辐射，我最为喜欢的游戏系列。游戏细腻而精致，其前二代尤甚。如果你没有玩过辐射1和2，那么请千万尝试一次，绝不虚此行。如果你对其古老落后的画面望而却步，请咬牙坚持下去，直到一个疮痍荒凉却又巧夺天工的末世界展现在你面前。
按现在的角度来说，这个游戏可以说是”不好玩“的，陈旧的回合制机制，落后的画面，诡异而重复的音乐似乎标志着它只会是故纸堆里供人瞻奉的老古董。但其真正的精髓所在却是一个巧妙，自由，真实却不失幽默感的精细世界。
粗糙的画面使游戏没有细致的纹理，但每当你的指针指向一个人，一栋建筑，甚至路边不起眼的一块石头，一堆尸骨时，左下角的提示框里总会对其有所各异的描写，明明白的给人以强烈的画面感。我至今仍记得自己扛着把铲子到处掘人祖坟的经历，并不是为了什么陪葬的珍宝，只是为了看看左下角对这尊墓和躺在里面的人的描述。
游戏的另一亮点，就是有着极大自由性的任务解决方式，几乎每一个任务都有不同的方法去完成，在每一个任务中似乎都充满了机遇与选择。当你接下任务之时，脑子里回转过几个鬼点子，你就能把这几个鬼点子实现，而非按部就班的按着雇主的要求去做。
我爱这款游戏。
FALLOUT / FALLOUT

Where to start with this game...

'It's a classic' would be a good place to start, I guess. I have no problems say that from the outset. It's only taken me 15 years to get around to play original Fallout, but I can see without a shadow of a doubt why it's so highly regarded.

Before you play this game make sure to download the Fallout Fixt mod, which is a very comprehensive community mod which fixes a lot of the bugs, and more importantly the resolution for modern monitors. Without this patch you'll more than likely experience a horrible rainbow pixalation effect during videos and gameplay.

Anyway...

Fallout is a turn-based RPG series which offers you various ways to tackle the game. Do you want to be a stealthy person, creeping around, pick pocketing your way to glory? Sure, why not! Do you want to be a smooth talking kinda guy who can talk his way in and out of trouble? Go on, be that guy! What about a bookworm who can use his brain to solve puzzles. Yup! And of course you can be a mix of all three, as well as a gun totting maniac! YEE-HAW!
For my playthrough I used one of the pre-set characers (Albert) who was a Lawyer in a previous life and was set up with high charisma and speech skills. This opened up different dialogue trees throughout the game, which was nice.

Anyway, I enjoyed this game - I enjoyed it a lot. The characters are great, the voice acting (while limited) was pretty nice (though it did give away who the 'important' characters were) and the story itself was pretty deep. The game starts, as always, with you the 'Vault Dweller' leaving your vault for the first time to explore the wastelands. You're tasked with bringing back a water chip to save your vault before everyone dies of thirst!
There's a time limit to this, which (for me) cast a sense of urgency. Normally in Fallout games (Fallout 3 and New Vegas) I'm guilty of just going 'WHEEEEE' and exploring everywhere and not really caring what I'm doing. Yet in Fallout there's no time to explore, you've got to save lives!
... if you want to.

You see you don't NEED to save their lives, if you don't want to. In fact, you don't HAVE to do much in Fallout if you don't want to. It's not a narrow pathed experience, you can pretty much choose how you deal with the events in the game (and the end game cutscene will reflect on this at the end). A lot of games claim to be an open experience, and the actions you take reflecting on the game world, yet here's a game from 1997 which actually does that. I'm not sure it even heralds that fact that it does this. It just gets on with being a pretty damn good game.

This brings me on to another aspect of the game - the many different branches of the game. People react to you differently depending on what you're wearing, what you're wielding, and what you're intelligence or charisma is. I find that amaizng now (in 2014), so I can only imagine how mindblowing it was back in 1997 when the game was released. The 'simple' graphics by today's standards shouldn't distract you from what is a very complex game. There's a lot going on under the hood of this game and at times perhaps too much.
My eyes were really opened up to this towards the end of the game when I was struggling with killing a certain mob. I had went about it 'head on' and was killed a number of times. Yet, after a night's sleep I came back with a different approach, a more sneaky ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥s approach and it was so much easier, and strangely satisfying. I had killed the guy and he had never even seen me.
OK, sure the wastelands were plunged into another 100 years of nuclear fallout in the process, but hey... I KILLED THE GUY!

However, even with the Fallout Fixt mod, the game can be prone to crash now and again. I'm not sure if it's the game's memory file getting too big or a conflict with Steam Overlay (wouldn't be a first), but towards the end of the game (and a lot of different quest outcomes) it started to become slightly unstable. So save REGULARLY!

