Wasteland

Wasteland is a post-apocalyptic computer role-playing game first released in 1988. The game was designed by Alan Pavlish, Michael A. Stackpole and Ken St. Andre, programmed by Pavlish, and produced by Brian Fargo for Interplay Productions, and published by Electronic Arts. more...

Home
*Best Sellers
Accessories
Genre
Action, Adventure
Arcade
Board, Card Game
Family
Fighting
Other
Racing
Role Playing
Akalabeth
Albion
Alternate Reality
Anachronox
Angband
Arcanum
Baldur Gate Series
Bard Tale
Champions of Krynn
City of Heroes
Crystalis
Digital Devil Story
dnd
Dungeon
Dungeon Hack
Dungeon Master
Dungeon Siege
Dungeon Siege II
EarthBound
EverQuest
EverQuest II
Eye of the Beholder
Eye of the Beholder II
Eye of the Beholder III
Fallout
Freedom Force
Gothic
Hard Nova
Lagrange Point
Lands of Lore
Might and Magic
Moria
Mother
Phantasie
Planescape
Pool of Radiance
Questron
Rogue
RuneScape
Sentinel Worlds I
Septerra Core
Skies of Arcadia
Starflight
Starflight 2
Suikoden
Suikoden II
Suikoden III
Suikoden IV
Suikoden Tactics
System Shock
The Elder Scrolls
The Elder Scrolls II
The Elder Scrolls III
The Matrix Online
Tunnels and Trolls
Tunnels of Doom
Ultima
Ultima III
Ultima Online
Ultima VI
Vampire
Wasteland
Wizardry
Ys
Shooter
Simulation
Sports
Strategy
Internet Games
Others
Platform
Systems
Vintage Games
Wholesale Lots

Overview

The game is set in the middle of the 21st century, following a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Parts of Earth have been turned into a "wasteland" where survival is the paramount objective. Players control a party of Desert Rangers, a Nevada paramilitary group that survived the nuclear holocaust, and are assigned to investigate a series of disturbances in the desert. The party begins with four characters, and through the course of the game can hold as many as seven characters by recruiting certain citizens of the wasteland to the player's cause. Throughout the game the player explores the remaining enclaves of human civilization, including a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas.

Game description

The game mechanics were based directly on those used in the role-playing games Tunnels and Trolls and Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes created by St. Andre and Stackpole. Characters in Wasteland consequently have various statistics (strength, intelligence and luck among others) that allow them to use different skills and weapons. Experience is gained through battle. The game would generally let players advance with a variety of tactics: to get through a locked gate, a player could use his Picklock skill, his Climb skill, or his Strength attribute; or he could force the gate with a crowbar - or a LAW rocket.

Wasteland was probably the first RPG in which all the characters in the party were not mere puppets for the player to control. The initial band of Desert Rangers encountered a number of NPCs as the game progressed who could be recruited into the party. Unlike those of other computer RPGs of the time, these NPCs might temporarily refuse to give up an item or perform an action if ordered to do so.

One of the other notable features of this game was the inclusion of a printed collection of paragraphs which the game would instruct the player to read at the appropriate times. These paragraphs described encounters and conversations, contained clues, and added to the overall texture of the game. Such paragraph books were a common feature of computer role-playing games of the period. Because programming space was at a premium, it saved on resources to have most of the game's story printed out in a separate manual rather than store it within the game's code itself. The paragraph books also served as a rudimentary form of copy protection, as someone playing a copied version of the game would miss out on much of the story as well as clues necessary to progress. Additionally, the paragraphs included a dummy story line about a mission to Mars intended to mislead those who read the paragraphs when not instructed to, and a bogus set of passwords that would trip up cheaters with results that ranged from character sex changes to detonating a bomb.

Read more at Wikipedia.org