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After years of waiting and false hopes, Bethesda has finally announced Fallout 4. It's as good an excuse as any to take a trip through time to where it all began, in a very different kind, but now much more familiar kind of Wasteland. This was back in 1988, on technology so primitive that most of the original's game text had to be printed in a manual, with the game simply giving a number to look up every time anything happened. Nevertheless, it found almost instant critical and commercial success... and immense difficulty getting a sequel off the ground. At least, an official one.Wasteland offers a very different flavour of apocalypse to the Fallout games. It's more focused on science-fiction concepts, such as robots and problematic AI, and has its tongue planted much more firmly in its cheek. The first town, Highpool, offers such delights as packs of wandering juveniles and a river that's easy to slip in while exploring. Getting in a fight and killing kids will summon a cowboy called Red Ryder to try and take you out. Leaving town and heading for the nearby Ag Center meanwhile and you're no safer, just more likely to be killed by killer rabbits straight out of Monty Python. The whole game wasn't so silly, but it definitely had its moments. Unlike Fallout, a solo game with optional companions to tag along and often shoot you in the back with an Uzi, it was also a party based game. As was the style, you had a team of four Desert Rangers setting out to try and bring law and order to both the oppressed and the unrighteous - a role that came with expectations and a sense of duty rather than simply the lust for cash and upgrades. It was also extremely ambitious for the time, with encounters that could be solved in different ways with different skills, and a world that didn't just casually reset itself once the Rangers left town. If things went wrong, they stayed wrong.
A sequel seemed inevitable, and there was one, after a fashion. It was called Fountain of Dreams (1990), and nobody involved with the first game worked on it. Really, only EA has ever tried to really push it as the follow-up, and even it gave up quite early on. It takes place in post-apocalyptic Florida, meaning a greener apocalypse. It also cranked up Wasteland's insanity to whole new levels, even using the slogan "The world is crazy. Too bad you're sane." For starters, there's an entire faction of clowns. Yes, clowns. Killer clowns who actually control much of the known world. "The Clowns have perverted the slapstick humour of their forefathers, taking its feigned violence literally, and expanding it into the martial art Slap-Fu." There's a voodoo faction, with characters like Lupe Garoo happy to set werewolves on your party. Walk into a fountain, and chances are good you'll be told "It's full of savage piranha." This was just the start of the silliness.
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