MacPlay Re-Releases Fallout

BrotherhoodOfSteel writes " Accelerate your Mac reports that MacPlay is re-releasing Fallout as part of their value series. This is the original (good) version and the new release will be Mac OS X-compatible. MacGamer has a preview. And since it's news, there must be a press release." Those who have played Fallout and Fallout 2 can vouch for the quality of narrative in this single-player RPG. Now if someone would port Fallout 2, life would be complete for Macintosh users. Update: 06/21 16:24 GMT by J : Here's Omnigroup's page on the Mac OS X port.

Fallout changed my life!

[Anonymous Coward]

Once you delve into the post-apocalyptic world, D&D starts to feel like Mary Poppins.

Fallout is great... or is it evil?

[kooshball]

I loved the original when I first got it for my Mac. It's one of the few games (much less RPGs) that I've played through multiple times. In fact, the only reason I bought a PC was so that I could play Fallout 2.

Ahh, what I wouldn't give for a turdocharged plasma rifle somedays.

Plasma Rifle to the eye and Save game times

[benwaggoner]

I started Fallout on a consulting trip to LEGO* in Billund, Denmark. I stayed in the mildly trippy Legoland hotel, but it was February and the park itself wasn't open, so there wasn't much else to do at night with jet-lag induced insomnia.

On my then-beefy G3 300 PowerBook, Fallout had the most remarkable save and load times, like 2 whole minutes. It was so bad that I wouldn't save for hours, and when I died, I minded the load time from my previous save even more than the fact I had to redo so much stuff.

The other thing I remember vividly about the game is when I was skilled enough to have 95% of hitting someone in the eye with the Plasma Rifle at a pretty long range. Plasma sniping!

If they get the save times down to something reasonable, I'd love to check it out again.

*(I was there desiging the video compression workflow for the original MindStorms CD-ROM cut scenes and tutorial videos. LEGO was an amazing place back then. One guy I knew told his boss he wanted to learn animation, and he had a dual-processor Octane with the full PowerAnimator a week later).

Re:Plasma Rifle to the eye and Save game times

[Alex Thorpe]

Bad load times on your Powerbook? I first got it for my Performa 6400 with 200 Mhz 603e. It definitely left me twiddling my thumbs a lot. I didn't get into it as much as my brother did, though. Come to think of it, he paid for it.

Fallout Save Game Times (& Other Technicals)

[Thenomain]

Just For The Record, the reason for the ungodly load/save times is that the save system is too complete. (This, to me, is like beer being too free.) Every city/segment that the character enters is then saved, whether or not the character has interacted with a person or object. They're saved with the rest of the area. However, and this is the important part, even if you don't re-enter an area since the last save, it is still re-saved.

This is also why Fallout (and, later, Fallout 2 and Planescape) slows down so much when there are a lot of people and objects in an area: Even if you can't see it, it's still checking the script every "heartbeat", usually every two seconds. (Obviously, this doesn't happen in areas the character isn't in -- we don't all have a new 40 TFlop system.)

As Fallout "re-broke the mold" (Fallout is a wonderful revisioning of the ancient and Mac-Only game "Wasteland" -- goofy and fun), some technical issues is neither surprising nor a reason not to play the game.

The visionaries behind Fallout have formed a new company somewhat-recently. Troika [troikagames.com]'s only released game is Arcanum [arcanum1.com], a Gaslight Fantasy. Yes, the graphics are lackluster and everyone looks like they're tall and anorexic, but the RPG engine is fun and it's about as well scripted as Fallout. It makes up for it in many ways that there are gobs of side-quests and different stats could give you an entirely different path along the plot-arc and three ways to "win".

I've strayed, but I liked the game. But then, I still like text adventures.

Wasteland

[TellarHK]

Wasteland was by no means Mac-only. In fact, this is the first I've heard of a Mac version existing at all. It was available for the Apple II, the Commodore 64, and then the IBM PC. I had the latter two versions.

Re:Plasma Rifle to the eye and Save game times

[Creepy]

Wow... two whole minutes.

If ONLY I could have had 2 minute load times. Try 25-30 minutes on my 7500/100 with 4x CD-ROM. I would start the game, go downstairs and have coffee (or beer, depending on the time of day), come back up to my bedroom, watch some TV or part of a movie and FINALLY the game would come up. Moving between areas usually was 10-15 minutes, as well. I actually bought a JAZ drive specifically so I could do a full install of Fallout and not wait for the painful load times(that was $400 at the time, with one 1GB disk). I later upgraded my CD-ROM to 24x and tried the minimal install and that was nearly as fast as the JAZ disk (2-4 minutes).

I actually thought the game was hanging my machine at first. About 3 seconds before I rebooted the game came up.

Fallout again

[mmarlett]

I dusted off my copy of Fallout this winter and threw it on my 2X 800 MHz G4 and played it under OS X -- obviously in Classic mode. But I was shocked at the lack of bugs. There was a problem with the mouse pointer trailing, but the 1/2 hour it used to take to load saved games was gone. Most importantly, sawing a mutant in half with a mini gun was still just as satisfying.

I'll buy the OS X version just in case my trigger finger gets itchy.

no upgrade?

[Creepy]

It looks like I'm stuck with Fallout 1.1...

No patch for 1.2 and OS X. Oh well.