Fallout 2 a 1998 RPG by Black Isle Studios made my list of favorite games of all time, so when it was free on GOG.com, I jumped at the chance to play it again. I am glad that I did, but it is play sessions like this that prove how far we have come in making video games.
The plot continues some time after the first game, and the village the Vault Dweller from the first game founded is in trouble. It is up to you to find a Garden of Eden Creation Kit to save the village.
The things I loved about Fallout 2 fifteen years ago are still what I love about the game now. It has a wide open world, and you can do pretty much whatever you want. The dark humor is fantastic, but much like all things in life, my mind forgot the bad parts of this game.
This game has one of the worst interfaces of all time. It requires you to press down on the mouse with just enough force not to select an action, but kind of click hover, and than drag the mouse up or down to select the action you would like to preform. It is so frustrating kind of picking all sorts of things, but not having them work.
It also lacks a good quest log, so I am always trying to remember exactly what I was trying to do, or that I accepted a quest at all. Than add to that, there is no auto-save, so if you die and have not saved in like fifteen minutes you will have to hover-click and figure stuff out all over again. This is particularly troublesome because for the first part of the game just about everything can and will kill you.
Not to mention if you, like me, decide to make a smart fast talking character, you will have to get used to the word “missed” a lot because you cannot hit anything. You will just sit there and stab at that scorpion for what seem like an eternity. In the mean time you will have no antidote for all the poison that has been thrust in to your frail frame, so you will just have to watch yourself die a slow and painful death.
I am not taking Fallout 2 off my favorite games list, because once I got used to all limitations of the game I started to really enjoy myself. It is always difficult to play old games because of all the streamlining and tweaking that has taken place over the last few decades, but if you tough it out you can still find what made you enjoy them so much in the first place.