reminiscing, let's get to the game itself. Fallout is a true hardcore game, because right away, before explaining anything about how the game is played or what challenges you might face, it throws you right in to character creation. If you're a complete newbie, you can select one of the preconstructed characters.

 Max Stone is a beefy brawler type with a decent agility (an absolutely essential attribute). I've never played him, but looking at his build, I'd say he's probably got some early game survivability, but is less than optimal for the long term. His high strength makes him good with melee weapons and his bare hands, which is great for when you run out of ammo, but by the late game, you're going to have plenty. He has small guns as a tagged skill, so he's not completely helpless, but honestly, you're probably better off optimizing for the stuff you're actually going to use.

Natalia is a bit better. She's got agility 10, a high-ish intelligence (which you want for extra skill points and dialogue options), and the gifted perk (which you want to take 100% of the time). However, her tagged skills include sneak and steal, which aren't exactly bad, but lend themselves to a specialized playstyle. She's probably the best of the preconstructed characters, but you'll either have to invest heavily in a better combat skill or find a power fist ASAP.

Albert is kind of a poorly designed character. He uses Agility as a dump stat, which not only makes him incredibly slow in combat, it also makes it harder for him to connect with his attacks and easier for enemies to hit him. I think the idea is that he's focused in Charisma and Speech, which do more than you might expect, but probably not enough to carry you through the game. Plus his low endurance makes him fragile, and his choice of perks is dubious. Skilled gives you extra skills, but slows your acquisition of further perks, so is completely not worth it. Good-natured is decent, but on a character as hopeless in combat as Albert, it just exacerbates his weakness. He might be all right for a pacifist playthrough, but he doesn't really have the speed to run away from the many, many enemies that will not respond to the peaceful approach.

Since none of these characters really appeals to me, and because I love tinkering with different builds, I decided to create my own character. Fallout has a really deep character creation system that strongly resembles a pen-and-paper rpg.

It's called the SPECIAL system, due to the acronym formed by the attribute names. It's kind of obscured by the fact that they decided to go with two letter abbreviations, but you can see them in the left corner there. From the top, they are strength, perception, endurance, charisma, intelligence, agility, and luck. These affect how successful you are with your skills, and also factor into your derived traits (seen in the middle, and being stuff like action points, radiation resistance, and critical chance). They each start at rating five, and you have five points to spend.

On the right are your skills. The starting rating is determined by your attributes (each skill has a formula which takes into account one or more attributes, but I don't feel like doing the research to find them). As you level up, you'll get a number of skill points (based on your intelligence), that will allow you to raise your skills. You must also select three "tagged" skills, which will cause skill points spent on them to count for double.

Finally, in the bottom left are the optional traits. These modify your character, giving bonuses and penalties that can influence how you level up or interact with certain game systems. You can choose up to two, but you don't have to. Since each one has both positive and negative effects, it's not always a good idea to have them. It really depends on your style (although you always want to choose Gifted).

Incidentally, none of the above is explained in the game, because Fallout is from a time when games had manuals. So if you wanted to know how this stuff worked, you'd have to actually read the little booklet that came with the game. Of course, if you were like me, and got the game in a rereleased bundle or digital download service, this may not be immediately apparent, and then you'd probably be a bit flustered at this screen. And even if you did read the manual (it is available on the internet, by the way), the character creation process is so complex that it's probable that you will run into one of the system's many traps. My advice is to try and find a guide (and you almost certainly don't want to use this blog as one, because I am mediocre at best).

With that in mind, here is my character, Duke:

I took the Gifted trait, which gives you an extra point in all your attributes, at the expense of fewer skill points per level. It's a ridiculously good bargain, because you don't need all that many skills, and attributes are hard to come by. I also took the fast shot trait, because aiming is useful, but shooting more bullets is better.

For my attributes, I chose to build up intelligence (because despite what I said earlier, skill points are still pretty important), and agility, because you've got to go fast. I bought Endurance and Perception down to five to get extra points, but no lower, because weak attributes are generally an invitation to disaster. Over the course of the game, I'll get more strength with power armor, and eventually outgrow the need for exceptional hit points, but this is not necessarily a great early-game build.

For my tagged skills, I chose small guns, because that's the best of the combat skills, speech, because you can often talk your way out of trouble (including the final boss), and lockpick, because I remember it being absolutely vital in Fallout 3, and I can't remember whether exploration is quite as important in this game.

