The Escapist Issue #98 Now Available

The ninety-eighth issue of Escapist Magazine contains five new articles, one of which offers a history of the Fallout franchise and another that details an old post-apocalyptic tabletop RPG called Aftermath!. An excerpt from the former:

Fallout 2 was even more robust. The pre-existing engine allowed the designers more time to develop the second title’s story, and as a result, Fallout 2’s dark humor was sharp enough to cut glass. In the original game, players were charged with finding a rare “water chip”, a piece of high-tech doodadery without which the player’s family and friends in “the vault,” an air-tight fallout shelter, might perish. The resulting quest is epic in scope, and finding the water chip begins to feel akin to searching for the Holy Grail. In the sequel, while searching through another fallout shelter, the protagonist stumbles upon boxes and boxes of water chips … all lying around for the taking. Later in the game, the protagonist has the option to enter a portal that leads to the past. There the hero finds himself in an isolated area of the original Fallout’s shelter. As he moves around in the enclosed space, the hero enters an incorrect command into a console. The system informs him that, indeed, he has broken the shelter’s only remaining water chip. You gotta love a game design based on nihilism.