"Three (radioactive) thumbs up!"

Back in the '80s, World War III had a weird fascination. Nobody particularly wanted it, but we all speculated. Russia seemed too pedestrian an opponent, and who knew how many nukes were lodged in Siberia, but things were always stirred up in the Middle East, and maybe one of our Western European allies would turn on us out of boredom or something. Home computer games also in vogue, and creating a shooter based on the whole last-man-standing nuclear mess quickly became moded. Most variants could be lumped into before, during and after with few internal variations. Gloom and doom showed how realistic they were, supposedly.

But Wasteland emphatically provided a different direction as an RPG. It used the high points of text(quick easy jokes,) freaky technology and a character system brought over from Bard's Tale to put a glow in the hearts of RPG lovers everywhere. Energy weapons and grenades replaced spells and the memorization that went along with them, even if chainsaws were more expeditious(no reloading and power packs in your inventory) and did sillier damage too near the end. Wasteland was yet another exception to the sci-fi rule that convinced me I liked the whole genre. And it was one of those games so raucous that you even enjoyed exploiting its weaknesses. The cluebook provided a funny story, and even the book of paragraphs the game used as memory-saving reference contained fakes that created a whole side story line--along with a false password that trapped you in an area for good, a meeting with a woman in a shower, and a message about how Thought Police were coming to remove a certain cheater's fingernails(I'd already reset a disk to pick up treasure several times before I broke down and read the book straight through, so this didn't scare me...that much.) TS Eliot's footnotes in some similarly titled poem have nothing on these.

Wasteland also pokes fun at many simple RPG conventions--for instance, you can choose your character's nationality, which doesn't make a bit of difference--and just plain does other things right(armor class reduces damage instead of avoiding it.) Hobos take the place of oracles when you feed them Snake Squeezins. It's the sort of game you feel very smart and funny describing to others, almost as if you're biting off the authors' ideas by keeping their game's memory alive. It even allows you to split your party up although most of the time, the reason is obvious--one puzzle is telegraphed a bit, and there are a few gender-specific bathrooms or narrow passageways.

There's no overdramatized good-versus-bad fight you'd get from something more medieval. In 1998, after the Drug Wars of the 90s(I'm not upset they missed on this, but I'm even more upset they goofed putting a computer with the sequel in the game,) the world finally fell apart. The big one dropped. Most of earth was rendered uninhabitable, and people just tried to survive. Some with more aggressive interpretation than others split into several weird creepy factions, none connected or thoughtful enough to sit down and talk and find out they have a good deal in common with the others. The's one gang of thugs in each city, with good guys under siege, but you also have a problem with robots. The only good guys are the Desert Rangers--that's you. Four characters each get a gun, canteen(needed to cross the desert,) crowbar and ammo and head out from Ranger Center, which is never worth visiting again. Unless you want to pool the valuable items from dropped characters to sell later and repeat a few times. Hey, these are tough times; people gotta share and sacrifice.

They also need to split up character knowledge. While Wasteland has no classes(it even has meaningless nationalities) you still need to dictate who will learn swimming, climbing, and various weapons. Although many guns make the same cool ghk-ghk noise when you unload a clip(you can also use 3- or 1-shot bursts,) a MAC 17 is much different from a NATO Assault Rifle, AK-97 or anti-tank missile. Your characters get numerical skills for each ability, which can be improved in a library or, more randomly, in assorted specific game locations. For instance, repeatedly climbing a hill will raise your climb or even acrobat skills. And later on as your IQ rises you'll have the chance to pick up new skills so weird they must be valuable, like helicopters(cool even if they're obsolete) or toaster repair or clone technology.

The most important skill, though, is medic. Death is unusual in Wasteland; there's no local healer with a hat dotted with glow-in-the-dark crescents. Yet when you're dead, you're dead. It's not as though you have to play perfectly, though, because you usually get knocked unconscious during a fight. Then you need time to heal, unless you've caught radiation poisoning or an STD from a 3-legged mutant. It's only when your condition is serious(i.e. they took ten or more hit points away than you had) that it lapses further. Critical becomes Mortally Wounded, Comatose and then a big skull on the screen. And it's hard to reach a healer in time.

