Roger’s Roundup
How would you react to a nuclear holocaust, assuming you lived through it?
With the COVID-19 pandemic affecting the entire world, of course video games have me thinking along those lines.
I’ve actually been playing a couple of games set in the same world: Fallout 4 and Fallout 76. In both, the player is a survivor of a nuclear holocaust, dealing with elements such as mutated animals and people, not to mention the unpredictable nature of other survivors, radiation and trying to obtain edible food and potable water.
The games are a combination of realism and fantasy. The world presented is a realistic wasteland of ruined buildings, junked cars, far-too-common corpses and mutated wildlife along with scenes of extravagant natural beauty despite the ruin.
That said, it’s not our world, although the cities are similar.
Fallout 4 takes place in a facsimile of Boston, including a shantytown built into Fenway Park and a, well, let’s just say oddly positioned USS Constitution.
Fallout 76 is set in the hills and mountains of West Virginia. I’m not familiar with West Virginia, but something tells me that those who are will recognize the area.
Things are subtly different in each game. Although there are no running cars after the devastation caused by the nuclear bombs, the wrecks players discover — as well as the robots, computer terminals and the wrist-mounted computer terminal you wear throughout the game — are all 1950s-style sci-fi creations. The mascot is an art nouveau cartoon fellow called Pip Boy. There’s just enough weirdness to let the player know, “This isn’t your good old home Earth, but some kind of different dimension.”
The difference between the two is that Fallout 4 is a solo experience with meticulously crafted storylines, a cast of wacky, friendly, dark or just downright mean characters all run by the computer program itself.
Fallout 76 is a multiplayer game. There are other people you probably don’t know running around trying to get all the same stuff you want, trying to do all the things you’re trying to do, and, quite likely, trying to kill you in the process.
Both games have a system called Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (VATS).
In Fallout 4, VATS lets you temporarily pause the game to automatically aim at the various body parts of the mutant bear (or whatever it might be) that’s trying to rip your face off. In Fallout 76, VATS can’t pause the game because there are other people trying to play at the same time.
While it lets you aim, it doesn’t pause the game to let you choose the best body part to aim for.
The action keeps going while you use it.
It’s a minor difference, but it turns you from an occasional superman into a guy fumbling with your big wristwatch while a bear is eating your nose.
Anyway, Fallout 76 got pretty bad reviews when it first came out, so I’m just now getting into it. The recent updates for it have been praised a fair bit, and I’m having fun so far.
Roger Cline is a staff writer for The Snyder News. Comments on his article can be made at roger@thesnydernews.com