Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra
 
I wish we had been able to give you a different relationship with WL by Ice Cream Jonsey Yesterday, 11:03pm PDT
Rafiki wrote:

I never played Wasteland back in the day. When I bought a copy of Wasteland 2, I got a copy of Wasteland. Steam says I tried it for 18 minutes and that's about all I could handle. I read a little bit about it and it sounds like there's some cool stuff and it's one of those games that I always saw people talk about with high esteem, but the game was just unplayable by modern standards.


There is a guy on the PCjr forum that started to go through games that could work in 16 colors for the PCjr, and make them work for the PCjr in 16 colors. One such game is Wasteland. He stated that he had done so in November, I asked if he could send me the patch and he did. He is going to upload the patches to the Internet Archive. I understand that it can take a sec, because I patched two games myself and I haven't uploaded them yet, but I will, soon.

This is a picture of my nephew playing Wasteland on a PCjr with the right colors. I assume he is the second person to ever live to play it in this mode:



So the deal is, yeah, it is going to want you to read from the instruction manual. They could have absolutely compressed the text if they wanted to. Everyone who worked on this was really smart. So even if they say the reason for making you consult the instruction manual for critical pieces of the story... I mean, who is kidding who?

It is a great game once you meet it on its own terms, which was easy to do in the 80s and 90s. I mean, I totally agree with you that it is pretty much the very definition of what this thread topic is about. I played it a few years after it came out in what must have been an EGA computer. It, along with Roadwar 2000, were the two big post-apocalyptic settings in that time. However - it's brutal, you can't raise your characters from the dead. I want to say there was something fussy about the combat, either having to go into some submenus for something that should really be a toggle. Maybe with burst mode?

I haven't finished it, but I get obsessed with it every few years and get pretty far and then lose my save game.

It was remastered in 2020. I'd love to send you a copy to see what you think. No obligation, we all have a million things going on. Can you remind me what your Steam handle is if you'd be OK with me sending it to you, Rafiki?



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Games that didn't age well for other than technical reasons by Nick Spaz 06/01/2026, 7:29am PDT NEW
    How did Frog Fractions not age well? by Michael Che 06/01/2026, 11:26am PDT NEW
        I played it seriously for the first time in October by Ice Cream Jonsey 06/01/2026, 7:10pm PDT NEW
    Re: Games that didn't age well for other than technical reasons by laudablepuss 06/01/2026, 11:51am PDT NEW
    Probably Wasteland by Rafiki 06/01/2026, 9:04pm PDT NEW
        None of the "what the fuck do I do now?" games aged that well by age of the hintbook Yesterday, 7:58pm PDT NEW
        I wish we had been able to give you a different relationship with WL by Ice Cream Jonsey Yesterday, 11:03pm PDT NEW
    Crazy Taxi. Not so great once you realized it was just a minor side-game in NT by GTA3 Yesterday, 8:50am PDT NEW
        That's a good one! NT by Confused Matthew Yesterday, 10:10am PDT NEW
 
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