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[St_Zartan]

Wasteland

"St_Zartan rips a clip into one Slithering Lizard for 128 points of damage, ripping it into a scarlet side of meat"

Daaaaaamn...   Just a couple of months ago I had my C64 emulator out trying to finally beat Wasteland.  (I never did when I was young.)  I finally gave up when the emulator ate my save.  It was very upsetting.  

I do remember that when I was young, I had one guy who could do more damage with a knife than any of my other characters could do with a full clip of an AK.

I moved this over here, because my love for Wasteland is an all-encompassing and extremely unrelated to Achewood. It was the first computer game I ever bought - I bought it before my family actually owned a computer, having played it but once at a friend's house (and unknowingly completely wrecking his older brother's save by getting his impressive party of Desert Rangers, um, drownded) and figuring that, hell, we'd end up with a computer sooner or later. The PC version is the best, in my opinion, and you can download it from, uh... lotsa places. And you should.

I spent many years of my childhood completely obsessed with this game and, yes, posting about it at length (HYUK YUK GUESS HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF EH) on BBSs. I still trot it out every year or so and give it a sound and tender thrashing. It is a wonderful thing that the two Fallout games, Wasteland's unofficial sequels, inherited its best quality: the game never, ever feels stale, from start to finish.

[Gimpson]

I bought Fallout shortly after it came out, but was playing it during a very busy year at school, so never finished it either.  I think I still have that one in a box somewhere.  I will have to find that once I download the PC version of Wasteland and finally finish it.  

Now I have a project for this weekend.

[jay-ell]

Darnit now I'm going to have to play through again with the names of all you guys as my teammates.  

Did y'all have a strategy to your skillpoint distribution?  I always had a physician, a thief (equipped with pickpocket, lockpick, safecrack, luck, perception, etc), a sharpshooter and a brawler, plus whatever NPCs I happened to use at the time.  Of course, I made sure everyone had some level of medical skill in case my Doctor went UNC or even CRT, and everyone had climb.  Did anyone else have particular combinations that worked well?  

Also, favorite weapons, in ascending order: Chainsaw (of course), crowbar, broken toaster, Visa card.  

Aaaaah, memories.

[CortJstr]

Dangit, you people need to start talking about games I have. Baldur's Gate? Arcanum? Wizardry 8? Civ3? Bueller?

[slink]

How about Chaos. Rebelstar. Come on now, Dizzy?

I only discovered the Fallout line about a year ago when a friend of mine was playing at again, having a machine that had no hope of playing anything I could offer him. Never seen or played it, though had it described.
And way back I had a couple of friends with C64's but I had a Speccy, and on PC didn't play many games til around the days of UFO: Enemy Unkown (X:COM) and Doom.

[St_Zartan]

As far as I'm concerned, everyone needs perception. Spotting Important Shit was entirely too random a process to be left to one character. Having said that, I did have my "thief", which was pretty much the guy who couldn't shoot so well but had the lockpick and safecrack skills. Wasteland had a lot of totally rad and almost completely useless dummy skills: e.g. sleight of hand sounds awesome, like you are going to be some sort of Ricky Jay trickster, but then you find out it's only used like twice in the game and even then only if you fuck up.

Medics: if the game rolled a character for me with an IQ less than 15, I turned the fucker out on his ear, because 15 was the bare minimum for the Medic skill. The world of Wasteland is wonderful because it is the way the Real World ought to be - even the least bit of medical knowledge and infinite persistence could bring anyone out of a coma brought on by a mechanical crocodile blasting off three quarters of one's biomass. Having Physician (or whatever) was Well and Good, but you're better off spending the points elsewhere and making a Medic macro: U 1 S 5 x

Once my characters got considerably powerful, I start putting points into Brawling and / or Melee Weapons. As noted above, a sufficiently powerful character can explode a Hobo Like A Blood Sausage with a pick-axe or her bare hands (yeah, all my bruisers are female and generally named Hester - your point?) where it would take Johnny Assault Rifle two or three turns. And do not get me started on the luscious Proton Axe.

[jay-ell]

Mmmmmmm....proton axe...

Cort, you can dowload the game for free at a dozen different sites.  Or, if you're so inclined (and don't mind using IE), you can play right in your browser at [url]http://www.virtualapple.com/wastelanddisk.html[url].  Theoretically, at least.  I got Oregon Trail to work, but Wasteland seems kinda screwy.  

