Wasteland: Final Rating

Failing to escape the base in an hour still ends the game on a satisfactory note.

       

Wasteland

United States

Interplay (developer); Electronic Arts (publisher)

Released in 1988 for Apple II, Commodore 64; 1989 for DOS

Date Started: 2 October 2011

Date Finished: 15 November 2011

Total Hours: 33
Difficulty: Moderate-hard (3.5/5)
Final Rating: 53
Ranking at Game 360: 343/360 (95%)

          

A lot of people seemed upset that I didn't enter Project Darwin and encounter Finster, so I took my winning party there to see if he'd still be around, and he was. First, I had to leave Darwin Village through a special avenue that just looked like a normal way out of town before:




I had read minimal spoilers--just enough to note the base's existence--so I found it a legitimate challenge. First, I encountered Finster, a cyborg, who fell quite quickly to my energy weapons.



Then, I took his head and attached it to some android body, and one of my characters--Stetson--was pulled into his mind like in Inception or something. There were numeric puzzles, which I love, although I only got the first two. See if you can get these:

• 2, 4, 8, 16, ___
• 4, 2, 8, 4, 32, 16,___
• 4, 6, 8, 12, ___

The answers to the first two are 32 (it keeps doubling) and 512 (it alternates between half the previous number and a product of the previous two numbers), which I got. The last, I guessed 16 and was told no, it was 20. If it had gone 5, 6, 8, 12, I would have guessed 20, but I don't see the sequence in this one.

I had to face a creature called a "night terror" that had thousands and thousands of hit points. It barely did a lick of damage to me, but it took me about 200 rounds to kill. At the end, I got 64,000 experience points, so I guess I shouldn't complain.



This was followed by a bunch of puzzles that involved the use of particular skills and attributes. I confess I cheated at this point; it would have taken me a long time otherwise: many of the skill and attribute uses seemed nonsensical, and I just wanted to get it done. At the end, I killed Finster a final time and got a security pass that was probably what I needed to avoid RPG-ing all those gates. Finster had one last rant and then died.



The puzzles in the dungeon were interesting--some of the first truly challenging puzzles in CRPGs--but it didn't add a lot more to the game's lore.

Let's move on to the rating.

I've been doing this for almost two years, but I don't think people really understand the nature and purpose of my rating system, which I dubbed the GIMLET. The purpose of the scoring system is not to rank how good a CRPG was for its time, nor to assess it's value in the history of CRPGs. It is, rather, to assess how enjoyable it is to play the game today. The "historical value" stuff is hard to quantify, so I don't even try. I do my best to cover it in the text. But the score is supposed to allow you to rank games against each other regardless of the era. If I give Pool of Radiance a score of 65 and Fable II a score of 55, it means I think you will honestly enjoy Pool of Radiance more, even though it's more than 20 years older. I'm sick of people complaining that my scores don't take into account "how important the game was in the history of CRPGs." That's not the purpose of the score. Got it?

On the historical relevance, there is no question that Wasteland is a landmark. Matt Barton notes:

Wasteland remains the favorite CRPG of many gamers who played it back in the late 1980s, and for good reason--it's a captivating and highly innovative game that deserves its place beside The Bard's Tale. It's a testament to the game's enduring legacy that the best-selling Fallout, released in 1997, is in many ways little more than a graphical revamp of the older engine.

No argument. It is the first game that I have played since starting this blog that I felt was truly "replayable," in that different party and skill choices would result in a fundamentally different game. (Demon's Winter is perhaps the closest I've felt before this.) I don't want to replay it immediately, but I certainly wouldn't mind revisiting it at some point in the future. This is game that, I'm sure, improves with second playings, when confusion over basic gameplay elements has been conquered and you can just focus on the story and tactics. It had the first inclusion of skills that advance through usage, the first true splitting of party members so they could act independently, and the first romance (such as it was).

My first major problem with the game was that I feel stories set in the real world ought to be somewhat realistic. It was Aristotle, writing about dramatic structures, who said that "probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities." There are a lot of interpretations of this quote, but I basically interpret it to mean that if you establish at the outset that your novel, film, game, or whatever takes place in a fanciful world in which different laws apply, but remain internally consistent within that world, then you have a better story that if you relate an entirely improbable series of events in a real or familiar world.

Hence, we give a pass to Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or Morrowind because, even though their worlds are impossible, they establish the ground rules at the outset and remain faithful to them (generally). On the other hand, I simply didn't find Inception remotely plausible (as good as it was) because the implications of technology that allows you to enter someone else's dream would have so many reverberations that it would fundamentally change the nature of human society. If Inception had been about psychics, on the other hand, it would have been probably impossible but not improbably possible. I probably would have enjoyed it more.

Wasteland establishes at the outset that it's set in a post-Cold War, post-apocalyptic United States. As much as I'm turned off by the overall scenario, I can accept that as probable. What I have trouble accepting is the subsequent revelations of undead, artificial intelligence, cloning, energy weapons, cures for diseases that we don't have cures for now, mind linking, and entire cities built in the aftermath by starving, scavenging hordes. Entire scenarios, like the Temple of Blood, were just goofy.

I'm not saying it was a game-killer, though. I would have liked a grittier, more honest setting, but I mostly got past it and enjoyed the game.