And now, at last, I'm able to start the game. Next post. Because this one has gone on more than long enough.

End of Year Retrospective - 2014

Technically, I have not been doing this blog for a year, thus an end of year retrospective is kind of arbitrary. However, I've done the math, and if I keep up my pace and buy no other games, I should be done with my blog around May of 2016. So, realistically, I've got at least two more of these posts to go.

The 2014 winter sale did not deliver quite the same ass-kicking as the summer sale, but it wasn't from any lack of desire on my part. Buying gifts for various people ate up most of my discretionary budget, and after having trouble with Dark Souls and Civilization: Beyond Earth, I was much more cautious about the limits of my machine. That said, I still wound up buying four games for myself, getting a fifth one free, and receiving three as gifts.

It's more than a little ridiculous, I know (although in my defense, two of the games I bought were less than two dollars and only one was more than ten). Over the past seven months, I've played 27 games for this blog, for a total of more than 600 hours, and yet I am farther from my goal now then when I started.

According to  this post I had 60 games at the start of this project. My current master list has 113 entries. I started at -60 and wound up at -86. So, you know, two steps forward, three steps back.

Yet I am optimistic for 2015. The low hard drive space on my current PC is making me very reluctant to buy new games (yet eager to buy a new PC - my current plan is to move all my most graphics intensive games to the bottom of the queue, patiently save money for several months, and then buy a new laptop only when I'm ready to play Borderlands 2 and the Saints' Row series). Also, I managed to make it through the winter sale without anyone buying me any heavily discounted terrible games as a joke (I know I'm tempting fate by saying this, because technically there's still 30 hours left in the sale, but I'm begging you - only do this if it would be hilarious).

When I started this project, I chose the handle "decadentgamer." It was a gentle jab at my excessively large game collection. I think the events of the proceeding seven months have shown it to be an apt designation. It little more than half a year, my collection has almost doubled. While the majority of that increase can be attributed to challenges and gifts (and I want to thank everyone who gave me games, and wish to say that I know than many of them weren't intended as "challenges" - I just put them on the list so they'd have a high priority on my play order), almost as many are due to the fact that I simply love buying games.

There is an immense pleasure in the act of acquisition just in and of itself. Knowing that you have a horde and it has grown slightly, yet perceptibly larger. And shopping is a blast. Comparing products, hunting discounts, factoring in your budget, and anticipating the intellectual and sensual pleasures that will be made possible by your purchase - it's a total rush. The only part I don't like is that agonizing moment right around the time the money is actually spent. Making a final, decisive choice, cutting off your other options, the act of parting with money in any amount (it's kind of paradoxical - I'm a cheap shopaholic, though I imagine it's not a rare combination), and the slightly guilty feeling afterwards, of knowing that you have yet another thing you don't need.

Yet even the guilt is only fleeting. I have no great regrets about the last year. I'm in a better position financially than I was six months ago. And while it's true that I would be in an even better hypothetical financial position, had I not indulged in this money sink of a hobby, I can only speculate how much worse off I'd be in general emotional well-being. Man cannot live by bread alone and all that, though more to the point, it's always been my feeling that the purpose of frugality is that it makes indulgence possible. Living a spartan lifestyle as a hedge against future hardship is a much lauded ideal, but I've never heard of it actually working all that well.

Which is not to say I didn't overspend. Like I said earlier, I ended the year 26 games farther away from my goal than when I started. Even if I hadn't humored my shopping bug, I'd have hardly been deprived. So I have a new year's resolution to make - no more frivolous purchases. When I buy something, I must have a specific, immediate use in mind. And no using this blog as an excuse. If I'm being honest, I think it may have weakened my resolve a bit. Whereas, ordinarily, I am not completely frivolous, the reason I bought so many games probably has at least something to do with the fact that I could tell myself "of course I'm going to play it, the blog demands it." Yet that sort of thinking has filled my schedule until mid 2016, and thus probably needs to be reigned in significantly.

Speaking of New Year's, I promised a big surprise announcement. Well, here it is:

To kick off the new year, I am going to play all five of the Fallout games, in order. And to mix things up a bit, I'm going to break from my usual format and do the whole thing as a screenshot let's play.

This should roughly double my workload, and none of the games clocks in at less than 20 hours, so it should also multiply my already excessive time deficit, but it's something I've wanted to do for a long time. I just shied away because it was an insanely ambitious project. Even now, I kind of tremble to think about it. But, hey, at least it should help me stick to my New Year's resolution.