As it is right now, winter is popular in our part of the world. Adults have this kitsch association of a whole happy family gathered around a cozy fireplace or having romantic sleigh rides and kids dream of building snowmen and having snowball fights. Winter time also being Christmas time, there are further associations of love and peace all around. And presents! Though would you like permanent winter? Probably not.
Fiction likes to pick up on semi-realistic scenarios and Transarctica takes it from one: a group of scientists attempted to stop the Greenhouse Effect with two nuclear bombs at the poles. The controlled explosion was supposed to propel dust and steam into the atmosphere to reflect some of the sunlight. Though the calculations went wrong; the experiment went too well. With the sunlight now blocked out completely, the Earth is now caught in a permanent nuclear winter. Not such a popular scenario – because, after all, what we all like most about winter is the warm feeling we all get when it ends.
The time has come. The night of all nights has arrived, where I will dive into darkness. Evil awakens and a nightmare comes true: Dracula rules our city of New York and the lord of darkness is also the head of the local corporation for cyber-genetics, cyber-space, cyber-surgery, cyber-technology, cyber-weapons and cyber-surveillance. Appropriately, it has been a very long time since the city has seen any light; we are in an apparently endless night.
On its surface Fallout 2 looks like nothing special: Seems like yet another one of those typical RPGs from around the millennium. Which means isometric view, small characters running around, giving each other a bad time with their weapons, a health bar somewhere… hmm… but not in a cheesy ‘epic’ fantasy world? No, actually this takes place in the exact opposite: A violent apocalyptic setting. That's already setting it somewhat apart from the rest. But its real strength only becomes apparent by taking a closer look: The one thing in which Fallout 2 really excels is its high degree of freedom, hence its potential to create your very own story with your very own character that comes bundled with this. In so doing the role playing isn't simply restricted to choosing what kind of damage you want to deal, but for once you can fulfil almost any tasks in your very own way. Thus Fallout 2 is one of the few games which comes as close as it gets to a decent implementation of pen&paper role playing on a computer, as best as it’s possible without some fellow human players. The brilliant game world, created with great love for detail, ensures the icing on the cake.
