Falling Back in with Fallout
Ol' Man River in the Wasteland
I'm back!
So, when I started this thing the plan was always not to tie myself down to a specific schedule or set of obligations. I have a long history of "committing" to weekly or otherwise specifically regular writing posts and losing my way. The idea was, maybe there will be periods where I'll write once a week or even more, and then some weeks I'll miss, and that's okay. Well it's been about five months.
This is partly a rehash of an old problem. Actually it is very much an old problem, but my awareness of it is a recent(ish) thing. For now I will say: it's Mental Health Awareness Month, and I encourage everyone to think about your wellbeing. I am fine. I greatly appreciate the people who read this thing. And I'll leave it at that.
Anyway. Let's talk about video games. Ostensibly the reason we're here. Truthfully, if I had been more diligent in the last few months it would have been a hole lot of "I have a family and I'm busy so not much this week." But having missed the time I have I do have some things to catch you up on this month. How my intensive January term, went, for one thing. I also went to the Popular Cultural Association meeting again this year and it was awesome, again. I might be putting a book together. So I in theory have a few posts already partly planned to get back in a rhythm.
But before that, Fallout. Yes. I, like you, your mother and your mother's mother am on a big Fallout vibe right now. I have installed Fallout New Vegas and installed it on my Deck for the ultimate bougie hipster experience. It remains very good while also a chilling reminder of my mortality. Though I haven't crumbled into dust playing it. That happened earlier this term when I asked a student where she had heard of Nirvana and she replied "they were my mom's favourite band."
I'm having trouble getting over how OLD New Vegas looks. I do not remember this! The contrary in fact. Those games felt so ahead of their time. Yes, I know, Bethesda jank (though New Vegas is Obsidian) but I’ve always felt that conventional wisdom grew out of its own momentum a little bit. Well. Some.
I suppose what really made that game feel so cutting edge, and an aspect that holds up wonderfully, is just how alive a world of lots of ochre, copper, rusted mustard or whatever - brown, basically - tones and NPCs with some pretty creaky walking animations can feel. I had not remembered New Vegas starting quite so ambivalently nor did I remember the game being kind of hard. Playing it now in 2024 a full fourteen - fourteen! - years after its initial release it feels like a bit of an intellectual and intentionally janky shooter. I just remembered, this morning, that I can assign direction pad keys to my shotgun and pistol. Real Doom vibes. Aren't these the games where anything can happen? Were they always this... shooty?
Well, yes they were. At the same time, New Vegas is incredibly unpredictable. The road from one early location to the next proved a dangerous route. Ambushes felt real. It all feels quite real. And I lost a character who seemed kind of important because I ran too far ahead and the raiders did the rest. I suddenly feel the urge to play a lot of Fallout, even though I barely had the time to play thirty minutes a day of anything before I watched the tv show. I’m not the only one. I’m not terribly sure this is the most cost-effective strategy for selling heavily discounted copies of games over a decade old, but here we are.
It's very good you know, Fallout. The television show. I didn't want it not to be. And everything I had heard indicated it would be good; but it still surprised me how much I like it and I'm not sure why. I don't consider myself some massive Fallout fan, though a look at my game collection would stress otherwise. And the show doesn't need you to be a fan, I don't think. There's a little bit of "ooh, I know that thing" but it's not like watching Game of Thrones having read the books.
It's a show that works very hard on capturing the feel of the games. I guess it does that for me though, mostly, it created a kind of spontaneous nostalgia. I am getting older but not that old. The whole thing feels old. Games, I mean. Once something exclusively for the young, we are reaching point where it is time for one generation to pass things on. I'm not sure where that leaves Fallout ultimately. But I move through post-apocalyptic Nevada wondering where the time went. You might think teaching 18-22 year olds might have done this to me sooner but, for whatever reason it’s realizing that games that came along pretty late in my life (like, my late 20s as opposed to my early teens) are very much fair game for retrospectives and adaptations.
I think about this all the time. How Nirvana now for young people are what Led Zeppelin were for me. Actually I didn’t like Led Zeppelin but the point stands. The Beatles felt like something out of an ancient age when I was in high school, but the distance between Let It Be and my high school graduation is the same as that between today and Radiohead’s The Bends. Temporally, anyway. Somewhere in my brain the excitement for the Fallout show was wrapped in this interpretative layer of “I’m glad they’re making a tv show based on those games I really like that came out a couple of years ago.” But that’s not the case at all. I am old, older than the hills (and so are some of you reading this, maybe).
I’m not down about it. This medium we love has conquered the world. And there’s going to be a second season of Fallout at some point.