Fallout 2: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game

Is your Russian feeling a little rusty? Not to worry, as an English translation for Fallout 2 mod Olympus 2207 has finally been released - so you can put the Russian dictionary down for now.

Olympus 2207 is a huge total conversion mod for Fallout 2 that was released back in December 2014, and at long last, it now has an official English translation (courtesy of Keyboard Gecko). Mod team Nebesa Games used Fallout 2's engine and basic mechanics to create a new story that's unconnected to the Fallout series: it adapts features like Fallout 2's skills and perks system, but adds new graphics, additional gameplay mechanics, and - of course - a bunch of new stories and quests. There's even a crafting system, a mini-game for hacking electronic panels, and a flexible structure with no main quest. "Do you want to become the tyrant of Radius, or do you want to improve the lives of everyone in it?," the official mod page explains. "The choice is yours!"

As explained in the lore section of the mod's website, the game takes place in the year 2207 in the Silicon Valley region of the US. The Great War of 2013 created an irradiated wasteland, and while some managed to escape into improvised shelters (or a luxurious vault called Livos), many had to "adapt to the new conditions on the evolutionary, genetic level". Sounds rough. Anyway, some lucky survivors found themselves inside a skyscraper called Olympus when this all went down. The game centres on this skyscraper, which everyone in the wasteland seems desperate to enter: it promises energy with its solar panels and protection from the horrors outside. If you can get past the guards at the bottom, however.

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Eurogamer

Glitch speedruns can provide incredible insights into the way games are made - and more importantly, how they can be broken. Awesome Games Done Quick, the speedrunning charity event, is in full swing this week - and one of the most amusing runs I've seen so far is by the ever-entertaining speedrunner tomatoangus, best known for his Fallout anthology runs - including sex% speedruns. Yes, you read that correctly.

Having recently changed his name from tomatoanus to the more family-friendly tomatoangus ("the g is silent," he says), yesterday tomatoangus took the floor to show everyone his Fallout anthology speedrunning skills. Although he ran overtime, finishing at 2:16:21 instead of the 2:05:00 estimate (thanks in part to missing the Radaway right in front of him), the run was incredibly entertaining and informative - with tomatoangus sprinkling in fun facts to keep viewers engaged. This is a hole you'll want to go down.

One of the biggest revelations for me (aside from learning you can push Liam Neeson into dialogue triggers with a Nuka-Cola truck) was that Fallout New Vegas' end slides aren't actually a cutscene: instead, the player is placed in a small room facing a projector screen. After enabling player controls in the command console, tomatoangus walked behind this to display Ron the Narrator standing behind the slides, talking through the script. "You can kill him and drag him off, but then he just slides in from the other side - he doesn't want to leave," tomatoangus said. Now that is dedication to the job.

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Eurogamer

"One of my boring, pointless hobbies is making lists, recently these lists have been timelines," Connor Rawlings begins a reddit post by stating.

"Thus I present perhaps the most in-depth timeline of the whole canon Fallout series."

That's a huge claim, but one which - somewhat incredibly - seems to be true.

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Eurogamer

Sex. Speedrunning. Not two things you expect to hear in the same sentence - and yet here I am, writing an article about it.

Speedrunner tomatoanus, who you may remember from his world record Fallout anthology speedrun (and his rather colourful username), has returned with yet another wacky video. Not content with whizzing through Fallout 1, 2, 3, New Vegas and 4 in under 90 minutes, tomatoanus' latest speedrun is all about sex. Specifically, getting it as fast as possible. Like a night out in Magaluf.

Similar to his other world record speedruns, tomatoanus played through the games considered by the community to be the "main" titles in the Fallout series, with the goal being to have sex in each game as quickly as possible. This apparently has its own unofficial category, called a "sex%" run, and has already been attempted by a number of speedrunners in Fallout 4 (check out these ones by Jinjenia and Duchys).

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Fallout 2: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game

There's been plenty of negativity surrounding the Fallout series as of late - so today it's time to focus on something rather more hopeful. Following in the footsteps of other remake mods like Fallout New California, one modding team is using Fallout 4 to give Fallout 2 a rad-ical makeover.

Fallout 4: Project Arroyo, named after the tribal village in Fallout 2, was publicly announced on Reddit back in December. Some commenters were sceptical as to whether the project would get off the ground - but earlier today the team shared more information and several screenshots to give us our first look.

"Fallout 2 became my favourite Fallout game when I began playing it," team member DoctWhite stated on Reddit. "The branching questlines, dynamic stories, and the immersive universe all called my name, however there was one problem for me. That is the game's isometric and outdated gameplay.

