Be Excellent To Each Other

Hmm - that could work.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

You also got "bonus abilties" when you hit certain skill level plateaus - costing you less energy to fire, or being able to zoom in on the target, that sort've thing.

How old are the first two games? I've got a Toshiba laptop which runs Postal 2 ok (as a benchmark).

Very. Calculators will run them.

I thought Oblivion messed that up too, actually. I mean, in Obliv, if you fire an arrow and it visibly his something, it counts as a hit, which is a Good Thing (seriously, having your arrow clearly hit something only for the invisible dice to go "U MISS GOBLIN HITS U" was pathetic). But if you have low skill in a bow, you can fire fifty arrows into someone late on and it won't even scratch them - you need a higher skill level to do enough damage. But your accuracy is essentially 100% from the second you pick up a bow.

I think a Deus Ex style crosshair would have been ideal, or if not a visibly wobbly crosshair, a simple lower skill = lower accuracy system, a la every FPS ever. And like in Mount and Blade.

I'm *not* assuming they aren't, you plum. I was agreeing with you that it'd be rubbish without them. I've bolded your bit that I'm agreeing with for extra talking-to-a-thick-person clarity.

I'lll try again: There'd be no point having the ability to target specific body parts without the location-specific damage effects.

Ah - I took your original response to be "There's be no point having critical damage without location specific effects", not "There'd be no point having body part targetting without location specific effects". My bad.

Here's hoping for an "Argh, you've blinded my legs!"

Fallout 1 and 2 are THE BEST GAMES EVER. And yes, I can run them on a P75 laptop, they are ancient. I got the Fallout 1, 2, and manual cheapo boxset a while back so I can keep my real discs nice.

Indeed. But I still love you.

You can't sig quote something you've pretended I said, you big meany.

I have distilled your post, nay, your very existence, down to its essence.

I'd have gone for "Duhhh", personally.

Anyone played F1 and F2 recently? I keep meaning to get into them but took forever to get Fallout 1 working on my old PC, then got a new PC.

I remember seeing there are some fan patches that restore some cut content and such?

http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/dload.php

To be especially concerned about:

For Fallout 1: Patch it to remove some hidden time limits to complete the game (the Waterchip's timelimit remains)

For Fallout 2: Patch it in case you have a European version, as it turns off the children sprites and as a result makes some parts of the game nonsensical or broken.

If you have the low violence version of Fallout 2, you *might* be screwed.

For those of you who've finished the game and are thus not vulnerable to spoilers, the list of bugs fixed makes for highly amusing reading.

Many moons ago I did Fallout diaries on the PC Gamer forums - after a speedrun through the original I decided to do an Ironman game of the sequel. I got quite a long way before undertaking a particularly hazardous mission resulted in my grisly demise.

Inspired by this (and Living in Oblivion) I'm now planning the following for Fallout 3:
-ironman (really)
-no fast travelling (also really)

Oh God, this reminds me why I stopped playing PC games in the first place...

The Fallout 3 official trailer is now on Xbox Live!

Again, because of the stupid embedded hatefulness of that site originally linked, I don't know if it's the same one...

...but it's easily the best game trailer, ever. Better than the Teen Fartass Poo ones.

Ball Gout Wee, more like.

"Ironman"?

You're not allowed to die.

Ironman means:
-no saving the game, except when you stop playing for the day.
-no loading the game, except when you resume playing.

The consequence of the above is that you only die once, and can't quicksave your way through tricky bits.

It makes games a lot more exciting.

I was most amused by it, watching yesterday. I already knew I was going to get, and enjoy Fallout 3. Now I reckon I'll *really* like it. Having played the first 'un an ikkle bit, and stuff.

It's just so well done... when you see the little animation of the family partying inside the vault, look in the top left corner at the anarchy battles being waged outside by the less fortunate.

The bit with the teenage daughter is WORRYING.

The most pleasant surprise was at the end of the first bit, when it pulls away from the TV (a la the original Fallout) and shows the new hero standing there looking on and I was expecting it to end... and then the music keeps going, and a montage of ridiculous violence begins.

I honestly want to show it to my mother, just to see her horrified reaction at the bit where the hero shoots the raider's head off and you get a nice view down their truncated neck as they topple over. No doubt it'll top the delighted reactions I got when I showed off Bioshock at Xmas and was smashing GAWD DAMN SPLOICERS faces in with a wrench.

It'd be your own fault if your mum went, "Whatwhatwhat!?!" and launched a highly popular and highly embarrassing poorly researched campaign against violence in gaming.

Nah. She's watched me play games since I was a wee 'un, and has likely seen far worse (the burning people in Syndicate, for example). Her head is screwed on straight, propah like innit.

Is this official trailer available on non-Xbox Live? The internet, I mean.

edit: and is it different from the E3 one? It doesn't sound the same.

