A Borderlands 2 stand alone expansion that is more of the same from this franchise. In this one, you are playing a game within a game as Tiny Tina DM’s a table top RPG filled with dragons, wizards, and other fantasy archetypes. There is very little to distinguish it from the other games in the series other than the grenades now act as missile-style spells. You are still collecting randomly generated guns and pairing weapon types with various enemy types. The main reason for playing this is to get the usual doses of comedic stories and characters. Claptrap is searching for his wizard beard, Torgue is a jock looking to gain nerd-cred, etc. A worthy expansion if you like the series.

Skald was one of handful of Kickstarter projects that I have backed. It is a throwback tribute to 80s role playing games like Ultima or Phantasie with a heavy emphasis on pen-and-paper dice mechanics. Watching the game’s development has been pretty interesting. Early builds of the game look very much like the PC version of Ultima V. As the months (and years) went by that art style became much more detailed and modern stuff like weather and lighting effects were added. The final product is an incredibly detailed pixelized world to explore.

So much care has gone into every single map tile. There is an overwhelmingly brown and gray tone to the art. I think this is trying to be reminiscent of the Commodore 64 palette but at times, especially during nighttime battles, it became difficult to discern friend from foe from foliage. The art style extends into several lovely “cutscene” graphics and various dialogue screens. There are even fanciful medieval drop-cap letters in the text display.

All of this is in service of a Lovecraftian tale of dark fantasy in which various old creatures are emerging back into the world and corrupting the minds of men. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t much emergent gameplay. The story is pretty linear despite the initial open-world feel of the map. I am playing this just coming off of re-playing the first two Fallout games and perhaps I expect a bit more player choice in the narrative. But, to be fair, the Ultima games were basically adventure games with role-playing mechanics thrown on top.

The role-playing here is mostly about building the skills you can use in combat and navigating the world map. Many tasks in the game will require a stats checks and Skald literally shows dice rolling as it checks for success. As experience is gained and characters level up, the player can assign points to stats trees that differ based on class. Spells are gained, new attacks are learned, and various combat skills become unlocked.

Skald is at its best during combat. It recreates the turn-based strategy of the early Ultimas in which you control the actions of every character in order of initiative. It isn’t quite as tactical as the Wasteland sequels but there is a fair amount of positioning, spellcasting, ability management. Keeping everyone alive is a challenge and those battles that end with just a couple of party members still standing are exhilarating.

Skald falls short of greatness in that it does not quite live up to the potential of a next-gen 2-D RPG. Hopefully the engine will continue to be developed to add more environmental interactivity, a better dialogue system, and a more expansive and explorable over-world. During the Kickstarter there was walk of releasing development tools. I’d love to see what the modding community can come up with using this system.

I couldn’t resist the pull of Fallout after a recent playthrough of Fallout 1. This is the second time I have played Fallout 2 but I have little to no memory of the game other than the opening temple and the Reno levels.

The game may not look much different than its predecessor, but there are massive improvements. The world is much more vast and there’s more variety in the overworld encounters and towns. Your followers now have a combat settings in which you can granularly control their actions. You can even tell them not to burst fire you to death! Inventory management is slightly better. They’ve added a “Take All” button to the interface. There’s a car that you can use for fast travel. Also the tile sprites are more detailed and you can tell characters to move if they are blocking a doorway. In other words, if you’re wanting to try out a vintage Fallout game, this is the one to play.

My biggest negative about the game is that the main quest line is nowhere near as good as the first game. It makes up for it in the sheer number of side missions and character dialogs to distract the player from the ho-hum threat of The Enclave. And at least there is no water-chip timer ticking to push you along.

My final thought is that much of what we think of when we think of Fallout really comes from the 3-D sequels. The retro-fifties aesthetic mostly exists in the manuals and marketing of these old Interplay games. That actual feel of the 2-D world is way more Mad Max than Leave it to Beaver.

I just finished watching the pretty good T.V. adaptation of the game and was inspired to start up a new game of the original. Fallout was the first thing I ever bought on eBay back in ’98. The box smelled like cigar smoke, but the game didn’t stink at all.

In retrospect, it’s not quite as good as I remembered. There are just a few to many fiddly “puzzles” where you are supposed to try using random objects on the environment to get past obstacles. There are no clues. You just have to know to “use radio on computer” or whatever.

Otherwise, everything else is great. I love the turn-based combat, the skills, and character interactions. The game is relatively short, especially when compared with the 3-D open-world sequels. We need more digestible length games these days.

I played a modded version of the game using a patch called Fallout Fixt. Most of the enhancements were not noticeable to me, but there were a couple things that I later realized weren’t in the original game. Most importantly you can tell your followers to move out of the way if they are blocking a doorway. This doesn’t work on recruited help from the Brotherhood and can end up making the game unwinnable. This is because the mod allows the Brotherhood knights to join you inside the mutant military base, which wasn’t designed for companions to fit alongside you.

I ended up playing all the way through the game and got all the good endings except for killing the Khans off. I’m tempted to fire up Fallout 2 now, but I should probably hold off. Skald comes out in a month.