I like old games. First, they don’t require you to shill 500 bucks to buy a half decent video-card that is needed to run the stuff from #currentyear. Second, they are dirt cheap if you know where and when to look. Third, most of the old games in my liking are from the golden epoch of 2000s. They are mostly still accessible either on Steam, Gog or Xbox Store. Fair share can even be relatively easily played on the current generation of PCs and Xboxes. They don’t have a lot of agenda packed in and the agenda that is packed is mostly outdated and irrelevant, sometimes even fun. Pure gaming experience. Grilling, dare I say.
One of the old games that I liked the most when it came out was Fallout 3, Bethesda’s big boom in the FPS genre. Expansive open world, an old but not forgotten series revived straight into 3D, memorable scores from the 1950s and general aesthetics of pre-1960s peak Americana in a zombie world of post-nuclear annihilation with lots of black humor, violence, gore and madness.
I played Fallout 3 a lot in 2008. Even though the Wasteland was bleak and narrow, covered with greyish filter on my low resolution monitor and with render distance so low I would accidentally walk into Yao-Guai and a few deathclaws without even noticing, it was still a fantastic experience. I don’t even remember bad gunplay or persistent crashes that were unavoidable at launch. I can only recall being in the Wastes and seeing the glorious City on the Hill crushed and shattered into million pieces, swarming with mad ghouls and brutish supermutants.
It’s been almost 13 years. A lot changed. Industry moved on. It’s been a few Fallouts since. Some were better, some were a big success, and others were and still are… well, special. But the yearning for the first 3D installment was still there.
I returned to the Capital Wasteland 12 years after to relive what was so precious to me back then. And it some sense I’ve got what I wanted. The Capital Wasteland is still here, and it’s shattered heart is broken open for everyone to see. I installed the game, got through the Vault sequence, ran to the city, a few ins and outs on the metro and a dozen of corpses on the way. Finally, National Mall, or rather a Full Metal Jacket version of it. I got to the top of the Washington Monument early in the morning and this is what I saw…
Terrifying but breathtaking view. A heart of the nation torn apart, yellow products of its sin fighting against the remnants of humanity in the trenches on the remains of its heritage. Dark night before the dawn. This is the Fallout I remember.
But when I got down, the reality hit differently. The main quest turned out to be a shallow shell where the player’s character followed the steps of much more interesting father figure voiced by Liam Neeson(a story about him would probably be better, Todd). Even father’s story was a straightforward and quite flavorless quest to save the people by giving them fresh water strangely fixated on the Biblical references with almost no serious moral choices on the way culminating by the choice to die by stepping into a radioactive chamber or make another person do it which ultimately lead your character to be called a coward in the game ending sequence even though you had a ghoul and supermutant follower who could do the job without any risk for their life but didn’t because reasons.
Side quests varied from “fetch a boy from a vampire cult” to “kill a tree with fire or a gun”. Moral system put you in the spectrum between heartless murderer and a human being with basic decency. Killing innocent people is bad, who could have guessed? Evil choices were, uh, evil, without any layers. A nicely sounding DLC on the alien spaceship turned out to be a shooting gallery that would nicely fit in Crysis games if gunplay was a little bit better. Aliens spoke gibberish and there was no way to communicate with them so the only choice was to massacre everyone on the ship and then destroy another ship with a death ray. I’d say that’s a spoiler, but the story so dumb that you won’t really lose anything significant from what I just said.
And still… I liked the Wasteland. I liked the vision of this ghost future and the larger background of its history. I liked the vibe. Fallout 3 turned out to be a dream game. Or, to say it differently, the game dreaming about which is better than really playing it. It’s ironic that a game that uses nostalgia so much is itself better in the moment you have a nostalgia for it. Or rather for a version of it that never was, a version that gets to your mind like a jammed signal mixed with another one on the same frequency. A signal that you can almost understand, but it goes away and leaves you only with a feeling. An image from another better world which might exist but doesn’t.
Maybe I am just a freak, but my memory works in the similar way. I don’t remember the events of my past exactly in continuity. My memory has two main elements: moments and mood. I remember what I said to a one girl on my prom in high school and my general feeling of what was going on, but not the sequence of events. My memory is better than reality because my brain cuts the corners which are uncomfortable or rough and makes it nicer. I remember Fallout in the similar way, the moments that were worthy to stay in the long-term memory like Little Lamplight, a town governed by kids, Harold, oldest tree-man in the entire Wasteland or giant robot with an inextinguishable hate towards communists and the vibe, apocalyptic feeling of the world on the brink of death and the sweet stench of decomposing corpse of a once shiny capital.
I am going to return there again in some years. I know what to expect and that in the end the taste will be semi-bitter, but nostalgia is too strong when it kicks in. So I will follow it yet again.