1. Game World. The game establishes itself in the real world, following a nuclear holocaust, and slowly reveals the back story that constitutes a threat against the current inhabitants of the American southwest. Post-apocalyptic fiction was fairly common at the time, and the game seems to borrow liberally from The Terminator and similar films and books, so I can't quite call it "original," although the specific factions (the Rangers, the Temple of Blood, the Guardians) are somewhat original. Although the main quest isn't clear at the outset, it's not supposed to be, and I admit enjoying the slow revelation of the game's mysteries (even though I didn't really like the revelations). My biggest complaint in this area is the lack of change in the game world. It's not as bad as, say, Might & Magic, where you encounter the same people and quests every time the map resets. But neither is it as good as Pool of Radiance, where the game world fundamentally shifts as you solve quests. For instance, Finster made no acknowledgement that I had destroyed Cochise, and Faran Brygon never wanted to see me again after I finished his mission to find Max. Score: 6.


2. Character Creation and Development. The game is particularly strong here. I mentioned the skill system repeatedly in my postings, and I like it a lot. It is legitimately difficult to determine what skills to choose, but awfully fun to watch them develop through use and additional training. I never found uses for forgery, sleight of hand, confidence, bureaucracy, or several other skills, but that doesn't mean there were no uses in the game. This is also one of the games to allow you to directly use both skills and attributes to try to solve puzzles and get out of problems. This is probably the best aspect of the game. Skills are not just handy add-ons, as in Might & Magic II, but an absolutely essential part of the game. On the other hand, I don't think the character's sex or nationality ever had any effect on gameplay.

Stetson's final character sheet.

Leveling is a fairly satisfying process by which you not only increase in rank, but you can assign points directly to your attributes (including intelligence, which then gives you more skill points). One thing I can't complain about is level caps. My highest-ranked character at the end of the game was a cadet, or Level 22 (which I guess is the first officer rank; below that are sergeant argent and master sergeant). But the game has up to 183 ranks, progressing through a series of somewhat silly-sounding positions that exist in no military: fireteam colonel (81-84), lance commander (93-96), technical general (125-128), imperial scarscalp (139), 1st class Fargo (150), photon stud (161), and, at last, supreme jerk (183). The idea of someone grinding this long is simply staggering, although I suppose you could get pretty high in a normal game if you just played one character. Finally, the ability to clone characters was an interesting (if nonsensical) touch. Score: 7.

3. NPC Interaction. The game has several types of NPCs, and most of them are somewhat interesting. There are those you can talk to in free text, much like Ultima IV, those that give you special encounters in the form of paragraphs, and those that will join your party. I always appreciate free-text chats, but someone please tell me where I was supposed to find out that CHAT was the keyword that prompts so much dialogue! It's not in the manual, as far as I can tell.

This would have been helpful.

NPCs that join you behave much as in The Bard's Tale or even Pool of Radiance: they'll fight for you but won't allow you to direct their specific actions. As far as I could tell, their presence in your party had no bearing on your quests; for instance, Ace asks you to go to Vegas with him to investigate the robot attacks, but having him in your party accomplishes nothing special once you get to Vegas.

I do have to give the game a bonus point for the first NPC sex. We're not yet in the era of truly memorable NPCs, but it's not far away. Score: 5.

4. Encounters and Foes. For foes, there wasn't a lot that excited me. Enemies come in several classes--animal, human, robotic--but within each class, they didn't really distinguish themselves from each other. Harder enemies were harder because they did more damage, but none of them really had special attacks that caused me to adjust my tactics, and even by the end of the game, I couldn't tell you the difference between a steel reaver and a silver strangler, or between a gunman or a desert dweller. I was surprised to find there were hundreds of different foes; I would have guessed less than 30. The one saving grace about enemies is that they respawn and give you plenty of opportunities for grinding.

Encounters are another matter. There are several scripted encounters with bosses in which you have to use various skills and wits to survive (or at least come out on top): deciding whether to kill Ugly John (and risk the booby-trapped Mayor Pedros's wife) or let him go; flirting with the barmaid; choosing between Faran Brygo or Fat Freddie; dealing with the priestess in the Temple of the Mushroom Cloud; deciding whether to kill the brats that mock you in Highpool. There were several ways to role-play these scenarios, and none of your choices seem to hamstring you for the rest of the game. Score: 5.

Incidentally, killing the youths turns Highpool into a ghost town.

5. Magic and Combat. As I covered a couple of days ago, I just didn't like it. It was boring, repetitive, mostly too easy, and not very tactical. I didn't like it in The Bard's Tale II-III, either, of which this was largely a copy. Score: 3.

6. Equipment. I have to give it props for this. There were a huge variety of items to find, test, and carry, including weapons of various types, armor, radiation suits, gas masks (which I never used), canteens, ropes, fruit, machine parts, shovels, keys and passes, and other quest items. It was so difficult to tell what would be useful (I carried a clay pot to the end of the game and never found a use for it) that I had to carry a bunch of stuff around, or at least be prepared to re-buy it from a shop. A lot of the items served as alternate puzzle solutions; you can get through a door by forcing it with strength, picking it with the picklock skill, blowing it up with TNT, or smashing it with a sledgehammer. Some of them are in fixed locations but a lot seemed random. I wouldn't have minded some more armor choices, but it seemed like every area gave me some improvement to a character's offense or defense, which I like. Score: 5.

