Yea really great game, a classic yes indeed and of course I gave it 9.0, however...
That was to play Fallout.
He told me that he had so many golden gaming moments while playing and replaying this that the fact I had never played it was completly crazy. I Had tried to play Fallout some years before but was distracted by other faster paced games at the time. So like all great works, I did not rush into anything and instead let the game come to me.
I am glad it did. Forcing yourself to play a game is like...game rape?
Fallout's story is pretty basic, there is no "oh and we also need.." moments. You are sent out to get a water chip then asked to perform 1 more task. That is all you need to do to finish the game. You can leave the starting area and happily kill yourway through the entire game and not have anything backfire on you only to complete it as a evil crazy fool. Or you can follow the MANY side quests/missions and go through the game diplomaticaly or half and half or ANY WAY YOU CHOOSE. That is one of the best features of this game. It is very open ended.
The graphics while dated, still stand up to todays standards (in my opinion) though the tile based combat can be slightly prolonged (dogmeat I am looking at you) it does give you time to think about all the nasty ways to dispatch your oponent or squeeze that little extra health out of your character(s) so it does have its benefits.
Turn based combat based on several factors involving how large your agility and percetion are compared to your oponents means you either fire first and have another go relativley quickly OR end up waiting while the enemy gets 2-3 shots in before you. That can be annoying and something you either get away with or gimp your other stats in favour of moving first and faster.
Everybody harps on about how great the dialogue is between you and NPC's. While the voice acting is better than average, it is not so common throughout the areas maybe 1 or 2 NPC characters per area and then it is merely seconds of voice. The rest of the dialogue requires reading (SHOCK HORROR!) the dialogue options and choosing your answer. Only, you can repeat the dialogue as many times as you like quite happily hammering your answers and questions out like an idiot getting no closer to any sort of real answer.
Occasionally you may miss a very obviously blended in item perfectly matching the floor tiles requiring you to repeat sections of dialogue or searching around for hours until an event happens which triggers an NPC response so you may progress with that part of the story. All the hallmarks of an early annoying RPG.
The combat is fun and the variety of weapons and choice of target body parts makes for a really fun game. Different weapons perform different death animations out of the NPCs and depending on where you hit will determine the gore or effect....head shots and chest shots never looked so awesome. Games these days seem to have forgotten that fallout did this sort of thing FIRST and perfected it, then everything after it looks like crap, why is that? Developers don't actually play games in their spare time?
Taking small fights, lets call them scenes, and turning them into carefully choregraphed set pieces straight from a movie. Turn the Police Station in the Hub into the Police station from the Terminator. Even wear the leather armor for the full effect. Take the assault rifle and the shotgun and just go through it 1 shotting the cops. You can do this sort of thing all the time. I stood in the middle of a road during one story part in the Bone's with a minigun and just fired at anything I could hit regardless of hit percentage, just because I wanted to spend that much ammo shooting up the scenary. Truly great fun.
Ok so I played it Andrew, I went right through it and got all minus 1 of the endings and I had great fun while I did it. I am not so sure it deserves a score of 10 because it did not quite hit the mark for me, but that is my tastes so don't go all fanboi hating on me :) I am looking forward to Fallout 3, with it's faster paced action it looks like my sort of game and with luck...I will understand some in jokes.
Ok so