Jolt Country

Wasteland deserves its own thread.

You know what? I have IDEAS. For a few blog posts. Mostly about my experiences playing Wasteland for the PC and finding (and playing) Brataccas for the Amiga. But first thing's first.

I know there are a few blogs that already do/did a great job talking about their experiences playing Wasteland. In fact, reading the CRPG Addict got me just as excited as the Kickstarter.

So maybe this can be cleaned up into a proper blog post, and maybe not. But we'll see.

Additionally, I decided that I want to basically use a Wiki or a hint any time I feel "stuck." I want to go through the game and trust it, sure, but I don't want to waste precious picoseconds wondering what to do next. So there are some resources that I'm using that should help.

The Wasteland Wiki: http://wasteland.wikis.ailis.de/wiki/Wasteland_Wiki

Developing Your Wasteland Skills: http://wasteland.rockdud.net/tips-wildbill_skills.txt

The Exhaustive Walkthrough: http://www.the-spoiler.com/RPG/Interpla ... and.2.html

Here are the paragraphs. (The game wants you to read them at certain points. It will say, "Read Paragraph 2" and so forth.) http://wasteland.protozoic.com/wastelan ... ragraf.txt

Won't you join me.... in the Wasteland?

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Won't you join me.... in the Wasteland?

Jonsey, I thought I did that already when you asked me to post items on Caltrops.

Nicely done! Giant screenshot, plenty of links, funny Tdarcos comment? This has all the makings of a... Thread 3000!

This thread is going places. Lock yourselves in now! Now, god dammit!

I hope to contribute to the Kickstarter before it's over (and I do intend to play the sequel), but I have to admit that I've never really gotten further than the rabid dog in the beginning (I think I once walked to the next town over after that just to see what was there).

As I've mentioned, I'm not a big fan of moral-dilemma games, and neither route of handling that really felt right (killiing the rabid dog and being forced to kill the distraught kid or just letting the rabid dog bite your ass the entire time you are down in the cave). Looking at those links above, players still haven't found a solution to that that appeals to me.

I can't say that I'd pick up Wasteland again, but it is true that CRPGaddict has been making me feel dumb for throwing away my "Interplay 10 year anniversary" cds.

For us lowly mortals who are less inclined to fudge with DOS Box, would a short tutorial or executable package for Wasteland be available?

I think I still have my Interplay CD(s). If I can track them down tonight I'll make an ISO of it. You shouldn't need DOSBox to play it. That being said, you can learn 99% of what you need to use DOSBox in about 5 minutes, less if you're proficient with DOS.

A tutorial on getting it to run!

1) Download this. It's straight from the RPG Archives set of discs that Roody was talking about earlier.

2) Download D-Fend Reloaded. It is a front end for DOSBox, and it includes DOSBox. All integrated.

3) I used the "Wizard" in D-Fend Reloaded to find Wasteland. But the executable is wl.exe.

4) I made D-Fend Reloaded use a specific version of DOS - DOS 6.22. I was seeing Wasteland lock up in the emulator before I did that.

One thing to keep in mind: you get one save slot and only one save slot! (!!!) So I am backing my save spot up using my favorite cvs application every so often.

Roody_Yogurt wrote:I can't say that I'd pick up Wasteland again, but it is true that CRPGaddict has been making me feel dumb for throwing away my "Interplay 10 year anniversary" cds.

Wow, that CD was a pain in the ass to back up. Neither MagicISO nor ImgBurn would back it up, so I had to use CloneCD.

If you want it, I'll leave it online through the weekend. Note that I had 0 luck with getting it to run under 64-bit Windows 7.

Thanks, got it already. I figure at least half of the games should work fine with DOSbox.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:This thread is going places. Lock yourselves in now! Now, god dammit!

"I need backup assistance now! Now, goddammit, now!"
- Al Powell, Die Hard

Tdarcos wrote:

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:This thread is going places. Lock yourselves in now! Now, god dammit!