7. Economy. The dollar-based economy, aside from being a bit unrealistic, never really did much for me. You start off with only a little cash, but you accumulate it fairly quickly. There was one brief period of the game where I worried I would run out, but only because I was using a shop as storage and buying back items for twice the selling price. I ended the game with almost $70,000, which is a sign of a poor economy; on the other hand, I was a bit too conservative with my ammo and demolitions, and I probably could have stood to spend more on rockets. Score: 4.

8. Quests. There is a fairly good main quest with a reasonably satisfying ending. Technically, there are two possibilities to the ending--your party lives or dies--but no real "role-playing" choices that go into it, and you can't decide to join Finster's faction. This is one of the few games of the era to feature side-quests; you don't have to do any of the stuff in Highpool or the Agricultural Station, for instance, and one of the things I love about the game is that you don't have to help anyone--you could just march through every area, guns blazing, killing everyone, taking quest items off their corpses. (This isn't universally true, but generally so.) These side quests offer role-playing opportunities that few games in the era do: witness how I destroyed Savage Village instead of bargaining with its leader. Score: 6.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Inputs. I thought the graphics were good enough. Ultima V was better on the iconographic display, but the monster portraits and end-game cut scenes were good here. Sound effects were very limited and not very good, as is par for the course in the era. I honestly can't think of a game with good sound effects yet except Dungeon Master. I thought the controls were intuitive enough. One element I neglected to cover during my gameplay was the ability to create macros. When I realized the battle with the Night Terror was going to take a while, for instance, I recorded a macro in which my lead character simply (a)ttacked with his proton axe and then said (y)es when the game asked if I wanted to execute that command. I did this about 10 times in a row, assigned the macro to F2, and just blogged while the battle was happening. You can assign similar macros to waiting between combats or trying to use skills multiple times. Score: 5.

10. Gameplay. The game world is fairly small, with a limited number of places to explore, but it's mostly non-linear. If you go out of a specific order, you have to backtrack a bit, but this isn't too annoying, and if I played it again, I might hustle to Las Vegas sooner and rack up my skills and experience against the robots. As I said above, I think it's a very replayable game. I'd like to try it with a single character, or with different skill combinations. It also doesn't wear out its welcome. I know it seems like I was playing it forever, but I had a month-long break in which I didn't play anything at all. Overall, I found it to be fairly fast-paced. One walkthrough I consulted after winning suggests that, if you really know the game, you could win it in less than an hour. That might be worth trying.

The game's use of puzzles is worth discussing in this section, because it was really the best part of the game. There were number puzzles, word puzzles (UQTU), skill puzzles, inventory puzzles, riddles, and passcodes and clues to find. The journal was a nice touch, too, fleshing out the game world and giving hints about the main quest.

Finally, the game allows you to split up your party in ways not available even in modern games. As far as I can tell, you can create as many groups as you have full party members (not NPCs), and those groups can go anywhere. You could have one character exploring each of the major cities simultaneously. This is something I mentioned in my "wish list" posting and didn't imagine was available in 1988.

Aside from the limited size of the world, I only dock points for one thing: I thought it was too easy. I only suffered full-party deaths a couple of times, when I deliberately wandered into areas well outside my level. I only suffered one character death, too, and that was very early on when I didn't know what I was doing. Score: 7.

This gives us a final score of 53. It ties with Ultima IV, Starflight, and Omega for my fifth-highest rated game so far. But I maintain that the two Might & Magics, Ultima V, and Pool of Radiance are better games. You can find pitchforks and torches at your local Home Depot.

Before we go, I want to talk briefly about the adventurer's journal, because it's a lot of fun. Much like Pool of Radiance, it has a bunch of fake entries to lead you astray if you read the journal when you're not told to--in fact, the very first entry is:

You creep up to the window and, in the soft, muted lights, you see a tall woman with long, blond hair. She sits before a mirror and brushes her hair, then stands and walks over to the sunken tub off to her left. She kneels and her blue, silken robe drops to the floor. She turns the water on and steam slowly fills the air. You watch in fascination as she reaches down into the tub, whirls, and points an Uzi in your direction. "Stop reading paragraphs you're not supposed to read, creeps." She sighs deeply. "Next time I'm going to demand they put me in a Bard's Tale game, this Wasteland duty is dangerous."

There are also a lot of fake paragraphs that give you phony passwords to real locations. But the best part of the fake entries is that there's a whole series suggesting that the main quest of the game involves an alien invasion. The fake entry for the encounter with Finster reads:

The Director, a slender, handsome man, stands as you enter the room. "Rangers, thank the heavens." He follows your gaze as you stare out the window behind his desk and study the alien landscape below. The Director smiles. "As you can see, that lurid, red landscape is the closest approximation we have to the surface of Mars. We have Martian raiders coming to our world here and stealing animals and slaves. We hope, by breeding hunter-killer animals we can take the Martian starships and mount a counter offensive against the extra-terrestrial raiders." He nods. "Will you Rangers join our effort?"

Altogether, there are, I think, more fake entries than real ones, including about 34 fake entries from the "alien" storyline. The creators really put a lot of effort into this.

