Fallout

The teaser trailer for Fallout 3 is like a love letter from Bethesda to the fans of the series. It’s a clear communication that we don’t need to worry. They get it. The music and the post-apocalyptic scene show us that they understand the look and feel of this world. The power armor and the posters with Vaultboy show us that they understand the style of this world. And Ron Perlman’s return for the now famous “War” intro shows us that they still respect the first two games.

When I heard that Bethesda got the license, I was nervous. Most of the guys who made Fallout 1 and 2 great have moved on to Obsidian Entertainment, and while I enjoyed Morrowind and Oblivion, I didn’t love them, and I haven’t really liked anything else Bethesda has done.

But this trailer gives me hope. A new Fallout game, ready to run on modern technology? It’s very exciting.

In fact, it motivated me to reinstall and replay Fallout 1 and 2, which proved to be much more difficult than I would have thought. Turns out that running games from the mid-90s is tricky.

First attempt, I just tried to install the games under XP. With a lot of messing around in the forums, I did finally get it working, but it required that I disable my video card and all my startup items. Not acceptable in the long term.

Next, I tried to install Windows 98 using Virtual PC. That didn’t work either, however. Something about the way Virtual PC emulated things caused the mouse to be completely unusable.

In the end, what I did was install Windows XP on Virtual PC. Then I made a shortcut to the game and set it to run in Windows 95 compatability mode in 640×480 resolution at 256 colors. To avoid the mouse problem, I had to turn off the integrated mouse pointer option. That all worked fine, but when I tried to go full-screen to play the game, my screen went blank. Turns out that Virtual PC tries to adjust the guest system to the host system’s resolution in fullscreen. So I had to manually set my Virtual PC to 640×480/256 by hand, and then tell it to use the guest system’s resolution instead of the host. Once I did all that, everything worked fine, and I was playing Fallout again!

I’m happy, but it was still WAY more work than it should have been. When I told Sean about this, he had a brilliant idea. Just like Xbox Live has the Xbox Live Arcade so you can download classic arcade games like Frogger and Street Fighter, Games for Windows Live should have an arcade where you can download classic PC games and have them run flawlessly. If I could get games like Syndicate, Fallout, and Planescape: Torment working as easily as the games on my Xbox, I would pay for an account in a heartbeat.