The whole unconsciousness bit also gives way to some tense battles. Apparently the only Law of the West is that bad guys have to wait for someone to wake up if no-one's awake in your party. Monsters make up for this chivalry by shooting at your knocked out characters, which is plenty mean but not very effective. Your characters seem to be able to tell the difference, though, so if you are mismatched in a fight, there may be twenty rounds until you kill the next bad guy, and the boulder slowly starts rolling down the hill afterwards. It's never immediately clear if you're in a stalemate, though, so fights can feel finely balanced without getting resolved quickly. And you can scroll them down quickly.

But you won't have to worry about that early on. Either you'll find easy combats(mutant animals at the Agricultural Center) or immediately lethal ones, as in the Guardian Citadel, if you try to go inside instead of edging around it as a shortcut through the mountains. It's a powerful tease, and I stuck my foot out(after saving) innumerable times before getting close to killing anyone. The original random fights in the first towns you'll meet are very reasonable, and there's no shortage of clues. One town, Needles, has a bunch of ammo dumps and a Church of the Mushroom Cloud--just because the Apocalypse happened doesn't mean people still can't join cults for all that. Quartz has more secular thugs, and there's a nasty mine with occasional monsters that can rip through bulletproof shirts. You can even wreak havoc on a village of mutant kiddies.

Las Vegas is really the centerpiece, though, and in a twist of irony it's about the only city in the world that's not aglow at night(radiation everywhere else, casinos got bombed.) You can actually complete the game without killing Fat Freddy, the really evil guy, and Faran Brygo, the hard-lining casino boss, but to get anywhere you need to fight H.G. Wells style monsters between row-house slums in order to get to important areas. When muggers finally attack you there's a pang of relief--not really the whole human touch thing, but you can wallop them so easily. It's still the ultimate city of vice, but with less glitz. Then there's Darwin Village, which is mostly surrounded by radioactivity. And you'll have to find the big base by solving a few nasty puzzles.

While most locations are pretty straightforward(Darwin's silly not-really-an-exit-to-outside excepted,) Quartz and Las Vegas force you to search through many similar deserted buildings to find the one that actually features some action. There are about three different types of dilapidated building and the repetition can get discouraging, especially with the towns being big enough that memory and mapping skill are necessary to get through it. At least most locations, when you find them, let you in liberally--or the guards attack you when you botch a password from another place you didn't quite find.

And these sorts of combats are always fun. While in many cases you'd just face a bunch of text lines on the screen that were pretty close to you, here you'd actually be on the grid. You could flee, but with bad guys on both sides it wouldn't do much good. If you know where certain monsters are, you can also sneak up so they only see you 20' away instead of 80' where they can shoot you. And the game describes several ways to shoot a gun, wield a crowbar, or spill your adversaries' guts in the text box detailing the combat.

I found I did many of these combats out of order, and I suspect others will too. Having overlooked many side quests on the way to the final enemy robot base, retreading a final time for clues felt more like a futurised Asterix and Obelix adventure than a gritty challenge. Honestly playing through the game and solving all quests, though, affords decent rewards for bringing a certain item back to the right people. Often on the way you'll find NPC's to beef up your roster; most are locked in cellars, and there are three slots for them, and you'll probably regret the first ones you take, lamesters who are...polite when you rescue them from thugs you utterly brutalized. Better ones appear much later in the game. Friends range from hobos to a trigger happy woman who spits to a maintenance robot who seems a bit underemployed.