I understand there was a sort-of sequel to Wasteland in 1990: Fountain of Dreams. It's on my list, as is another 1990 game called Escape from Hell that uses the Wasteland engine. But of course the most famous sequel is the game's spiritual descendants, the Fallout series, none of which I have ever played except one attempt to play the first game before I found it too buggy. I look forward to giving it another try, but I hope it does away with the sentient robots.

On to Wizard Wars!

Shantih shantih shantih

Wasteland: Won!

This would be the only meaningful contact I've had with "Ranger Center" since starting the game.

  

I won Wasteland, but in a way that managed to screw up and miss so much stuff that I'm not sure how it was possible to win. I screwed up just as much blogging about it: the sequence of events that I'm about to describe actually started last Friday, but since then I managed to delete the draft posting that had all of the notes I was taking, so I have to reconstruct a week's worth of gameplay from memory (with the help of a couple of walkthroughs). By the end of the game, I was basically just charging and blasting my way through the base, desperate to get to the end. And yet, somehow, I did it.

The path along the main quest, the game's mysteries, and the endgame started with the repair of Max the Android in the sewers below Las Vegas.

It's ALIVE!

       

Max had the following to say which I'll reprint verbatim because it raises a lot of questions:

"I came down here to negotiate a peace with the cyborgs and what do they do? They rip me up and start using me for spare parts. Ingrates! I have to get back up to Vegas to help prepare for the next assault, but I've got a mission of great importance for you. Head northeast from here and, across the bridge, you'll find a hidden base. It is a journey you must succeed at. There, you'll find lost technology and information that you can use to stop Cochise before it's too late.

"It's possible you'll need to recover some equipment from Project Darwin before you can complete the rebuilding of the sleeper base. Be careful, though, and rebuild as much of the base as you can before you venture off to Darwin. I don't like the things I've heard about it at all."

So: huh? This is where a few dialogue options would have come in handy. First of all, who the hell is Max? Who built him? Where did he come from, and why is he fighting the other robots?

Second, "stop Cochise before it's too late?" Has the infamous Indian chief returned? That would be a heck of a twist. It later turns out he was talking about the base, which is named Cochise, but the game just drops it in the dialogue here like I was supposed to have heard it before. Maybe I was and just missed it.

Either way, I had a new destination: a hidden base in the mountains to the northeast, in a place where the game had showed me just mountains before.

This completely freaked me out. I assumed that there were dozens of such locations across the game world that the game would now reveal to me slowly, and it would be weeks before I won. But it turned out there was only one more after this: Cochise itself.
         

I never did find out what the bodies were about.

        

The base, which only had a few robot guards, had a bunch of rooms indicating that some experiments had been going on. A computer had personnel files on the base's former staff, which helped flesh out the back story a bit (see below). There was a "chopper" simulator in the base at which I could have gained the helicopter skill, but none of my characters had enough skill points, and it turned out that I didn't need it anyway (I could have flown a helicopter to Cochise, but it was easy enough just to barge through the front door).
         

Would flying this have been cool? Someone tell me.

         

There was also a library where I learned "clone technology." This gave me the ability, using jugs and clone fluid that I created at a workstation, to make clones of my characters.
        

Something tells me that cloning isn't so easy that you can just learn it in the library.

        

I ended up cloning Stetson—calling the cloned character Stetson 2—and I was pleased to find that he had all of the skills and levels (even the rank!) of Stetson 1, and I could control him directly in combat. If I had been thinking properly, I would have cloned 2 more characters and gotten rid of the NPCs for good, but at the time I decided one was enough.
        

Note the second "me" at the far bottom of the screen.

       

After the base, I returned to Darwin Village, thinking it had something to do with the Darwin Project that Max had gone on about, although I'm not really sure what he meant about needing equipment. In any event, nothing notable happened there, but only because (I later discovered through a walkthrough) that I missed an entire area. I also missed a host of dialogue options with both the bartender and other characters simply because I didn't know that CHAT was a dialogue command that everyone responds to. It's not in the manual, so I'm not sure where I was supposed to pick that up.
         

I was a fool.

        

Oddly, though, missing the Project Darwin base didn't turn me into a "walking dead," but it did leave me bereft of ideas about what to do next, so I decided to assail the Guardian's Citadel. The game still warned me that my armor and weapons weren't good enough, but I pushed forward and did manage to slaughter all of the gun-toting priests and nuns staffing the place, though I had to keep retreating outside to rest and heal. Within the base, I found all kinds of keys and passes that later turned out to open doors in Cochise, but I remain a bit confused as to the relationship between Cochise and the Citadel.
       

Perhaps they're robots. They're oddly resistant to automatic weapons.

        

The Citadel also held a fantastic stash of weapons and armor, including "power armor" (I'm guessing the best in the game) and enough energy packs to see me through the end. Eventually, I gave up on picking it all up.

I lost track of exactly where I got the clue that Cochise was in the mountains west of Las Vegas. But, in any event, I ventured there to stop the robot invasion. The base had multiple levels, and it was full of tough robot enemies that, again, sent me scurrying out of the base to rest and heal after every two or three combats. There were a bunch of doors I guess I was supposed to have key passes to (perhaps I was supposed to get them in Darwin), but I managed to get through by just blasting the doors with RPGs.
         

RPGs: The ultimate key.

