Anyone want to be my sensei?(Teacher) xD

[The Koi of Okinawa]

I'm adoring this game, like many other older games, but I'm having some trouble catching on. Could someone talk with me so I learn a bit easier?

[Psst!]

i ran the original and the '96 reissue to death. still have the official guide from the 80's & all. but i've been running WL2 and haven't had a chance to walk down memory lane just yet, which is a small problem as it seems Fargo took the opportunity in this reissue to tweak & 'rebalance' WL1. so some of what i once knew as gaming gospel is now just a history lesson. most of the changes i've heard about are to combat mechanics, so the rest should still be the same.

with that grain of salt in mind, where are you in the game and what do you need?

[The Koi of Okinawa]

Thank you for the comment, friend. I appreciate it. And I'm gonna sound like a serious child with this game, but I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out how exactly it works. For example.. giving another character in your party items? Equiping gear and maybe some general advice? If you want, you can add me and we can chat about it. I'm really fond of old games, so this is a real treat so far.

[Psst!]

done & done.

FYI, though, but i think there's a copy of the manual included with the download, something you can view or print anytime if you run into a 'how do i' situation. but the system is pretty basic. most of it trips off the first letter of the action. so if you're unsure, look for keywords and type the first letter. for xample: U - 1 - S - 2 - spacebar.... which might stand for "Use - character #1 - Skill - skill #2 (perception?) - use right where i'm standing (spacebar).

or "A - 2 - A" for "Attack - enemy group #2 - full Automatic".

for item transfers ...

bring up inventory ( i ) then tag the character you want to review, find the item, then hit the number associated with it. item should highlight. hit ( T ) to Trade the item, then hit the number associated with the targeted recipient.

so....

i - 3 - 6 - t - 2

translates: open Inventory, character #3. select item #6 on this screen. Trade item to character #2.


if you want to equip the item, just hit ( E ) instead of ( T ). to uneqip, just hit ( E ) again and it should toggle off.

when trading with stores, hit ( P ) to pool all available cash on the character doing the buying.

[Psst!]

for the other stuff ... oh, you could write a book. some off-the-cuff points:

- automatic weapons are everything. most of the early game is a mission to get them and most of the game is about using them once gotten. everyone needs Assault Rifle skill; maybe one or two with SMG.

- speaking of, you'll need to push dexterity to the low- to mid-twenties if you want to hit targets beyond 50 feet. (yes).

- also speaking of, you'll need to push IQ to the low / mid-twenties to qalify your characters for an education in energy weapons (critical).

- you need to save TONS of money to buy up class 6 armor for the group (like, $24K to 36K eqivalent) because there ain't much free to take. start saving from day 1 as best you can.

- only pick up stuff you intend to keep, use or sell immediately. each character can only carry 30 items and anything you drop is gone forever. if you don't need it now, leave it where it is and come back later. it won't move.

- pistols suck (maybe that got changed? doubt it)

- brawling was AWESOME...until Fargo nerfed it in this edition (i'm told). still, worth investing some starting points here to begin with lvl 2 or 3 (for your main bruiser-type character). double xp for kills and each swing to the chest does more damage than a 45 to the face. go fig.

- first guy in the group (#1) is your leader; they'll got shot at the most and will do the most killing. you want them highish on IQ and very high on dexterity (which controls accuracy). skill 'em in Rifle

- perception isn't always automatic. sometimes you need to specifically use the skill on a target to trip a reveal. walking over the spot or bumping into it only works sometimes or to a limited degree.

- a geiger counter is a worthy buy, but if you're unsure about an area, watch the clock and wait until night. radioactive locations will reveal (glow) in the dark.

- easiest way to heal is by running into the deep desert (it will say "it's hot..." each time you move or pass time). hit key (ESC) to pass time. random encounters don't trip in the deep desert, but you'll need a canteen.

- don't go into the mine unless you have automatics.

- avoid the nomads unless you have automatics.

- avoid Vegas

- avoid Needles

- avoid Darwin

- Citadel? no.

