In preparation for Fallout 3 I recently downloaded Wasteland from www.abandonia.com. Wasteland was the precursor to the original Fallout, and a lot of the ideas from it ended up in the later series. Given that Wasteland was originally released in 1986, I obviously wasn't expecting it to be much like Fallout, but I tried to approach it with an open mind. Unfortunately I had trouble getting beyond the first hour or so.
I can quite happily read a book written two hundred years ago, watch a film from the twenties, admire paintings from the Renaissance and see a play first performed in ancient Athens. But I have trouble playing a game that's only twenty years old. I'm not sure it's just a technology issue (although that's probably part of it) since I still revisit older games a lot. What turned me off were things like the fact you're thrown in without anything to really direct your initial play, the random combat where enemies don't appear on the map as you travel, and the seeming lack of any real continuity between towns. Wasteland seems like strong evidence to me that games really have evolved in terms of both storytelling and mechanics despite what a lot of pundits say. I want to be fair to Wasteland, and to explore it properly, but I can't see it sucking vast chunks of my life away like its successors did...
While I'm on the subject of 'retro' games: I really dislike that label. In film and music,
'retro' usually refers to modern releases which evoke the medium's past. Austin Powers is a retro movie which draws on things like Our Man Flint and The Avengers, but those influences are not retro themselves. Imperial Teen have a retro sound, influenced by bubblegum pop of the sixties and new wave acts of the late seventies and early eighties like Blondie and the Pretenders, but that doesn't make the Pretenders retro from the perspective of 2007. Citizen Kane is not a retro movie, so why is Wasteland a retro game? I'd argue that a true 'retro game' is something like Darwinia, which is a modern spin on older games like Cannon Fodder and Space Invaders, or Ankh, with its plot and puzzles both heavily and openly influenced by Monkey Island. I know it's just semantics, but it seems like there is that distinction to be made.
styg
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2 comments:
I'm not sure I altogether agree with some of your remarks at the beginning of this post. I'm sure you are perfectly happy reading books written 200 years ago; I expect you're also okay with things written in Shakespearian English, you can probably breeze through Langland and Chaucer as well -- I bet you find books written in some portions of the twentieth century difficult, dated and hard to read. I love Citizen Kane, Bringing up Baby, Ducksoup and Casablanca, I'm a sucker for 40's B&W; but there's a whole batch of perfectly acceptable 80's movies that I find trying to watch (Repo man is a good example). I loved STNG the first time round, but I've been watching the reruns recently and finding them rackety, poorly scripted, with naff fx.
And therin lies the problem, time moves on, slang and fashion change at a cracking pace, technology also. Wasteland was a great game in its time, but I expect different things from games like that these days; better graphics, better stories, more interactive game play, and I remember when I thought games like Wasteland were all that. Give it fifty years and the kids who grew up with the tech we got used to, and who have got used to tech we haven't even thought of, will have no trouble with Wasteland at all. What you consider old-fashioned and rickety, will just be "the way they did things in the past"
Anyway, this was longwinded, and I've just reread your post, and I think that may have missed the point, but I've written this now, so sod it. I'm enjoying your blog so far, it's making me think. keep up the good work.
Good point and thanks for your comments! You've sparked a couple of thoughts in me, but I'm afraid I can't make readable sentences of them right now - I've just gotten the 'net back today and my head hurts after hours of messing around with networks, checking emails, updating AV and so forth. Hopefully I'll be able to post a coherent comment later on, after I've eaten and stuff.
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