I’m not what you might call a ‘hardcore’ gamer. I really haven’t ever been, but as time has gone by I’ve gotten to the point where I’m less and less competitive when it comes to games. At the end of the day, I’d rather play a good co-op game than go head to head against a nameless stranger that insists on throwing insults my way. But I still love gaming and I still love difficult, challenging games. I just like them in the single player world.
My wife will tell you that she’s seen me play more in the setting of Fallout than is healthy for any person, and as I check my Steam account, I can tell you that I have spent 238 hour in Fallout: New Vegas. I’m a little bit sick, I think.
This is all leading up to something loosely Star Wars related, I promise.
I’m going to give you a little bit of a gaming history lesson here, but bear with me it’s worth it. Fallout was released in the mid 90’s, but it was based on an earlier game called Wasteland. A lot of the same staff worked on both games. Wasteland was released in ’88 and was about a twenty-first century that was following the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust between the Soviet Union and the US. So there’s not that 50’s theme that everything in Fallout has, Wasteland played it straight.
Well, with the recent success of the Fallout games, the original developers of Wasteland have gotten together and started a Kickstarter page. The aim was to raise a million dollars to get the game off the ground, they’ve got $2.2 million as of the time of this writing.
So I was looking at the prizes connected with this and a lot of them seem pretty cool. At the end of the day, I don’t know how much this game is going to cost, but for $15 you can get a digital, DRM free copy of the game and for $30 you get that and a .pdf book of the concept art and the soundtrack. $50 caught my eye.
At $50 you get a boxed copy of the game that comes with a fabric map of the game setting, something that’s really awesome that you used to get in RPG’s in the 80’s and 90’s (like Ultima), a faction badge (come on, Desert Rangers!) and the first novella in a series about the setting.
Written by Mike Stackpole.
I checked, it’s that Mike Stackpole, he wrote for the original game back in the late 80’s, he’s writing the novel for the new one. My eyes just about bugged out of my head! Now, I need to wander off and find $50…
