I always do. The fallout community, like so many fandoms for vintage games, is wrong on most details even if they are right to love those games
Fixt is actually not a purist mod (not even the “purist” version). It added a lot of new or altered content that still needed to be edited out of ports that used fixt as a base (fallout et tu among them), along with an avalanche of new bugs (which you have already experienced)
The fallout 2 engine is also not a completely different engine. It is a direct continuation of fo1’s engine and any game mechanical changes can be reverted. Fallout et tu is akin to the mod that ported Baldur’s gate 1 to bg 2’s version of the infinity engine (baldurs gate tutu if I recall correctly, its no longer necessary thanks to the enhanced edition releases). Sure, you can use it to mix content from the two games together but the real benefit is a codebase that has been maintained over the years
playing some of the old dos game Night Shift. Feels very like a console game, and having passwords instead of a save game function really drives that home. The game is still fun but feels extremely dated, especially the controls. I like it a lot but I WANT to like it more. An updated version on a tated screen would kill
tutu is totally depreciated as it only covered bg1 + totsc in bg2, it is arguably more “purist” than EE, but even like 20 years ago people were playing BGT mod because you could actually continue into BG2 seamlessly, and that’s what the EE really replaced. you still need it for soup like big world project though (please don’t play big world project)
That is a shame about Fixt not being purist even under purist settings. To me playing one of those old PC games in a newer engine is like deciding to play Super Mario All Stars instead of the NES versions, perhaps it isn’t as dramatic but if I’m gonna play a 30-some year old game I’d rather see it as it was rather than ported into something nicer (I picked that one as it was the answer I was given to “closest to the original but stable on modern machines). Kinda feels like this whole endeavor ended up being a waste of time, no matter what I chose I’d have picked wrong :\
When I get to Fallout 2 in a decade I’m just running it as-is and let whatever comes come.
if someone put fallout et tu in front of you and said it was fallout 1 you would not have noticed at all. fallout 2 was made in 9 months, they are so close together that the disconnect here is purely psychological. i wish you luck in your future old pc games endeavors friend.
I just wanted to point it out because all stars example doesn’t adequately describe the situation with fallout. @Tulpa put it well when they said to me that would be more like porting fo1 into tactics cuz those are actually diff engine. Bc of hardware configurations not being standard there is often no definitive version of an old computer game. You often have to take what you can get to even play something at all. See: anything that used direct draw post windows 8 when ms removed it
I mean to add a slight bit of context when I was looking this up before starting I saw so many mentions of “no, that’s only possible in Fallout 2/the Fallout 2 engine, that’s why you gotta use et tu”, I believe that the larger Fallout community has certain… quirks with their feelings but coming in cold they definitely give the impression that it changes the experience in many small ways simply via the act of placing it in the newer/better engine. Perhaps after all these years they are so in the weeds that small things now appear massive to them.
Lol well this circles back to tulpas point… the fallout community are dogs. Complete hucksters. They say New Vegas is a good game too. Genuinely don’t blame you for getting the wrong idea which is why I’m spending so much time clarifying
l rememeber learning this lesson on the gamers quarter
someone was critical of fallout and we got raided by no mutants allowed, but one of the guys ended up being really nice and liked the vibe and stuck around
if you’re wanting purity you just have to drop the dll files from the dgvoodoo folder in there and run the dgvoodoo executable and tell it how you want it to scale the picture! that’s practically all it takes to run like 90 percent of old games and they function identical to if I had dug out my 500mhz win 98 pc.
okay it is annoying that blurry ass bilinear filtering is on by default and you have to right click on the little banner to bring up a for some reason hidden tab of options to change it to point sampled (also where you have to set the integer scaling to max and probably a good idea to set fullscreen mode to fake)
but at this point I got a no effort folder I just drag the files from into any new old games folder everything is preset and just works, with my crt shader
Started playing Tales of Maj’Eyal again. Don’t know exactly what that means for me mentally. Looking for something safe with good controls but lots of options. Roguelikes are definitely my safety zone-out genre but I am really picky about controls and Tome is very good to just run around within. It rides my fine line.
I’ve never beaten it and don’t really know what that looks like. It’s been a long time, maybe a decade, since I last got really stuck in. Got through all the first tier dungeons with a Bulwark and I feel like the rust is off. I’m already wanting to try something a little more mechanically varied like an archer or slinger.
I’d like to stay interested and make time to finally get through the main campaign. It is really calming.
Finished Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. Fun set pieces toward the end, less annoying than I feared it might wind up being, narratively a little incoherent but whatever.
The funny coda to all this is that the realization that Fixt wasn’t vanilla gave me a good idea why it was crashing, so I redownloaded the game, reloaded an earlier save and yep, played for a good bit wandering around and was 100% crash free. If one is curious I gave a second power suit to one of my companions to wear which apparently isn’t a thing in the base game, realized it was only crashing after I left the Brotherhood to head NW to try and find mutants and yeah, that was the only thing I did afterwards on that one save and when I didn’t do it I was able to walk up there and basically anywhere else without issue. Would have been better to learn that before I finished, but it is oddly satisfying to have an answer as to what went wrong
I do have to say… looking things up and reading that the main reason they said to rotate saves was because companions keep blocking doorways as you normally can’t ask them to step aside sounds hilarious from afar, I will admit I am a bit glad I accidentally avoided that.
Anyways since that is done I started up Alpha and Iota, a game whose demo I stumbled upon just over a year ago and at this point is sitting at seven total reviews. This is unfortunate as a couple hours in my impressions remains the same as it was with the demo: it is actually really good and creative. It is a… well 2d platformer is probably the closest genre where you are a spark that can animate various objects and have to jump between them to get through the various stages, except you can only move outside an object for a second or so before you pulled back into the last one you occupied (it is a little bit like Space Station Silicon Valley I guess?). The thing is that it is a lot denser/more involved than it initially seems, there’s alternate paths and stuff to collect that seems absurdly tricky to even begin to contemplate reaching. There’s a mechanic where if you press a trigger an object will keep doing what it last was indefinitely which you will have to use that while jumping in and out of said object to get through almost obstacle courses. I could see a future where it tries to get a bit too cute and sorta falls a bit apart but as of now it is at a level where it could be in contention for among my favorite indie games of the year mechanically speaking and… again it has seven reviews. The fates can be cruel.
(BTW @moderators can we get a sticky please/thanks)
