Aww shit, I'm late on this one. I said that I'd post my thoughts on this weeks ago. Apologies to the one person that was looking forward to reading my thoughts.
Okay, enough bullshit, here are my thoughts on the game: This was quite an endeavor not only in the narrative but in the gameplay experience. I've never played a CRPG before, only RPGs in the vein of Final Fantasy and Earthbound. The first thing I have to say is it's nice to play an RPG that's challenging and not just an exercise in level-grind abuse. It might not have always been fair, but it was preferable to the RPG gameplay I'm used to.
On the subject of combat, I thought it kind of sucked. Having the attacks replicate dice rolls is fine, but not knowing the stats (which inform the die rolls) without looking them up on the internet is annoying. The interface also left something to be desired as well. While there is a lot of information to be doled out, it'd be nice if there was a more streamlined way to dispense said info. I've tried adjusting the text's scrolling speed and couldn't find a speed that wasn't too slow or too fast. It'd either blaze past my eyes or crawl frustratingly slowly. Thankfully, the combat isn't too involved, so I was able to just set the scrolling speed to max and attack until the enemy was felled. On that note, the combat was rather easy and the game's challenge mainly came from the other aspects of the game.
The unconscious/comatose/death system is rather annoying as at times you'd wind up in battles of attrition where you'd hit the enemy, get knocked out, wake back up, hit the enemy, and get knocked out again. Rinse and repeat until you either get killed for real or manage to eek out a win. At earlier levels, it's a pain to get your injured party members to a doctor and at later levels it's annoying to have to make several attempts to heal a teammate. It's like hitting your head against a wall that will eventually crack if you set your macro to automatically press the healing keys over and over. The terrain can be annoying as well since the radiated squares don't show they're radiated except at night and if you fall into water the game will grind to a screeching halt as it tells you how much damage the party members suffered (usually 1) on every square.
This game hasn't aged well in terms of graphics, sound, and interface. It also wasn't able to keep my attention by its lonesome, so I've had podcasts running in the background. I know I'm coming off quite harsh, but if you'll keep reading, you'll see that I did enjoy this game. I enjoyed it. Sorry for the lame joke.
Why did I enjoy it? For a few reasons: As I said before, the sometimes unfair difficulty made for a nice new RPG experience for me. After completing this, I'm now interested in trying the old Ultima titles, Starflight, and other CRPGs. I have a feeling that I'm going down the CRPG rabbit hole. The primitivity of the game actually works in its favor for me. It makes for a nice "burn out game" that I can fire up just to press buttons after a long day's work. It also works because the text descriptions paint a lovely picture of the environment that the CGA graphics cannot. It's kind of a weird stopgap between a novel and a comic with its use of Images and Words*. A very interesting and unique experience that I haven't seen in any other medium or even other game genres.
Related to its need to use imagination is the fact that in the right state of mind this game is outright hilarious. I'm not talking about try too hard Earthbound-style humor either. I'm not much of a role player, so I just went around shooting motherfuckers and choosing dialogue options that I knew would result in combat. Kicking down hotel room doors and gunning down random dudes makes me chuckle when I imagine what it'd look like in a more modern game. There are also intentionally funny moments such as the mutated hooker that gives the john Wasteland Herpes. That moment actually felt like a combination of the two ways of laughing at this game since I imagined the john (Thrasher in my case) getting his ass kicked by the two punks that happened to be there while weakened by the disease. Other segments of the game such as the mortar launcher and the messages that appear when the party runs into a cactus are some more examples of the game's humor.
The enhancements made to this game for its modern re-release make this game much more accessible to modern audiences and show the love inXile has for Wasteland. The narrated paragraphs, though rather dryly read, greatly aid in gameplay by preventing alt-tabbing out of the game that would be needed if inXile had only used scans or transcriptions. The soundtrack was rather nice and I think CRPG players would greatly appreciate its addition. The new graphics for the enemies are nice, but it sucks that they're not animated, so I prefer the old graphics.
This was overall a pleasant first CRPG experience that gave me more than just a look at the precursor to Fallout (the main reason why I played Wasteland).
*I'm sorry again. I couldn't resist a forced-in Dream Theater reference.
