Monday, January 9, 2012

Wasteland

The year is 1987. Some games are getting better than ever as the developers explore with the RPG genre, and big dogs of the time Interplay and Electronic Arts are constantly producing breakthroughs. Wasteland is cool, from the character creation to the battles, hands-down an awesome pick and possibly the most influential game of all time. You're some army rangers who, after a nuclear war, decide to go look for neat stuff in the scary, scary wasteland. You'll pass through Las Vegas as well as some other ghost towns in your quest for survivors and loot. There's been many games almost identical, but none of them are the real...

Gameplay: 9/10
It's a solid in my book. You control four characters with individual attributes such as perception, rifle skill, lockpicking, etc. This already sounds familiar. You start the game at some army outpost, and its pretty much you and your buddies from here on out. You're gonna walk them through the wasteland, exploring areas, looking for stuff, and probably dying many times as you learn where to go and where not to go. Eventually you get the hang of it and get into some battles where you can perform, start getting nifty loot, and create some pretty boss dudes. The battles are pretty cool, I've run into groups of 10 or so, and even though it's all happening in text, I get the hoard feeling. -1 point for the seemingly endless unconscious loop I got stuck in. The enemies kept attacking the party, knocking a couple of them out, and on the next turn one would be awake again, only to get knocked out by an enemy, so on and so on.

Graphics: 9/10
So it's really old. In the wasteland, you're basically a stationary image roaming around on a tiled map. It's neat and there's lots of colors, so I'm not hating on it. There's a text scroller at the bottom of the screen that tells you details, like "It's getting warm" or "glowing desert tarantulas scatter away at your footsteps". Oddly poetic in its ways. I like the profiles of the enemies you're facing, gives some insight as to what's going on. Other than that, there isn't really any animation going on, not even when the opponent becomes wounded, so -1 point.
Sound: 0?/10
I really don't remember hearing any sound. There's probably nothing going on in this category.

Overall: 8/10
It's great. It's long and deep. Easy to see the Fallout series being inspired by this, and a lot of games follow in the wake Wasteland created. Lots of fun to dabble in this game even for just a little bit, you'll be surprised at some of the similarities between it and Fallout 3. Actually, check out this wiki and you'll see what I mean. So go ahead, give this game a shot, the link below has what you want.
http://hotud.org/component/content/article/39-rpg/22114


8 comments:

  1. looks like the old D&D dungeon crawlers... but with an apocalyptic setting... interesting!

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  2. Does look awesome. Loving this blog! Always interesting!

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  3. nice post, I've been reading alot on wasteland recently, someone who i follow talked about it as well. it looks like a fun game i think ill try it out.

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  4. I'm playing it right now, and holy crap it's so hard

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  5. Wasteland is nuts but so much fun, it's one of those things where you have to sit there and level up a bit before going out and getting vaporized by robots and rabid dog drool

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  6. I remember playing this :P There wasn't any sound..

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  7. I think I have a super old dos computer laying around somehwere

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