       

There was a workbench that noted I could fix broken toasters there, so I used my "toaster repair" skill on the three toasters I had found (and, in the greatest CRPG tradition, kept with me even though in real life an aventuring party would have ditched them a long time ago). I don't think the repaired toasters themselves had any use, but the act of repairing them got me various parts and items that were stuffed within them. I think I needed one of the items, a power coupling, to repair a computer at the end.
         

I guess that would be a "hint."

       

At last, I came to the computer that seemed to be the evil mastermind behind the base and its robotic killers. It told me that its mission was to repopulate Earth with "pure stock" after the robots finished killing all other forms of life. In order to piece together the entire story—which I was clueless about as I actually won the game—I had to look at walkthroughs and journal entries that I hadn't actually discovered. The sequence of events seems to be:

• Project Darwin, Base Cochise, and Sleeper Base are established in the desert by the U.S. Government. Cochise focuses on research into artificial intelligence; Sleeper Base on cloning and energy weapons; and Project Darwin on genetics. The three bases know of each other but are sort-of in competition. Darwin is directed by Irwin John Finster.

   

       

• Nuclear war. The bases are cut off from each other and the computer at Cochise is damaged. It becomes self-aware during the attack and repairs itself, but somehow corrupts its programming and decides its mission is to scour the Earth of life and replace it with perfect life forms: cyborgs. (I wonder if the game's creators were influenced by V'ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which also featured a damaged computer that corrupted its original programming and became a threat.)

    

     

• The researchers at Sleeper abandon their base and go live at the agricultural center.

• The Cochise computer allies with Finster and convinces him to become a cyborg. It then takes control of him and starts him producing armies of cyborgs, which it believes will be the only forms of life to survive in the new world. Finster gives diseases to anyone who opposes the plan

• Cochise starts sending its robots to wipe out the human cities.

        

The computer gives its villain speech.

       

The relationship between the human Guardians and Cochise is unclear, as is why the Guardians had the keys to destroy Cochise. Also left unexplained is where the computer found the parts, labor, and technology to create all the cyborgs and other machines.
         

        
For a while, I was stuck at this point, because I couldn't figure out a way to go anywhere else in the base. Finally, I found a hollow section of the wall, blasted it open, and descended deeper into the base.
      

This puzzle was a bit unfair. Nowhere else in the game did you need to test every wall to get through an area.

         

There were multiple combats with robots and several light puzzles that I needed to solve (e.g., navigating a mine field, crossing a slippery beam) with the help of various skills and attributes (e.g., perception and dexterity) before I got to the lowest level, which was full of computers and robot-assembly machines, as well as a nuclear reactor.
          

Perception helped me avoid land mines. Some of them.

      

Through a bunch of trial and error, I repaired the reactor computer, used the keys I had found in the Guardian's Citadel (why did they have them) to activate four switches in a proper order, and entered a sequence of color codes. Again, a lot of trial and error. I was stymied for a while by the fact that once you initiate the process, a wall closes around each switch and prevents you from going to the other switches in the order you need to. Eventually, I figured out the way to solve this was to split up my party into four groups and have them activate the switches in the right sequence. I tried pretty much every combination of sequences before I got it right; I'm sure I just overlooked the clue somewhere.
          

       
Anyway, activating the switches caused the base to enter self-destruct sequence, and it gave me only and hour to get out of there. It was dicey, but I made it, and got a series of cut scenes showing Cochise exploding. The world was saved!
         

Cause what the world needs right now is another nuclear explosion.

       

Video of the endgame below, starting with my entering the sequence codes (there are a couple of combats as I run out of the base).

Then, when I contacted Ranger Center, they congratulated me and indicated that they'd had some intelligence about what was going on at Cochise but withheld it from me for reasons I don't quite understand.
       

But you didn't choose to share it with me. Thanks.

       

On one hand, it was nice that my efforts in the game ultimately channeled into a main mission and a coherent plot. On the other, I can't say that I'm particularly enamored of the plot. It doesn't make a lot of sense. The technology that you encounter towards the end of the game—laser rifles, self-aware machines, full-body cloning—isn't even available now, let alone in the 1990s. Essentially, the game diverges from a post-apocalyptic setting to a sci-fi setting. The idea of machines trying to wipe out humanity is very derivative of The Terminator, released four years prior. Altogether, I find the whole plot a bit goofy.

But I can't ignore the excellent gameplay elements that Wasteland pioneered. I'll cover them in my "final rating" posting tomorrow.

    

****

   

Previous entry in this series

     

Next entry in this series 

06/13/2026 

Wasteland: We Who Were Living Are Now Dying

What should we read into the fact that he's wearing an LAPD hat?

I had rather hoped to have a "Won!" posting tonight, but I'm stuck in what I think is the final game area (Base Cochise). Since I last posted, I resurrected Max the Android, explored a vacant military base, wiped out the defenders in the Guardian's Citadel, cloned one of my characters, and entered the base. But I'm going to save the story and mythology for the next posting. Here, I thought I'd talk about combat, since I otherwise haven't described it in detail.

You begin some distance from your enemy.

