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.