A friend of mine asked me if I've ever played any of the Fallout games and what I think of them. Here's an impromptu rambling rant, by way of response.
I like the original Fallout game (the one made by Interplay, before the company ran into financial difficulty). It seems to work well within its scope despite (or perhaps because of) the technological constraints of its time. I haven't played FO 2 (which looks to be more of the same) or 3 (which, I think, is where Bethesda took over and things start to go downhill; I could be wrong).
Having played Fallout New Vegas (NV) and 4 briefly (mainly because they're buggy AF and crash alarmingly frequently, even with stability and bug-fix patches), the most I can say about NV is that it's sort of OK and would probably have been better if Black Isle/Obsidian had been given more time and a better engine on which to develop it. Gamebryo is old, buggy and disappointing crap. This is apparent in NV and even more sore in FO 4, which should look and run far better than it does for a game of its time. Somehow, Skyrim isn't too badly affected by being saddled with it; props to the team there. (However, anyone who's spent considerable time installing and using HQ texture mods for anything knows it leaves a lot to be desired. Maybe Bethesda was just really lacking skill or lazy when it comes to model design.)
FO 4 is, IMO, little more than Bethesda's second-to-last-ditch effort to cash in on the FO franchise/formula and give Gamebryo another outing (instead of putting it out to pasture and porting existing code to something like Unreal Engine or Unity; by no means an easy task, but one Bethesda could probably have afforded to undertake while it still had a good reputation). It doesn't really offer anything new (other than different characters in a different setting) and isn't innovative. The only positive thing I can say about it is that the user community made some really cool clothing/uniform mods for it. That's not even a reflection on Bethesda.
FO 76, I haven't played. (Honestly, who has?) It's apparently an utter disaster (based on the reviews I've seen): a blatant asset flip that is so far from functional it's funny in the manner of a farce.
"Stay out! The plants kill!"
Interplay/Black Isle/Obsidian had a wealth of good ideas and material, including cinema and literature on which it called and from which it drew: A Boy and His Dog; Forbidden Planet; Mad Max; There Will Come Soft Rains; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Sadly, the company experienced some financial difficulty and was bought out by Bethesda (which, at some point in the distant past, had good ideas of its own, too). Bethesda took all that and ran it into the ground, just like they did with all their own titles (and, consequently, their reputation). That's what happens when you take brainfarts seriously instead of good ideas and then lie about them, Peter Molyneux style, Todd; it really doesn't "just work"!
As for Fallout Shelter, that's the only one of Bethesda's FO games that I've played and really like without reservation. Perhaps because it is so simple, Bethesda managed to not duff it up. In my opinion, it's the best FO game they made. However, it says something worrying about a supposedly AAA game studio if that's the best they can do, the most that they can manage to get right before tripping themselves up and faceplanting.
In a turn of events that I find full of poetic justice, Bethesda got bought out by Microsoft Game Studios. That seems to be the fate of tech organisations that wreck themselves (or come close to it): Microsoft might pump dollars into salvaging your business.
Personally, I don't care that Bethesda took itself out. To me, the sad parts of all this is that Interplay met its demise and id got dragged along with Bethesda. (Remember id, the developers who gave us Doom and Quake, inspiring Valve and Gearbox Software to bring us some pretty cool games in their own right?)
Sidenote
I like the Fallout universe's alternative retro futuristic style and setting; its treatment of the sixties in America and imminent threat of nuclear war (no doubt inspired by/borrowed from the material with which the Interplay developers were familiar). It's a bizarre mix of technology, both space-age shiny alloys heralding progress and antiquated bakelite-esque kitch. To me, "dumb" computer terminals are typically quintessent of that time.
Despite all the fancy (and often bloated) GUIs/Desktop environments we're now accustomed to, I have a fascination with command-line computing (and not purely perversely, in the case of DOS; some purists argue that a good CLI-based environment/system is more flexible than using GUI-based applications). One thing I definitely want to do is learn *NIX shell scripting (bash, ksh, tcsh and zsh), as well as C and the ncurses/notcurses libraries, with libcaca thrown in for good measure. I have a wild dream of becoming extensively knowledgeable and proficient in that paradigm for getting work done, as well as creating tools that fit within it. I'd also like to learn a bunch of Web technologies that will help me to create Web-based versions of the tools I use. (The combination of HTML5, CSS3/4, ECMAScript 6+ and backend languages like Python and Ruby is a pretty potent one that should be capable of providing what I need to make RIAs that do what I want.) My aim is to create a Docker image that provides/utilises only CLI-/TUI-/Web-based applications/tools (even though it is possible to get X to connect to a remote server; I don't know how), mainly to prove to myself that I can and because it'll bring me some (perhaps warped) sense of achievement.
"Yeah, you could do that weirdness. You just need a device capable of SSH and it should work."
In some roundabout way, I feel like Docker images are some alternate retro-futuristic take on mainframes and dumb terminals of the sixties (or at least a direction they could have gone in if the ARPANET had developed under different circumstances). Maybe I just don't (yet) understand Docker. However, it is also true that no technology is ever used solely for the purpose which its developer(s) intended.
Lead image by Octoptimist from/on Pexels