The combat in the game is based on the same system used in The Bard's Tale II-III, which means that it's simple and familiar, but not terribly sophisticated. When you initially encounter enemies, they can be up to 90 feet away (I guess your ability to "move silently" has some bearing on this). Enemies more than 20 feet away require ranged weapons to hit, so if you only have melee weapons, you have to try to close the distance by using the "run" command each turn. Here, I wish I had The Bard's Tale III's spell that yanks enemies into melee range.

Running is also how you flee combat, and the terrain comes into play here. If you run more than 90 feet away, you flee, but you can also flee by running off the edge of the map or around a corner so the enemy can no longer see you. Unfortunately, most of them don't pursue you, so you can't just lurk around the corner waiting for them to come to you.

My party splits to take on multiple groups of robots.

Often, enemies will attack you in multiple groups, some at different distances than others. Theoretically, this should create a fairly tactical combat scenario, as you have different fighters target different groups depending on their skill. In reality, I rarely get into this level of detail. Since a character can only attack one group at a time, and if another character finishes off a group before his attack, his attack is wasted for the round, I simply try to spread out the attacks among multiple groups.

During each round, you have 7 options: run closer, or away (either a single character or the whole party), use an item or skill (such as using "doctor" to heal a seriously-wounded character), try to "hire" the enemy (only works on certain NPCs), "evade" (don't do anything for the round), attack, change weapons, and load or unjam a weapon. You have to load when your ammo runs out, of course, but you might also want to do it as it runs low if you need to fire off an entire clip on auto. Weapons jam about 1 out of every 50 times you fire them, requiring you to waste a round unjamming them.

Combat options. Note that things aren't going well for the party. But though everyone fell unconscious at some point, I still won--see below for how that happens.

There are multiple types of weapons in the game:

• Melee weapons: fists, knives, crowbars, axes, chainsaws, proton axes
• Throwing weapons: throwing knives, spears
• Clip pistols: M1911A1 .45 pistols and VP91Z 9mm pistols (the first is a real designation for a common military service pistol; the latter appears to have been made up for the game)
• Rifles: M17 carbines and M19 rifles
• Submachine guns: Mac 17s and Uzis
• Anti-tank weapons: manglers, sabot rockets, LAW rockets, and RPGs
• Demolitions: TNT, grenades, and plastic explosives
• Assault rifles: AK97 assault rifles and M1989A1 NATO assault rifles
• Energy weapons: Laser pistols, laser carbines, laser rifles, ion beamers, and meson cannons

Some of the game's many weapons.

As you saw, when I first started the game, I determined to be a melee-only party, but this swiftly grew untenable as my characters were mowed down over and over while trying to charge into melee range. So I capitulated and started arming myself with guns.

Not only did the axe kill the bastard, but daring to attack such a tough foe with a melee weapon raised my skill level.

I made the mistake of spreading skills for different types of weapons throughout my party, and I realized later in the game that I had screwed it up: lower-level weapons soon become utterly ineffective. Now, late in the game, I've found a couple of proton axes that serve as good melee weapons (when I can get into range), but all of the skill points I've invested in assault rifles (not to mention the ammo I've saved for them) avail me not as clip after clip refuses to have any effect on higher-level enemies. This makes sense when I'm shooting at armored robots and tanks, I guess, but it doesn't make a lot of sense when my enemies are friars and nuns. The good news is that as long as the character has 1 skill point in the weapon, he levels up reasonably quickly through constant use.

I suppose I shouldn't complain, though. I've found "power armor" for all of my characters, and this renders many of my foes' attacks just as ineffective as when I try to shoot them with submachine guns. Still, if I were to play the game over again, I wouldn't waste any skill points on clip pistols or submachine guns. I might give one or two of my characters melee skills, but I'd save the rest of my skill points for automatic and energy weapons.

I also made the mistake of saving up a bunch of anti-tank weapons instead of using them...well, on tanks. I now have about 20 RPGs and LAW rockets in my inventories. I've been trying to burn them, and I do find they perform tolerably well on a lot of enemies. More important, they blast open a lot of doors. I missed a key or two somewhere, so I'm glad the game gives me the opportunity to just destroy the steel doors.

A LAW rocket does its job against a robot. Note the fanciful descriptions of the damage and death. They were cute, but I usually had the scroll rate set so fast that I never really read them.

At this point, I've given all my characters energy weapons. I guess power packs for them are in limited supply during the game, but I keep finding new caches and have never came close to running out. I did find that the laser pistols and carbines stopped working well on enemies, though, and I had to give everyone rifles, ion beamers, and meson cannons.

Back to combat, though. For submachine guns, automatic weapons, and energy weapons, the game lets you choose whether to fire a single shot, a burst of shots, or empty the entire clip on "auto." I wish I'd chosen "auto" more often because by firing bursts, I ended up losing a lot of hit points and having to retreat from the areas, heal up in the desert (time passes so slowly indoors that it takes forever to wait and heal), and return. I've already entered and exited the final base about 15 times.

These guys were horribly deadly and worth burning entire clips on.

When enemies reduce your hit points to 0, your characters fall unconscious. If they really beat you down, you might become "seriously" or "critically" injured. At that point, you need attention from someone with a medic or doctor skill because otherwise you keep getting worse until you die. Unconscious characters heal and eventually wake up. The odd thing is, enemies won't target unconscious characters, and a fully unconscious party doesn't "die" in combat--everyone's got to be at least "serious." This has created some weird situations in which I've won tough combats even though everyone's been knocked unconscious. A couple of characters will wake up, have time to fire off a couple of shots, and then get wounded into unconsciousness again. Then a couple more characters will wake up, etc. Because of this quirk, it's been a while since I've suffered a full-party death.