[Zeon08]

Originally posted by Psst!:

f

- you need to save TONS of money to buy up class 6 armor for the group (like, $24K to 36K eqivalent) because there ain't much free to take. start saving from day 1 as best you can.

lol, just take ace give him gambling skill, go to acapulco, macro gambling--->infinite cash

[The Koi of Okinawa]

Oh goodness. xD

[Psst!]

did they actually fix gambling in this version?

in the original coding, gambling was xtremely true to life - the house always won. i had dudes with skill level 5 gambling and luck in the high twenties and i was lucky to break even, let alone score additional bucks. and let me tell you, it ain't cheap to get a ranger with 24+ luck and gambling skills that high. ain't cheap at ALL. complete waste of time and resources.

actually, the best way to get bucks was to run a "day one" xploit that would start you off with, like, $6,000 plus. then you raided a bunch of treasure-holes and such to make up most of the balance. killing gamblers for laser pistols in Vegas is the more common method.

(WL1 don't punish for bad behavior.)

FYI - don't ever reload LPs. save the power packs for e-weapons that matter. very limited number and they don't grow in stores. however .... LPs always come with a fully charged PP when you find 'em. and stores pay $4K per pistol, loaded or not. dude can do a lot a damage with forty shots from an LP.....

[Tweed]

Even if brawling is nerfed you'll want at least one person with proper stats to swing a proton ax (luck, strength, some speed). If you intend to have a team of shooters everyone needs high dexterity, everyone needs high IQ period, don't roll anyone lower than 16 IQ or you'll end up spending too much time just bringing it up with each level. Agility is useless, you're going to get hit, deal with it, charisma is useless.

I usually never roll a character with a MAXCON lower than 30 unless they have very good stats. Everyone needs 1 skill point in Clip Pistol, SMG, Assault Rifle, and if you play like I do AT Weapons. At least one if not all should have 1 in brawling.

At least two people need to know medic, preferably two points. Two people should also probably know lockpick just in case the other gets knocked out. At least one person needs high perception, but you can start with 1 point and train it at Ugly's Hideout in Quartz. I usually give everyone 1 point in climb and train it at the sand dunes in Needles near the Mushroomcloud church. I usually give everyone 1 point in move silently. My guys always seem to drown even if they know swim so I don't find it very useful and I don't have the patience to train it.

1 person should know bomb disarm, preferably two points or more eventually.

As far as avoiding places, I do almost everything out of sequence anyway. After Highpool and Ag Center I goto Downtown Needles to get Christina because she's carrying an UZI, I sneak into Darwin and gun down the thugs inside the blackmarket and take their SMGs as well then I buy some TNT and head back to Needles and visit the waste pit.

After I blast my way down to the bottom and take out the pit ghoul the pile of assault rifles and rad suits are mine for the taking, poor Ugly John and his gang don't stand a chance. Hell, I do the Citadel before I goto the Sewers.

[The Koi of Okinawa]

You guys really know your ♥♥♥♥. It's really admirable. I think I'm gonna jump into the game, finally, tomorrow. Just been taking some small notes before-hand while playing some other stuff.

[Psst!]

eh, we're just obsessives from an era of very limited options. it was like, this game or prancing elves and strumming harps through wooded glades. motorcycle cyborgs with integrated machine guns xploding like blood sausages made an impression.

pistols is just a waste of points. damn things never worked and underperformed by every possible metric. #1 cause for early group failure was relying on those junkers for anything but making hard cash - by selling them to some other fool. and i think you only need one person trained in locks, climbing, or swimming. (if your 'locks' character is UNCON & you don't have a way to revive them, you've got bigger problems than doors.) the one person's use covers the whole group, so there's no need to double.

oh - and i SO know what you mean about the damned swimming! but you know what? it isn't the water that "gets" you, it's the mother-$*&#*%ing FISH! sure, your lead swimmer passes the 'stroke' challenge but that doesn't do sqat against the "fish attack" challenge. i don't think anything does. you just have to eat the damage. but without swimming, you suffer double loss - points for drowning, then points for fish bites. and that adds up.