"I need backup assistance now! Now, goddammit, now!"
- Al Powell, Die Hard

Agreed. He was the inspiration to me saying "Now, goddammit" which morphed from "Now, goddammit, now!"

I feel that Tdarcos has truly connected with Jolt Country now. This is shaping up to be the best fucking thread in forum history! Let's bring in some babes!

Agreed. If there's one thing that turns on women more than middle-aged men talking about video games, it's a guy in a wheelchair with a broken dick who talks about wiping his ass.

Flack, in the Wasteland there are no middle-aged men! We are all young, we are all stars!

I got to play for about ten minutes tonight. There IS in fact a problem with this game -- it's got so many options it can be overwhelming, and sometimes they just mess some things up.

I found a dude named Head Crusher at one point. He asked me to sit down. Excellent! Now... talking to people in Wasteland doesn't really happen the way you might think it does.

Do you see the options at the bottom of the screenshot? Well, to talk to people, *sometimes* you need to click on "ENC" for encounter. And start a non-combat encounter.

If you start a non-combat encounter and there's nobody to have an encounter with, well... you can just go through the combat options. Useful if you want everyone in your party to reload, I guess.

At one point you get a credit card, and instructions to give it to Head Crusher. Here is how you do it. And look, this sucks. I would have never figured it out:

You go to the chair across from him. You hit "U" for use. You hit "I" for item. You select the Visa card. You are then asked what direction you want to use the item.

You have to point to the chair ACROSS from Head Crusher.

!!!

Not Head Crusher himself, not the table between him and the chair, and God help you if you're sitting on the chair. Even writing this out, this can not be right (but I think it is). Argh.

That's one of those moments where suddenly I do not trust the interface at all. Using a credit card two squares away from the dude I want to give it to? This game desperately needs a way to just give shit to people.

One of the things I am evaluating, as I play Wasteland, is the feasibility of using Hugo to make a Wasteland-type game in the far, far future. And I am really seeing the benefits of a full text parser to a game like this. >give card to head crusher is so, so, sooooooo much better than having to use keyboard shortcuts to (sort of) do the same.

Well, not to turn anyone away from writing an awesome apocalyptic tale in Hugo, do you know if AGC has any functionality in this area? Can't we force them to add it?

Hey, AGC people! Go add a parser!

Seriously, this is an interesting question- whether any existing RPG development kits have decent support for skill/object usage.

Aside: I've toyed around with wanting to write a RPG (which I never will given that it'd be something I'd need to enlist help for), but I figured I'd try to do a console style rpg in Verge or do a game in that Fallout engine thingy.

Jonsey's issue with movement, action and quests in Wasteland brought to mind similar issues I had with Syndicate - the initial learning curve is steep because the controls are very, very choppy. Want to switch weapons in combat? Either figure out the three key short cut, play with the UI which is convoluted and clunky wen controlling more than one character, or say "fuck it" and play the SNES or Genesis ports.

And the secondary (out of combat) screens require guess work - research and equipment are both non-intuitive affairs where one must learn the exact parameters of the research tree, how long such research takes, and that switching between skills invalidates the previous choice. Seriously, why are games from this era as confusing as possible? The scenarios in Wasteland require the "soft touch" and progressive messing about that Jonsey refers to, Syndicate has a learning curve only because the UI and game systems force the player to invest inordinate amounts of time losing because of a system that is engineered to encourage poor choices.

Though what confuses me, is that X-Com got the equipment load out, research screens, and a free form travel and "random encounter" system right and Ultima V had an encounter and interaction system that shamed Wasteland in a number of contexts. But okay, Wasteland did a lot of things right and they worked in this larger framework they created, a concept that wouldn't be seen until the Fallout series and the short lived trend for "sand box" style games.

Good games all around but perhaps Syndicate and Wasteland are examples of developers becoming too immersed in their own creations?

I don't know, Retro!