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Fallout 2: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game

Fallout 2 turned 20 years old yesterday.

Black Isle Studios' turn-based, open-world post-apocalyptic role-playing game came out on 30th September 1998 to rave reviews and it is now considered one of the greatest RPGs of the era.

Fallout 2 is set in 2241. The town of Arroyo is under threat from a drought, and it's up to you to venture out into the wasteland to retrieve a Garden of Eden Creation Kit to save the day. It is an understatement to say things do not go well.

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Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game


Online PC retailer and CD Projekt affiliate GOG is giving away classic Interplay RPG Fallout for the next 48 hours.


As announced at CD Projekt's Spring Conference earlier today, it's a way of saying thank you to existing customers and a welcome to those checking out the recently revamped site for the first time.


The store also re-stated that it will start offering newer titles in addition to its library of classic games. Indies like Botanicula, from Machinarium developer Amanita Design, will be a focus but there'll be more mainstream fare too, including a premium DRM-free version of the first game in the Assassin's Creed series.

Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game


An early story concept for the first game in the hugely popular Fallout series saw you zipping back and forth in time, traveling through space and battling sentient dinosaurs, creator Tim Cain has revealed.


Speaking at a post-mortem panel at GDC in San Francisco today, Cain explained that the game's story morphed a number of times before its eventual post-apocalyptic setting was settled upon.


At first, it was going to be a traditional Dungeons & Dragons fantasy game.


"A lot of people who came on board said we could do something that's better than D&D - let's put our own twist on that," he recalled.


"We quickly threw that out as there were so many other fantasy games being developed. This is the one choice we made that saved us from being canceled."


Then came something rather more ambitious.


"Our second idea was epic. You started in the modern world, you were thrown back in time, you killed the monkey that would evolve into modern humans, you went through space, you went to the future which was ruled by dinosaurs, you were then exiled to a fantasy planet where magic took you back through the timeline, and then you came back to the modern world to save your girlfriend.


"It's weird even hearing myself talking about it now, but we were really going to go with this. One of the other producers kind of slapped me and said 'there's no way you're ever going to get this story made. You can work on it for years and nobody is ever going to do it'.


Sure enough, Cain and his team scrapped the idea. However, they held on to the extra-terrestrial theme for their next pass. That concept saw aliens invade earth and conquer all but one its cities. The game's hero would then venture out of this safe zone to fight back.


"This is what morphed into Fallout - the idea of a vault that you left and went out into the wasteland," said Cain.


However, getting the game finished and onto shelves proved a very challenging process, with the title nearly axed on a number of separate occasions.


Its first brush with cancellation arose when publisher Interplay picked up the Forgotten Realms and Planescape D&D licenses. Some at the company thought that a new RPG IP might detract from sales of those titles. However, Cain "begged" boss Brian Fargo not to pull the plug and Interplay duly let it live.


It had another close call when Steve Jackson's GURP role playing brand, which Fallout was initially tied into, decided the game was too violent and didn't approve of the art style.


"It was too late to change anything," explained Cain. "I figured we were going to be canceled."


But management gave Cain a last minute reprieve.


"I was asked to write a new combat system. We had a week to design it and a week to code it. If we could do that we wouldn't be canceled. I'm not exactly sure how we did it. I know we drank a lot of soda, we were there all the time, I know we smelled bad too, but we did it."


There was one more shaky moment just before launch. European ratings boards refused to classify the game for release as it allowed the player to kill children.


"We allowed it. We just said it's in the game. If you shoot them it's a huge penalty to karma. You're really disliked, there are places that won't sell to you, there are people that will shoot you on sight. We thought people can decide what they want to do.


"But Europe said no. They wouldn't even sell the game. We didn't have time to redo the quests so we just deleted kids off the disc [for the European release]. The story references children but you never actually see any."


Cain also discussed the struggles the team had coming up with a name for the game. It was originally going to be titled Vault13 but Interplay's marketing team rejected it as it "didn't give any sense of what the game was about."


"They suggested things like Aftermath, Survivor and the wonderfully generic Post Nuclear Adventure," recalled Cain.


"What eventually happened was Brian Fargo took the game home and played it over the weekend. He came back and put the CD on my desk and said 'you should call it Fallout'. It was a brilliant name - it really captured the essence of the game."


And the rest is history. The game launched on PC in 1997 to huge critical and commercial success and a franchise was born.


Cain now works as a senior programmer at Obsidian - the developer behind last year's Fallout: New Vegas.

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