going out of seqence is one of the tricks, because there are spoils to be found by raiding some of the higher-tier danger zones. BUT ... you have to know xactly where you're going, what you might run into when you get there, and what you can handle and what's going to drop you like a stone. (and holy crackers i would not step in Darwin with just the one Uzi! one bad toss from the randomizer and it's over, Uzi or not. just take on the pit then hit up those Rail Nomads. boom-boom. now you got a full set of NATOs. not hardcore enough? go back to Downtown Needles, bust through the trash wall and tear up those jerks. that's a pair of '97s, worth plenty bucks at your local retail establishment. so dude - if you take the Darwin route, ONLY go if you've got automatics and auto the Christ out of anything you meet. Auto-Auto-Auto. don't hold back on anything.) but in the end, it's really all a qestion of how 'straight' you want to play it and how far you're willing to bend the rules.

now i'm getting curious. i'm gunna see if the ultimate dirty trick for big easy cash still works or if Fargo nerfed that too.

[Tweed]

The second picklock is more a matter of personal convenience than anything, I don't like waiting for people to heal up and I usually end up dragging unconsious people around with me unless it's a high risk area. I forgot to mention the Jerk meeting, I usually hit that up after the wastepit and it's an EASY assault gun but I grab the extra Uzis off the blackmarket thugs to deal with the pit ghoul faster since he's a tank and you won't be sporting armor aside from leather jackets.

Not to say you don't occasionally get blown away before you reach the black market, but the game autosaves anyhow and it's a short walk from the lower left side of Darwin. I just find it faster than other methods for grabbing guns. Like I said, just my crazy method. Other people like to raid the Savage Village, but that requires foreknowledge of the password to get in if you don't mind totally breaking the intended route and looking it up. With the black market you just give them the wrong password twice and they attack.

Never waste cash on assault guns either, blackmarket thugs or no blackmarket thugs you can get through the Jerks with Christina's uzi and then hit the waste pit for the guns and rad suits down there, there's an AK 97 on one of the snipers on the island in the Temple of Blood and once you're there you're close to finishing a quest that will give you even MORE assault rilfes and goodies.

However, save the rad suits even when you replace them with kevlar suits and DO replace them with kevlar suits before heading to Vegas because even with full party dressed in kevlar and assault rifles it gets rough in there.

Here's another point where people may or may not agree with me is AT weapons. If you have the space to lug them around and someone who can learn to use them then do so, they deal incredible amounts of damage and have some of the highest armor penetration outside of Ion Beamers and Meson Cannons in the game.

A lot of them can actually be found in Vegas off of robot encounters. The disadvange is having to constantly swap for a new AT weapon each time you fire and your whole inventory being full of nothing but LAW and Sabot Rockets.

Unless they removed it there's also a Proton Ax in Vegas, you absolutely want this weapon and if you intend to break the sequence of the game into swiss cheese you MUST have it. The game is so much easier when you don't play by the rules.

[The Koi of Okinawa]

Very limited? Pfft, even with new tech, most of the newer games can't even dent the armor of older games. There's just an art to it that I don't see in any new games. Nor the challenge. Pillars of eternity looks like a good upcoming game though.

[Psst!]

no - f' -ing - way. Proton Axe in Vegas? that's impressive. i thought i had that town scoped to the nines, but that's a new one on me. where the hell did they hide that thing? best thing i ever found in that 'burg was Faran's carbine (which went a long way in the sewers before you got the second one there).

AT's important. not enough heavy e-weps to cover a full sqad. since carbines ain't worth jack in Cochise, you'll end up with at least a pair of rocket warriors. but i gotta say i found them ... underwhelming. for weapons designed to kill tanks and giant robotic death machines, they didn't produce like i would have xpected. i remember rolling 30s against octotrons with RPGs. LAWs in the twenties...sabots in the single digits. granted, better than 'no effect' but a dang sight short of killin' numbers.

and ooo! - i HATED that accuracy penalty! you can have a guy able to dead-eye anything at 100 feet with a rifle or AR 100% of time, but pull out that rocket and it was like, 80%? not bad, homes, but dang - bites when you miss with a) something you can't replace and b) lose another two turns for reload and shoot / receive return fire from the dead. i "know" you're supposed to frag the Scorpie with all them dead-machine rockets, but life was easier with lasers. burn 'em with the pistols and sell 'em empty for the cash.