Which brings me on to another thing. This is an 'old school' game. It will not autosave for you, you must take control of your own save files. If you die you won't be taken back to the next/recent checkpoint... you'll have to load up from the last point you saved.
This was the only thing I didn't like, but in the end I learned to live with it and it made me realise how pampered I had become as a gamer. I didn't have autosaves and 10 minute interval checkpoints when I was a kid and I still played games all the time back then. Yet, here I am as a grown man crying about dying and having to go back 20 minutes in the game because I had forgot to save... a lesson in life this game has given me.
Also, this game is tough. REALLY tough. Depending on how you build your character, or which character you choose. You will die a lot.
A lot.

So in closing...

If you're looking for an old school RPG experience than I'd recommend giving Fallout a try. I appreciate at time of writing they're no longer available on the Steam Store, or GOG, but hopefully they return one day, as they deserve to be played.

[English text written below]

Как пропевали западные рецензенты в своих бесчисленных дифирамбах: "Fallout - игра с интеллектуальным геймплеем". В далеком 1997 году большинство великих идей и амбициозных планов все еще пылились где-то на задворках светлых голов юных гениев от мира игровой индустрии и казались слишком несбыточными, чтобы стать явью. Те, кто все же успел вступить в стройные дружные ряды геймдизайнеров и программистов откладывали потенциально прорывные идеи в долгий ящик, ведь техническое несовершенство тогдашних систем давало от ворот поворот многим грандиозным задумкам. 8-ядерных процессоров и видеокарт с запредельным объемом оперативной памяти тогда еще не существовало и то немногое, чем разработчики могли завлечь игроков в свои сети отдавалось на откуп таланту, фантазии и проработанному игровому процессу. Никаких шейдеров, мегатекстур, "бамп-мэппингов" и прочего колдунства...

Fallout подкупает своим игровым миром... Суровые реалии пост-апокалипсиса со своими законами была тогда еще свежей темой, о которых многие читали лишь в книгах писателей-антиутопистов и фантастов. Наступление Дня X, когда Земля налетит на небесную ось, или же погибнет в огне атомной бомбы, созданной руками человека, будоражил ум многие десятилетия, но одно дело - рисовать картину гибнущего мира в голове, а другое - оказаться там самому посредством компьютерной игры. Проще говоря, имея прямые руки и светлую голову на плечах, сама идея Fallout была обречена на успех задолго до выхода самой игры.

Играя в Fallout, равно как и в практически любую игру тех лет, невольно задействуешь тот ресурс, который современные игры предпочитают не затрагивать - воображение. Учитывая визуальное несовершенство, но глубину созданного мира, часть локаций дорисовывается в голове. Возникает эффект, сравнимый с чтением приключенческой книги с картинками - иллюстрация лишь задает настроение, все остальное происходит где-то в недрах подсознания.

Умный, интеллектуальный, стильный, пост-ядерный...
__________

As many reviewers used to say in their first Fallout reviews: "Fallout offers more of an intellectual gameplay than anything else". In 1997 lots of great and groundbreaking ideas were collecting dust somewhere in the depths of videogame industry genii's heads and seemed too unbelievable to end up realized and brought into life. Those lucky ones who managed to make their ways into game designers and programmers were forced to put potentially brilliant ideas off thanks to technical imperfection. No 8-core CPUs, no 2Gb videocards... all what developers could do to lure players into their games was forged by talent, fantasy and elaborative and delicate game worlds. No fiddling with shaders, megatextures and bump-mapping stuff...

Fallout grabs attention by it's setting... Harsh, rough and unforgiving post-apocalyptic world with it's own set of rules, rights and wrongs was still a fresh kind of story which could be discovered mostly in fantast-monger's books. The Day X when Earth stood still or get burned to the crisp with an atomic bomb strike boggled people's minds, but drawing the picture of a dying world in your head and actually playing it are different things. In short, Fallout ideas were doomed to be successful right before the game's final release.

There's one thing you can't stop using playing Fallout - imagination. It's hidden, dormant resource modern games don't usually provoke due to graphical wonders. Why imagining things if it's already delivered to you. Fallout just like almost any game made in that period works in a bit different manner. The effect is similar to the one you feel when reading an adventure book with pictures - you basically draw the rest of the scenery in your mind, putting yourself in the world behind the screen.

Clever, intellectual, stylish, post-nuclear...

Just buy it already, this game is a classic. In the most recent patch there is no time limit after you fix the water purifier as well, so you're free to explore post-apocalyptic Californiway to your heart's content.

Probably my favorite RPG of all time. I was in high school when it first came out and was OBSESSED with it.
It was my first instance of starting a game in the early evening, and looking up and realizing it was light out and I'd been playing it for 10 hours.