One Happy Team...

Completed Fallout.

To this day, I didn’t know what’s the proper way to find the Military Base where the mutants dwell. I just go to Necropolis to deliberately get captured and delivered to the Leutenant.

Turns out, if you go to Cathedral first, there’s a computer with the base location.
By that point I also decided to get rid of my companions, as a supermutant with a rocket launcher or a minigun would wipe them out anyway. I began to feel like a play “Save Dogmeat” game. It’s ironic that even developers were aware of this. Official way Dogmeat dies is one of those forcefields. Forcefields are a pain in general. You just need to stock on Stimpacks and hope for the best.
Also by this point you get so much experience from simply whacking supermutants, you don’t need quests anymore.
There’s a special perk called “Mental Block” that is used only in one encounter against the Master.
I’m glad I now properly played Fallout. Despite game crashing on me occasionally. It speaks a lot that a 25 years old game is still playable. But I feel like there’s just one way to play this game: get Plasma Rifle, burn everything. Any other path just takes more time.

Killed Mother Deathclaw by trapping her between three of my companions. The game was noconcept of aggro.

Gave Ian the unique “Blade runner” pistol from freeing the ranch. He’s a beast with it, if only the AI wasn’t so dumb as to switch to knife every time he needs to reload.
Boneyard is a story about town mayor hiring you to avenge his son, supposedly killed by a gang, only to discover it’s his bodyguards who killed him. The battle between bodyguards and the gang is quite epic by ’97 standards, but it has one major issue: Regulators also try to kill some key NPCs, so you’re in a rush against time and luck yo save them.
I always assumed that Necropolis and The Glow where the same place. Turns out The Glow is a dungeon full of robots Brotherhood of Steel sends you to in order to get accepted. I didn’t remember any of it.
You can actually get two suits of power armour. One as a possible reward for rescuing the initiate held hostage in Hub, and another if you manage to get needed parts and repair it. Also, they make a lot of fuss about the laser pistols, despite the fact that by that time you should have much more powerful options.

Barter skill seems to be outright broken. I thought it should bring better prices. It doesn’t.
Lockpicks skill doesn’t seem to be useful at all, as I managed to lockpick all doors until now without leveling it up once, just by trying and trying.

Now, I view this game as sort of a puzzle: mostly trying to figure out the correct order to tackle the quests. Dekker fight seemed difficult at first, as it’s a small room, and most enemies attack the main character. But it’s easier, if you get the combat shotgun first from the guys that hold someone from Brotherhood of Steel hostage. And this becomes doable once you beat the raiders. And this becomes doable once you finish Necropolis.

I remember that as I kid I always feared the encounter with Deathclaw in the caves.

But I either got lucky, or it’s not as bad as I remembered. The poor beast went down on the first try, with the help of Combat Shotgun.

Finding the Water Chip is not as hard as I remember, even without a guide. Once you get to the Hub, you’re basically being told that it’s in Necropolis. And also you can send a water caravan to Vault 13 from there, if 150 days are not enough. I made it at meager level 5. But just taking the chip is evil, since then ghouls don’t have any water. A better solution is to repair their water pump, and they even point out where you should look for the parts.
And there are two problems with that, considering how old the game is. First, the repair part is tiny, and you need to pixelhunt for it. And second, it’s not called “water pump part” or anything, but simply “junk”. I decided to bring it back only because I ran out of other ideas.
Also, I was wondering how the game explains the transition between the first half, where you look for the Water Chip, and the second, where you hunt the mutants. Turns out, not very elegantly. You meet the mutants in Necropolis (they can even capture you and bring you to their leader, which at this point not very helpful). And once you tell Overseer about that, you’re tasked to eradicate them.

Something like:
– Hey, I’ve seen some Nazis on the street, mom.
– From this day on your task is to assassinate Hitler!

No Mutants Allowed is still alive. Wow. Long time.
The GOG version doesn’t have children. While not a big deal by itself, returning them takes a bit more than the usual patch, because this version uses DAT files. Had to repack it myself, but it worked in the end.
There’s a patch pack called Fixt, but it’s incompatible with 1.2 saves, and I don’t have the motivation to start over.

I played and even finished Fallout as a kid, but…
It was a ripped version, so I didn’t know there were talking heads and even movies in the game until much later. And I didn’t know English that well at the time, so I played with a walkthrough most of the time.
Playing it now, it’s not a complete blank slate, of course. I still remember that Speech and Stealing skills are surprisingly useful, while most others are complete thrash, for example. And it’s lucky that I remember some of the quests, because there’s very little indication of them at all. For example, if I didn’t remember that Tandy from Shady Sands gets kidnapped at some point by raiders, I wouldn’t know this quests exists at all, because you don’t have a good reason to revisit Shady Sands, and even if you do, you specifically need to talk to her father for that.
I plan the game differently now too. As a kid, I would literally hunt every rat and scorpion to maximize EXP. Now, I just fight only if I really need to. Although I must say, the EXP you get from fighting is quite good, so maybe I wasn’t that stupid as a kid.