Vegas / Citadel were about the only places AT had a real chance to shine. but how many did you ever really find in Sin City? there's the DM sqad in South Vegas that coughed up a bunch of sabots and LAWs ... the golf course score (but man, i saved those for Cochise), and then a couple turn up in the sewers and such. okay, i guess, but it wasn't like they showered you with enough to sweep the sewers. i can't tell you how long i spent scouring the south for random encounters to score more rockets - and ended up with nothing after that first fight. killing cyborgs with assault rifles just seems .. wrong. game shoulda been a rocket-fest from that point on.

the Savage Village was so screwy. if you play straight, it's so completely underwhelming. like, why did they even bother? a handful of rockets and a slew of ARs? dude! we passed the AR point AGES ago. might as well 'reward' your team with popsicle sticks and candy rings for all the good they'll do at Cochise.

rad suits - why go for multiples? just as a safety / backup measure? one works just fine. no random encounters in the key rooms. perfectly fine to solo it. heck, even if you had your whole team in, can you imagine facing even one octo with class 5? sure, the cannons take him down in the first round, but he gets his double-burst counter-fire. might as well be naked. (hell, i didn't like having class 10s. really Fargo? really? only five suits of the good stuff? fine, fine - just dump the crazy rooms in Cochise and trim out all the goof from Finster's head.

truth in old games v. new. just like with movies, tech is an easy crutch to lean on. fancy features! new lasers! same old schmaltz, just with fancy new window dressing. but you've got the advantage of TIME, of looking back over an entire era in a single glance. the crap content may be higher nowadays (debatable - have you ever played ET the Game??) , but they also pump out more games in a day now than they used to release in a year back when. today, someone comes up with a survival / horror / crafting epic and tomorrow there are forty more in beta, each with their own little twist. even if they're copies, a few usually turn out good. back then, here it was and that was it.

and remember, this is all well before the internet. hard to imagine, but a lot of material just didn't get around during the '80s and '90s. without internet, you were reliant on local retailers with limited shelf space and (freqently) very high overhead to buy product and make it available. and many of those guys were independents, owned by people with certain ... moral standards that sometimes clashed with the products on offer. or better yet, you have a dude who was born in the 1940s and sells advertising space in telephone books on the side trying to figure out what those gol-dang kids running through his lawn want to play with "nowadays". hmm! computer chess? or this "Metal Gear Solid" thing from Japan? thbbbt! everyone loves chess. and what kid wouldn't want to make holiday greeting cards on their new dot-matrix printer! .... throw all that together, and lots of games got tossed under the bus. you'd be amazed how much never got around.

elves & all can be good, but if you wanted something different, WL1 was it.

..... although i do remember something about a post-apoc involving gunboats running trade & xploration through some vast archipelago. standard deal. start with cheapo boat & weak gun, search for trading partners with better gear and fuel for your gas tanks. kill pirates, free slaves, something ... never played it myself, because it never showed up local. or maybe they only printed 20,000 copies and distributed through the West Coast. you never knew.

[The Koi of Okinawa]

Aye, aye. I was born in the 90's, so I didn't get raised during the base upbringing of games, sadly. I adore quite a few movies and games from before though. And I've always kinda wished I could have gotten to play around in old-school arcades. I love arcade games, haha. I love my share of Japanese games too, both old and new.

[Psst!]

personal xperience - i went LOOKING for MGS after it had come out, and even the joints that sold Nintendos had no idea what i was talking about. Mario? with a gun? noooo .... totally different. major best-seller. check the catalogue. right HERE ... whoa, that's crazy. (****)

well, if you love the era, then here's a qick classic from the 80s: the movie "I Come in Peace". can't believe that didn't go big in cult or blow up like "Predator" did. and it SO would have been the perfect port for a completely kick-butt game.

if you ever catch / find it ....

space gun....
multi-level parking lot ...
head-hunting flying razor disk.

totally. sick. like a mash-up of Phantasmagoria, Die Hard, and RoboCop. with comedy.