Zartan, did you ever use Metallurgy?  In the caves?  That was cool, albeit semi-useless.  And who saw "toaster repair" coming in handy!?!  I mean, really!

[St_Zartan]

Zartan, did you ever use Metallurgy?  In the caves?  That was cool, albeit semi-useless.  And who saw "toaster repair" coming in handy!?!  I mean, really!

Metallurgy was one of those awesome throwaway skills; you only really used it in the cave, mining silver. This is good at the beginning of the game because (a) you get experience for using skills successfully and (b) you can build up a nice little pocket full of change. THESE GUNS AREN'T GOING TO BUY THEMSELVES

Toaster repair. You use it to repair broken toasters. Useful things are lodged inside them. Now, fuck*ng alarm disarm, I could never get that shit to work.

[jay-ell]

Oh dude.  You need, like, skill level four for it to be useful, but if you go back after you've got a lot of XP and stuff, and use disk-swapping to get into the Needles jail or Faran Brygo's place or whatever, you can totally kick ass and sneak by those alarms like nothing else.  

I could never make it work when I really needed it, tho.

[jay-ell]

I found it!  

Get old C64 Games here: http://www.c64.com/

Emulators also available.  I recommend VICE; it seems to have the best compatibility with the greatest variety of ROMS.  

I also found this page.  Unfortunately, it's a hoax.

[St_Zartan]

Oh dude. You need, like, skill level four for it to be useful, but if you go back after you've got a lot of XP and stuff, and use disk-swapping to get into the Needles jail or Faran Brygo's place or whatever, you can totally kick ass and sneak by those alarms like nothing else.

My preferred method of entry into the Needles jail was crashing through the goddamned skylights, guns blazing, thank you very much.

If you're playing Doctor Apeshit-style and opt to blow away the relatively decent Faran Brygo and his pals, you can fully explore his building - did you ever find the beta version of Wasteland 2? Also, I don't know about this "disk-swapping"; the PC version installed directly to the hard drive.

They did announce a Wasteland 2, way back when. It was to be subtitled "Mean Time", and the really big deal was that you could port your Rangers over from the original. Needless to say, I was very attached to my Rangers and kept that stupid fuck*ng team backed up until the very day that they announced, whoops, sorry folks, no Wasteland 2 like ever.
 

I also found this page.  Unfortunately, it's a hoax.

This would have been the most awesome goddamned thing ever.

[jay-ell]

I don't know about this "disk-swapping"; the PC version installed directly to the hard drive.

Oh damn

I played on the C64, yo.  If you copied all the disks, you could switch to unusued disks mid-game and re-play the same levels over and over again after you'd gotten insane mad skillaz.  You can do this with most emulators, as well.  Once I replayed Darwin Village enough times to let each of my 4 characters kill the Night Terror.  It was insane.  

Talk about needing a macro for that shizznit.

[St_Zartan]

Once I replayed Darwin Village enough times to let each of my 4 characters kill the Night Terror.  It was insane.  

Talk about needing a macro for that shizznit.

I'll just bet - that fuck*ng thing took like hours to kill even with an absurdly powerful character. Finster's Head was probably the single thing, thinking back, that (for me) made Wasteland super fuck*ng great as opposed to just super great. I am a stone cold sucker for that Reed Richards psychonaut stuff.

My sowwy widdle macros never got any more complicated than trying to revive comatose characters or break down doors. At one point, I had intended to put the Night Terror onto a t-shirt, with the words Darwin = Proteus underneath in that Ladybird children's primer font.

TWO CHILDHOODS WELL-SPENT RIGHT HERE

[Gimpson]

Zartan recommended the PC version, so that is the one I grabbed.  I'm playing it right now, but the move clicks coming out of my PC speaker are about driving me nuts.  Do you know if there's any way to turn the sound in the game off, short of physically snipping the speaker wires?  

If that's what I need to do, I'll do it.  My PC is on a rack about one foot to my right directly at ear level.  The constant loud beeping is removing some of the enjoyment from the game.

[CortJstr]

Doesn't the Windows sound mixer have a slider/mute button for the PC speaker? I can't check on my work computer since user accounts are grotestquely crippled.