Apocalypse #2: Wasteland
Like Ultima IV with guns
This review was originally posted to Twitter on April 1st, 2020.
Initial release: 1988
Platforms: Apple II/Commodor 64/PC
Developer: Interplay Entertainment
Before Fallout, there was only Wasteland. Post-apocalypse games are a dime a dozen now but the genre wouldn’t even exist without what amounted to a Ultima IV knockoff — but what a knockoff it was!
This is the classic RPG to end all classic RPGs. Directed by the legendary Brian Fargo (whose name you may recognize from the intros to Fallout 1 and 2), Wasteland is the spiritual godfather to everything from Fallout (obviously) to Borderlands to The Outer Worlds.
The story is simple: in 1998, someone touched off World War III. In the aftermath, some surviving United States Army engineers founded the Desert Rangers, a paramilitary group that provides protection to the surrounding communities in the American southwest. 90 years later, you play a small unit of Rangers assigned to investigate disturbances in the desert, beginning with the small camp of Highpool. Your investigation will eventually take you to Las Vegas, an infested biolab, and a heavily fortified, robot-controlled fortress.
Although Wasteland has remained obscure for many years, with the popularity of the post-apocalypse RPG genre in the decade-plus since Fallout 3 came out it’s experienced a small revival with the development of a long-awaited sequel and an enhanced re-release. The chance to play a classic RPG straight outta the graves of the 80s is cool enough, but they sweetened the deal by giving the graphics a slight upres (not animated, sadly), voice acting, and even a soundtrack. All of these options are, of course, toggleable.
As for the game itself… well, it’s a game from 1988. Just look at that screenshot. It says so much, and yet there’s so much more that will drive you mildly insane. 90% of the game is menu-based. 90% of the plot is relegated to a “paragraph book,” 90% of which is fake. The paragraph book serves both as copy protection as well as a means of preserving the story in a game that was already pushing the limits of memory technology at the time. Sprinkled throughout are fake paragraphs that detail a very different, crazier story that never happens.
The character creation is, in a word, bull. Basically you you have a bunch of stats and you roll the dice on them, old-school tabletop style. You absolutely want an intelligence stat around 17 or 18, but rolling a stat that high requires patience — it could take 20 minutes. For each point in intelligence, that’s a point you can put into a very long list of skills with each level up, about a third of which are must-have, a third are fairly situationally useful, and a third are garbage. There’s also more skills you can learn in libraries later.
You could start the game with the four default characters, charmingly named with monikers like “Angela Deth” and “Hell Razor” but their stats are basically crap, which of course necessitates that you struggle with character creation in the first place. (Amusingly enough, the default crew are canon as of Wasteland 2. Nobody ever said you couldn’t just use an outside tool to recreate these characters or make new ones the way you want to, but of course some restraint is required if you want to not cheat.) Once you’ve muddled through character creation or just thrown in the towel and took whatever, it’s off to your first destination… which the game doesn’t tell you about directly. Only the manual, hint guide and any walkthrough you can find will point you in the right direction.
In fact, it’s best to just think of this game entirely as the digital component to a book-based tabletop game that you play by yourself. the books will see you through it; the game itself is strictly six million menus for combat, inventory management, and moving around.
I’m not kidding about the menus, by the way. there are menus out the wazoo. inventory management is a nightmare. combat is turn-based and done entirely through nested menus — who to shoot, whether to use single shot or bursts (or full-auto which uses up the whole magazine,) etc. In fact, it’s arguably faster to just stick the mouse cursor in the corner and just use the keyboard for everything. The worst part is using skills, as for nearly all of the game your skills are going to be too low for a good chance of success. Fortunately you can keep trying. You will, of course, almost always fail, and have to try again. The DOS version of the game (the one everyone’s familiar with) seeks to alleviate some of this tedium by allowing you to create macros, so you can try again at the push of a button.
Combat in general is just hard as nails. Don’t be surprised to find yourself torn in half by mutant bunnies or delinquent children within the first half hour. And the combat only gets harder. Eventually you’ll start running into enemies who just shrug off bullets. Character development has to be carefully managed because as robots become more common, you’ll be going through assault rifle ammo like popcorn, and it’s not until you’re deep in the Las Vegas sewers that you get an energy weapon capable of dealing with them effectively. However, you can’t learn new skills unless you spend skill points you earn through leveling up at libraries, of which there are only a select few. Shops are few and far between as well, and they’re easily prone to falling victim to a game-breaking bug: if you save and reload while standing in a square that opens a shop menu, it breaks the shop, making you unable to access it again. This isn’t so bad if you do it in, say, Quartz, but if it happens in Needles before you’re done with Las Vegas you might as well give up.
It’s not all bad, though. If you’re willing to struggle through the endless menus and infuriating combat, the game is chock-full of humor. A boss-level enemy early on is “Harold, the bunny master,” a huge, angry mutant farmer who commands the local rodents. Whatever you did to that man’s bunnies, he wants to kill you.
You can basically do whatever you want, including massacre a camp full of the aforementioned delinquent children (which is canon!!!) Some of the enemy deaths are amusing, most notably the legendary “blood sausage” and “thin red paste” messages you get when you use extreme overkill.
The graphics are fairly decent for 1988; the DOS version uses EGA, so some colors may seem a little weird (such as everyone being white as a sheet) but you get used to it. The animated enemy portraits are the real treat as the rest of the game is fairly simple.
The enhanced edition hopes to make the paragraph situation easier with voice acted readings of the paragraphs from within the game; these are alright but they’re kind of lackluster. It feels like you’re being read a bedtime story, and you’re better off sticking to the book. As the game was released in 1988, there was originally no real music to speak of, but a few years back Edwin Montgomery created a soundtrack with a unique track for each area of the game. The overall vibe is kind rather unlike Mark Morgan’s Fallout soundtrack, more synth-heavy than industrial.
We look back on games of this era as clunky, dusty and inaccessible, and they are. Imagine trying to play Ultima in 2020 — you’re either desperately bored in quarantine and looking for comforting nostalgia, or you’re crazy and you’ve been playing nothing else since the eighties. But to dismiss games like this would be a disservice to the importance they had in the development of the medium. We wouldn’t have Fallout, Mass Effect, The Elder Scrolls, Baldur’s Gate, or any of these others without the pioneering work by these games and their contemporaries.
So while this game may be infuriating to play by today’s standards, it’s still a vitally important piece of video game history. there wouldn’t be a Fallout without this game. Wasteland, alongside Ultima IV, casts a long shadow over RPGs of today.
With a sequel in development, InXile Entertainment, the spiritual successor to Interplay and the current holders of the Wasteland IP, understood the need to bring Wasteland forward into a new era. And so on February 25th, 2020, they released a full-scale remake. Is it true to the legacy? We’ll find out!
In the end, though, remake or no, sequels or no, spiritual successors or no, Wasteland ’88 only holds up if you’re really patient, or really old. As someone who only came at it in recent years, it’s a game I enjoy, but a game that infuriates me as well.