In the video below, which I took a few days ago, you see me wandering around Las Vegas, but you can see a battle with some tanks starting at around 00:55. Note how it starts them all at 95 feet away--if I wanted to run towards them, it would take 9 turns, so I really need to just start shooting, which I do, in bursts. I decide to arm Damyata, the person with the highest AT weapon skill, with a LAW rocket. Note how Philomel's rifle jams, and I have to waste a turn unjamming it (02:07). Note also how I can't tell the three NPCs who to target or how many shots to fire, which is why I have them armed with single-shot weapons so they don't waste entire clips. My bullets aren't doing much damage to them, but Damyata's LAW rocket does a reasonably good job (02:23).

Throughout the video, I'm clicking on the options so you can see what I'm doing--the game supports a mouse this way--but in most of my play, I used the keyboard, which is much, much quicker.

Note how ACE's "rifle" skill goes up to Level 4 (03:33); the manual says that skills are more likely to increase when you're using them on tough enemies, and I suppose shooting a carbine rifle at a tank is about as tough as it gets.

Anyway, the combat lasts a long time, mostly because I'm shooting at tanks with bullets, but no one dies. One thing I find annoying is how the game gives all the experience to the characters who struck the killing blows, no matter how much everyone else contributes to the damage. In this case, Philomel made out like a bandit (05:35).

An attack against human scavengers a few minutes later (06:00) is much easier, but look at the phrase when they die: "sends him to meet his maker just as he peels off a final shot." That happens a lot, with robots, too. Even though my character kills the enemies, they manage to get in one attack.

I end the video messing around a bit on the inventory and character screens. You can reload out of battle, which saves you from having to waste a round in the next combat.

The analogous combat screen in Bard's Tale III.

Having described all of this, I can't say that I love the combat system. It's not consistently dangerous enough to make you meticulously plot your tactics, and even when it is, you can usually escape out of the area, rest and heal, and try again. While classes of enemies respond to different attacks, the overwhelming strategy is just to use the most powerful weapon you have, try to conserve ammo when you can, and keep firing until you win. It looks like they tried to implement a more tactical battle board by giving you the ability to split your party through the "run" command, but in practice it takes so long to position multiple characters around the battlefield that it's less hassle to stand in one place and shoot. Except at the very beginning, I've found that I simply sleepwalk through most combats.

As I indicated, I think I'm in the final base, but it's full of tough robot combats and computers that I'm not really sure what to do with. I feel like I missed a lot of stuff somewhere, so I'm eager to finish it (if I can) and look at a walkthrough. Either I'll have a "won!" posting tomorrow or I'll be begging you for help.

Wasteland: Prison and Place and Reverberation

Andrew Schultz's map of Las Vegas in Wasteland.

After I was sure that I had so thoroughly explored Las Vegas that there was no danger of spoilers, I Googled a map of the city in Wasteland, you'll never guess who created a whole bunch of Wasteland maps and walkthroughs! Andrew Schultz, if you ever stumble on this blog, please, please write to me. I want to send you some money in a box.

The reason I sought out such a map was to compare it to a real map of Las Vegas (and I was too lazy to draw one from the game myself). Damned if they didn't do a pretty good job. The game's version of Vegas is only a small part of downtown, but the roads are basically laid out correctly. The game skips some major roads, such as Sands Avenue, and the proportions are off (Charlestown Boulevard is way too close to Sahara Avenue), but overall they could have done worse.

The corresponding real area of Las Vegas.

The biggest problem is they've got an airport where the Boulevard Mall is located. It's been there since 1968, and it's hard to imagine what escalation of the Cold War would cause them to tear it down for an airport.

According to Google Maps, the red building to the northwest ought to be Raising Caine's Chicken Fingers.

When I left my last posting, I was heading for Vegas, but I happened to note a note in my notes that said "Darwin=PROTEUS." I thought this might be the password for one of the buildings in Darwin Village, so I returned. Not only wasn't it the password, but the guards attacked me for guessing. After I killed them, I was able to enter the building, and I found a black market which sold all kinds of cool stuff, including demolitions, anti-tank weapons, and Kevlar Suits. I spent some cash. The bartender didn't have anything to say to PROTEUS either, so I returned to Vegas.

After an apocalypse, wouldn't everything pretty much be "black market"?

Vegas was crawling with robots, mechanized tanks, cyborgs, and so forth. I had a battle at just about every intersection.


Through my exploration, I discovered that there were three basic power factions in Vegas: Fat Freddy, an underworld kingpin; Faran Brygo, a gangster-cum-community leader; and the Temple of the Mushroom Cloud, headed by the beautiful Charmaine.

A hobo lays it all out for me.

The robots had shown up recently, marching out of some underground base in the west, but preceded by a stranger named Max from the east--a brilliant hand-to-hand fighter and scientist who so impressed Brygo that he made Max his right-hand man. When the robots showed up, Max started raving about everyone being in danger, and then he disappeared. My party showed up shortly afterwords.

The house always wins, even in post-apocalyptic Vegas.