But this thread is now focused on WASTELAND 2. Wasteland 2 is a great game and I demand you to all give me your terrible opinions about how it is too tough for you.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:I don't know, Retro!

But this thread is now focused on WASTELAND 2. Wasteland 2 is a great game and I demand you to all give me your terrible opinions about how it is too tough for you.

For the uninitiated: Robb also expressed to me terrible opinions about how it is too tough for us. So either he was lying to me to make me not feel so dumb, or he is lying to YOU to make YOU feel dumb!!

I DEMAND AN INVESTIGATION.

(And an apology!)

Until I see a character creation guide, my instinct is to be paralyzed by fear at the Character Creation screen. Christ, I have already gone through the "discovering the best attributes through having to replay the first half of the game twenty times" with Balder's Gate, Morrowind and (the original) Pool's of Radiance.

Very paranoid about re-living the "five - ten hours in, your characters are useless" bit.

--Retro

Ok. I'll tell you what I did. OK? You can do what I did.

DOCTOR CHARACTER
Max in intelligence. Max in Surgery and Field Medic, but I also gave her Shotgun.

THE PERCEIVER
Max in luck. She has Perception, Shotguns, Hand Guns, Field Medic. She also has one of each of the speech stats, Hard Ass, Kiss Ass and Smart Ass. On your first level, give her some sort of hand to hand weapon skill, only because ammo is so scarce, sometimes it's nice to have one person with a tire chain or bottle of acid. I guess a bottle of acid is not a hand to hand weapon but more of a hand to face weapon.

BIG BLACK DICK WHICH SHOOTS AT YOU
We don't max this guy out. A little in accuracy or dexterity or whatever. I forget what attributes the game has. We're not overly concerned with intelligence. Whatever makes it seem like he would shoot well.

He gets most of the gun stuff. Assault Rifles, Machine Guns, Shotguns... the only other skill he gets is Computer Science. He is basically the JC poster known as Bruce.

Mr. FIX-IT

Try to raise his intelligence and luck and accuracy a little. He gets snipers and machine guns... but we try to put one into every other skill. Lockpicking, Safecracking are a must. Alarm Disarm, Demolitions are also useful. Possibly another Perception. You want to get one rank of everything for this dude as quickly as possible.


That's four dudes, none of whom are tripping over each other trying to perform the same trick. The Doctor, the Talker, the Shooter and the Skill Bro. This way it doesn't matter what NPCs you add or don't add. (Not that the game has let me add one yet, which is infuriating.) You want to make the Shooter person be competent with all kinds of weapons. You can relax on Energy Weapons for two or three levels. You can relax on Toaster Repair for a few levels for Mr Fix-It. You can relax yourself, because this is how I am doing the game.

Also, restart every time someone dies because it's bullshit that you can't roll new dudes.

You realize you have described The Worst Game Ever. A game where you have to spend a lot of time up front, hoping against hope that you didn't choose wrong for the next 43 hours (or in this case, 43 minutes) with no information other than internet forums to go on.

IF games get slaughtered if they can enter an "unwinnable state", and you're describing a game which you can get into that stats just by not tirelessly investigating the magic combination of characters you need to progress past the first fucking scenario.

And this is great? You're saying this is great?

I WANT it to be great, by the fucking way. I'm not some "FANBOI" of whatever the opposite of Wasteland 2 is. I want, and am ready to LOVE it.

But I've played the first hour of it about six times by now. I learned a few lessons. I get further each time. But this is before the VERY FIRST STORY MISSION is over.

I would say I'm just bad at videogames, but all videogames are, in their essence, Starcraft II, and I'm gold league, which is not great, but not awful.

I demand an apolo- I demand you explain how we are all fucking this up. I WANT to love this game, you understand. Shadowrun, I was on the fence, and within 20 minutes, I wanted to (and did) hate it.

But this is DIFFERENT. And you're doing nothing to help. And I suspect you also suck, because "Highpool" which you're braying about is ALSO before the first actual mission in the game.

Fuckin' shit.