It might be on prepareforthefuture.com, or Bethesda's own site.

I think it IS different from the E3 trailer, as it's a proper official one and is identified as such.

I have Fallout 1 & 2 (imported - Ed) and ready to try at home.

If you get stuck at any point please feel free to ask, as I know the games very well.

I have Fallout 2 bought new when it were released. I have yet to play it! HAHAH! IN YOUR FACE INTERPLAY!

ARSE! Fallout won't install on Vista.

Tried it with DOSBox?

It took me ages to get beyond just after the water shed in fallout. The trouble is, I tend to go for sneaky/quick/clever characters who aren't suited to a balls-out fight, and always end up biting off more than I can chew. It doesn't help that the combat system made it possible to take down an enormo-mutant with your fists. Just possible. Also that there was a sense of realistic danger - certain areas were just utterly no-go without the right skills and equipment.

On my most recent go, I finally went for a character with high big gun skills, but also had really high small arms skills, and realised (to my slight annoyance given the wasted points) that it is in fact possible to fight even several mutants/hard bastards using only regular guns, if you pick a good combination of skills and perks. There's nothing quite like taking down three minigun-wielding muties with a few well-placed desert eagle shots. The big guns can shove it, frankly.

Also the 14mm pistol makes a noise that is about six times louder than anything else in the game. It is enormously satisfying when someone's pissed you off by, say, injuring your dog, to shoot them in the leg with a report like the stamp of god, then exit combat, pick up their weapon and walk away, leaving them forty miles of desert from the nearest doctor. Yes.


Fallout 1 and 2 should both work in xp with compatibility mode on (95 seems a bit better). I used to get a lot of minor video issues, though that could be my particular PC's fault.

In fact, I tried this straight after I posted last. It looks like it's working.

Although I chose to install it on my mounted drive and now I can't find it. Hmmm...

Make sure you choose to create your own character, Zardoz, and go for 10 agility points before making any other choices. That way you get to make the maximum amount of moves per turn in battle.

Right, I've got it running on DOSBOX, but it's in a small window and the sound is all juddery. Does anyone know any trickery to make it better?

I've no idea how, if if thry've coped with Vista, but the folks at http://vogons.zetafleet.com/ have helped me more than once (typically indirectly via the archives).

Try pressing ALT+ENTER for fullscreen? Dunno about the sound, sorry. Try looking into 'vdmsound'.

Whee! Bizarrely, I'm starting to get really optimistic about what Fallout 3 could be (it helps that I had a go at the first one a while back, and the opportunity to fix some of its flaws became obvious). Is there anything that spiting fanboys can't do?

Yes. Big guns was largely a pointless skill unless you were desperate to roleplay someone who used them, as by the time you got them you were either dependent on small guns already or were realizing how much better energy weapons were. Turbo Plasma Rifle + high skill = one hit kill to the eyes, one hit kill to the eyes, one hit kill to the eyes...

The water shed bit was tricky...

As for 'possible'

Do you get boobs and swearing after the watershed?

Close, but the correct answer is Gauss Rifle, yes Gauss Rifle.

No gauss rifle in Fallout 1.

Syndicate > Fallout 1.

Boosh fans>>>>CUS.

Insanity.

Odd you should mention that. The gauss rifle in Fallout works more or less like the scientific definitions say one should - it uses magnets to hurl a projectile.

For reasons I've never understood, the 'gauss gun' in Syndicate was actually a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

The best guns in the game are the custom BB Gun (yes) you can get from a weird random encounter in the mountains that I've only ever seen once (you have to steal it from a loon), and the hand cannon you get from a 'kill the bandits' mission in the Hub. I ran into the latter completely by accident when some random who I took for a junkie or loon asked for my help, and it teleported me straight into helping him when I said yes, where in most cases you can help out at your leisure.

It's a totally awesome gun, though. It's basically the 14mm pistol with less ammo, but puts holes in things the size of tennnis balls. I took on eight mutants with it by standing in a doorway (so my dog and idiot sidekicks wouldn't run into the line of fire again) and blowing their faces off at range. The BB Gun is almost as powerful, never needs reloading and takes less time to fire. Both are much like carrying around the finger of death and pointing it at anyone who annoys you.

The Red Ryder LE gun you do indeed get from a strange random encounter, I forget which one but I think it's the one with the car dealer.

The .623 pistol (I think that's its name) you get by helping a guy chase some raiders off his farm. It is deliberately designed to look like Deckard's gun from Blade Runner.

The Turbo Plasma Rifle is also arguably the finest gun. It's large and heavy (but you generally have power armour by that point so it doesn't matter) and you can get the 'Turbo' charge by getting a guy in LA to tweak it. This reduces the cost to fire it by one AP, which for my character meant she could fire two targeted shots per turn. Combine that with my huuuuuge energy weapons skill, and I was scoring two eye-killshots PER TURN.