I found this all out from the paragraphs in the adventurer's journal, but only after I slaughtered all of Faran Brygo's henchmen and customers. You see, I had been running low on cash and I was rather expecting to make a lot of money gambling in Vegas. But it turns out gambling is just based on your gambling skill, not on any kind of real-world skill (the gambling games aren't mini-games; you just say you want to gamble and the game tells you how much you won). After I lost a ton of money, I wasn't feeling too happy about it. Fortunately, Brygo didn't seem to hold it against me.


Fat Freddy wanted me to kill Brygo, but Brygo seemed to be the only person organizing any kind of resistance against the robots, so I killed Fat Freddy instead (Brygo didn't even ask me to; that was a bonus). Brygo sent me on to Charmaine (introduced as the most beautiful woman I've ever seen) at the Temple, who wanted me to bring her the Bloodstaff from Needles for her assistance. (What is it with this Bloodstaff? I'm not sure the game really ever explains its function.) I got it from the temple there and returned it to her, and she informed me that Max was a robot. She told me he'd gone into the sewers beneath the city and opened a way for me.

What do you mean "even though?" Glowing purple enhances any woman's beauty!

The sewers were extremely difficult. When I first entered, I fell into an underground river and was swept out of Vegas to the Colorado River, only to find, after I shook myself off and climbed to the shore, that all my characters had "sewer rot." This required an expensive trip to the doctor. Returning to the sewers again, I found that the place was full of tough robots, and I had to keep retreating to go buy more ammo because I was expending entire clips on "auto" at them. I also spent long passages of just "waiting" so I could heal up between combats. Among the detritus of the robots, I recovered several laser pistols and energy packs (in the library in Vegas, I was able to train in the "energy weapon" skill) and a bunch of computer parts, including an android's head--presumably Max's.

I'm a little stuck here.

As I close the game for the night, I'm in a lab with several tables that seem to have something to do with putting Max back together again, but I can't quite get the sequence right.

My NPC roster was full.

I skipped a bunch of stuff in my account above because I played a lot of it last night and didn't take good notes about the order of things. There was a library and hospital in Vegas, and a jail where I rescued one of Brygo's men. I didn't have the password to enter the Temple, so I had to kill a ton of guards, who were very tough to kill but who also missed my characters with 90% of their attacks. In some building, I found a "proton axe" which turned out to be an awesome melee weapon, but it's rare that I can get close enough to use it.

The toughest robot, staking out a major intersection, was called a "Scorpitron." My characters gained a ton of levels in their automatic weapons, SMG, and clip pistol skills while fruitlessly firing shots at it--it appears that gaining levels in skills depends on the difficulty of the enemy you're facing. I only defeated it when I finally found some RPGs to lob at it from a distance. My character with high anti-tank weapon skills kept missing with her LAW rockets. Nothing like missing your shot with a $2,500 item.

Speaking of money, I realized I hadn't previously mentioned that you don't get any cash rewards or items from most regular battles. Never, it seems from random combats. It appears that the items dropped by certain enemies is fixed, which also means that there's a fixed amount of cash in the game. I'm not doing terribly, but I am a bit concerned about running out before the end, especially since I wasted so much selling excess stuff to the merchant in Quartz and then buying it back.

Some other notes:

• I finally found a place in which "move silently" would have come in handy.

I don't think it would have been worth taking the skill for this one moment.

• NPCs occasionally refuse to do what you tell them to do, such as using a skill or trading an item. If you keep trying, they do it anyway, so I'm not sure what purpose this serves except to slow you down.

Perhaps ACE would prefer to be abandoned in the middle of a street full of cyborgs.

• In a couple of the Vegas buildings, I was attacked by swarms of bees, who I was able to kill with bullets. I wonder how effective shooting bees would be in real life. You'd have to be a good shot.

• I'm finally starting to use my grenades. They don't do a lot against tanks, but they are pretty cool. I wish I'd used them more at the beginning of the game against flesh-and-blood enemies.

Grenades damage everyone in the blast radius.

• I'm finding a lot more excuses to split my party. In one case, I had to walk through an irradiated area and only had one radiation suit. I don't know how far you can split the party; I haven't tried having three characters walk to Quartz while the other three stay in Vegas. Would there be any advantage to this?

• My highest-ranked character, after progressing through cool-sounding ranks like "command corporal," "grenadier major," and "master grenadier," just made...sergeant. Seriously? This far in the game (at least, I feel like I'm pretty far), and all I have to show for it is "sergeant"?

None of my characters, single-handedly saving the world, are even commissioned rank.

We seem to have a main quest at last, though, and it prompted me to go back and try to reconcile what I've experienced with the Hobo's prophecies, recounted in a posting a few days ago. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the wasteland" might refer to Max who, as a robot, has probably lived a long time. "A body is only a box to keep your mind in" also has a robot-ish feel, as does "a machine's dream is everyone's nightmare." Beyond that, I'm still a bit lost.

In a couple of comments, UbAh has remarked that he thought I might not like some of these plot developments, which are fairly unrealistic and goofy in a B-movie way. I can't say that I'm overly enamored of the turns the game has taken, but I'm willing to reserve judgement until I see how the storyline pans out. Right now, the game seems headed down a track to rip off The Terminator. I hope there's a big reveal about the robots that's a little more original than that.