Improving your characters has some entertaining ironies. For instance you can drop them into the lovely(and intentionally) purple river. They'll go downstream and pick up a bit of experience for trying to swim. If they're strong enough, they may even improve their swim skills. You can continue to do this to get better with no real risk. Even better you can get a player seriously injured, find a safe area, and keep using medical skills on him without getting him back to merely unconscious. Gambling is a long-term investment; lose a bunch early, pump up your luck, and watch your skill--and income--swell. There's much more than just levels, but those are arranged by military rank and the next one is always unexpected. You start as a Private and become different flavors of Corporal, Sergeant, Colonel, Cadet and Lieutenant, and you can radio in for training whenever you want--no silly coots at a review board far away from the real action. The game becomes a real tease later on when it only changes your rank every other level. Well after solving the game, I spent time bashing in Xenon Laser Cannons until our family's Apple was passe. Apparently I got about halfway to the eventual top rank, which I found to be Supreme Jerk, level 183.

But you don't need to get close to that to win, and in fact often you'll find you want to press on and not wait to recharge your hit points in critical areas. It's tough to stop and heal up--or improve--even though you know you should, especially when so many fights seem winnable if you reboot and try again. And going by with the minimum(time is the only healer, and cash is scarce without cheating) gives a real seat-of-the-pants feeling in the more tense areas. You know you should rest as a tough encounter may be around the corner, but there's a certain macho to getting through with half your party unconscious most of the time. It gives many times the excitement of driving a car near-empty for too long without any of the embarrassing risk.

And even though there's no magic in Wasteland or great item scheme, and some like jugs and fruit are useless, I still enjoyed finding the cash to move up from a crowbar to a chainsaw or, in the armor department, from leather to Kevlar to high-tech armor. This does make certain formerly tough combats trivial(monsters can't dent your armor for damage,) but the game still has scary foes that can knock your condition to serious, and the bad guys you can beat one-handed quickly aren't worth the experience.

Sadly you will get tangled with the item list(you get many slots, but they're not easily organized logically) and the lack of an experience meter. And quite frankly the humanoid icons throughout the game are ugly. The exploded places on the map look better. Which is too bad, because they did the right thing putting the map on the full screen, and there are enough futuristic tiles and dented walls to be believable. It's a small thing but it's also what you see most--the animated snapshots of the nearest group in combat can be quite good(thug pulls a gun out of his jacket, or a priest waves a sign saying VISA,) on a scale with Bard's Tale III but with more cool mutations, and so you're left wondering how the designers botched such a small-scale yet important task.

The descriptions make up for this a bit. Even today there are many 3-d games that have one result if you hit a barrier, but here you get descriptions that add to the overall feel and even some easter eggs('Soup is Good Food!' scrawled on one corner wall, for instance,) depending on where you smack into a barrier. Often you'll learn you're in a canyon by the squares you step on, which really brings the 2-d grid to life. Of course there are sarcastic comments, too, but even today this sort of system could be useful when graphics can only do so much.

In fact Wasteland even scores a few times with sound. Impressive as RPG's or ancient computers are really known for that. First, the noise when your automatic gun blasts a full clip, and second, the bugle that signals a character's promotion. And if you have a geiger counter and are near radiation you get to hear ticking--very clever. So the new ideas generally don't fail--although they don't always work perfectly when they need polish.

Wasteland was one of the last Apple RPG's I emulated and played through again. With all the fan sites and the hints they gave, I wanted to sweep through everything at once, but in a way I had already replayed it when I had it--there were many quests that I missed early on. I took them over by volume, and with emulation making exploration and level-building very quick, I found Quartz and Las Vegas's so-similar buildings became more accessible and logical. I half-compulsively tried both paths through a major location--beating everyone up versus solving puzzles and looking for passwords--and even when I played honestly I found that the tasks to improve your party were well-balanced. The Guardians' Citadel was particularly interesting, as the armor at the end of the task let you waste the defenders when you reset the disk, and I enjoyed many of the later fights enough to play through them several times. There was even a chance to try both endings--one where your party gets fried inside the exploding robot base. I also finally got into Finster's, the area not entirely logically accessible from Darwin Village. And then I cranked the speed to 'fastest,' put a hammer-head on a button where my party would pick up interminable experience trying to climb rubble and failing, and looked forward to my official promotion to Supreme Jerk in a few hours.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 11/01/99, Updated 11/03/03