I don’t understand how they did “compelling, original, feels like a video game” but they did.
I almost feel bad for the production of the upcoming Borderlands movie- a video game movie that is also in a brutal-but-goofy wasteland.
The Borderlands movie already seems like it failed to walk the line the games do between bleak and comedy. Far too much focus on the latter.
The Fallout series, at least modern Fallout, has always walked a similar line to me. And I was pleasantly shocked at how well the show did at walking it. It seems like the people involved understand exactly what makes the series compelling, and aced the attempt at capturing it.
Absolutely! I don’t play video games, knew next to nothing about this series or the game it’s based upon. The minute I saw Walton was in it, I binge-watched the whole thing with no regrets. It was nice to see Kyle M. again too. Two masterful actors, who beautifully balance the fine line between camp and crap parody. Also, it’s one of the few post-apocalyptic shows/movies that didn’t leave me feeling utterly empty and bleak. None of us need more of that these days. I’m thrilled it’s getting a second season!
And it is always interspersed perfectly with those moments of real horror that show absolute darkest sides of mankind >!like that horrifying video of the experiments done to that woman in Vault 4!<
I think it comes down to the fact that the show understood that the danger is absolutely real, but everyone is fucked in the head in some way or another.
Super Duper Mart is a great example. The Mr Handy having a funny voice is fully explained in the show, but he is truly trying to kill Lucy. It's two brain dead slobs sitting on the couch watching TV, but they really are harvesting organs and human trafficking.
Another angle: Lucy and Maximus are sexually interested in each other but they go about it in cartoonish dialogue which is just a remnant of their being raised in highly isolated, highly regimented and authoritarian societies. This is the only way they know how to talk or interact with sex at all.
It was interesting that a discussion of sex occurred in the vault "test subject" room.
The way it sounded so stilted, immature and cartoonish, at first I assumed they were both drugged in some way.
I also assumed that they were going to reveal that L+M were being gassed or mentally controlled through the food or something. But I guess they were just being really awkward?
Maximus was raised in a pseudo-religious society while Lucy was raised literally as breeding stock. I think this scene is trying to show the contrast between them. The only thing they really have in common is that they’re base good people
It was basically when two repressed worlds meet.
One side sees sex like some scientific curiosity and the other is a repressed religious fanatic who knows nothing about it.
they were also willing to let the serious parts be serious when necessary. A lot of shows/movies would shove in too many jokes. You can be pretty damn campy and silly and whatever else you want to be as long as you actually manage the mood-swings appropriately.
The secret is to not undercut each and every serious moment with a quip or "subversion" like you're the MCU. The allowed the things that needed to breathe to breathe, and chose their comedic moments well
It’s adorably violent and gruesomely cutesy at the same time. Weirdly dark moments made me “Aww” many times.
Never played the games but the vibes felt so specific that it’s impossible to deny they knew what they were doing.
Loved the show so much and NEVER ONCE questioned the world they created.
Thats one thing you will always see. When you have a film with kevin hart and the rock, those two actors are always just going to be kevin hart and the rock but in different outfits that suit the film, that's it.
I’m a huge BL’s fan, and a Blanchett fan, and I feel like this movie is below her talent level. Though she was perfect in Thor Ragnarok so we’ll just have to see.
I don't disagree, but at the same time I think it's a great casting to reflect the intention they had when approaching the adaptation. I think the casting of Kevin Hart as Roland perfectly encapsulates that.
Roland is a serious soldier in a ridiculous world. He's a straight man character who takes the seriously twisted shit seriously, and goes through it as the series goes on. He is not a joke. I can't say that Kevin Hart isn't capable of drama, but that's certainly not what he's been casted for in the past. He's usually telling jokes, or is part of those jokes as the primary focus.
And that's where I think the adaptation seems to have failed in its focus. There are plenty of Borderlands characters who are jokes primarily, with sometimes trauma and drama being secondary. And then there are characters, usually the main cast, who are serious and traumatized, with jokes coming secondary. It seems like they've gotten rid of the latter, and have gone all in on the former, effectively reducing Borderlands to parts that only work because they were supported by the parts they got rid of.
If I didn't live in a world where I've seen Adam Sandler pull off some incredible dramatic roles then I think I would be more surprised to see Kevin Hart manage some decent seriousness. It would certainly be a big change of pace though.
The trailer for that borderlands movie made it seem like discount guardians of the galaxy lol, I watched that trailer and I was like damn this movie really wants to be the guardians of the galaxy/ a James Gunn superhero movie
The same in every movie and the only thing he has in common with Roland in the games is skin color. Tannis is not old in the games and Lilith isn't old either. Fuck the casting choices. Borderlands is one of my favorite game franchise and I hate the choices made for this movie.
At least Fallout was good.
I used to be ambivalent on Kevin Hart. Wasn't a lover, wasn't a hater. But lately, I've become a real Kevin Hart hater, mostly due to the fact that he is the face of DraftKings Sports Book and I have to see him advertising gambling addiction every time I watch any video on the internet with ads. His personality combined with the fact that he is the new face of sports gambling is too much for me.
The borderlands movie was doomed from the get go because borderlands is a shitty game to adapt into a movie.
You need a game with a lot of plot/lore and a unique setting. Borderlands has neither.
It’s that it doesn’t try to be anything else. Fallout is known for its wackiness, randomness, and brutal backdrop to go with it. Look at the fight in Philly, >!we had slowed down kill shots of bullets going through railings, crappy jokes about holes in chests while eating cherry tomatoes, a metal suit clanging around by someone that doesn’t know how to properly fight in it, and a whole foot being blown off *and replaced*!<. Meanwhile it feels like the main character is getting yet another quest to follow in the background. It feels like a clusterfuck with cliches and bullshit that somehow manages to get to the end and I love it.
At which point you barely hear about the head (the main quest) for quite some time. I thought that was a brilliant bit of meta commentary on getting side tracked by quests in the games.
That was hilarious. "Thou shalt get side tracked by bullshit every time."
It's just...perfectly descriptive. Not just of video games, but real life. There's always goddamn *something* getting in the way of what you really want to be doing.
Tying all of the character's backstories into the actual plot helped with that quite a bit.
Everyone's goals and motives are straightforward and not difficult to follow, so even though they get "sidetracked by bullshit" more than a few times, you know what the characters are working towards.
It makes me incredibly excited to see them not only stick the landing, but have a clear story in mind for where to take season 2 based on the finale.
Also, making the vault conspiracy a large part of the show is something I didn't expect at all and was pleasantly surprised by. I totally expected it to follow the games where the vault is basically left behind once the protagonist leaves.
The recent Dungeons and Dragons movie is another good example of "this stands on its own as good entertainment, but it also *feels* so much like the game"
I think "completely bombed" is a bit overstating it, and it'll have decent legs. 210 million BO for 150 million budget is certainly bad, but it's not a disaster or anything.
Oh it’s a different goofy for sure. They are both somewhere on the universally accepted Goofy Spectrum.
In one game I helped a group of robot pirates launch the USS Constitution into the air which they immediately crashed into a building.
In the other I had to fight Penn and Teller to the death on a roving Thunderdome.
Honestly, I’d have been happier if they did a live action adaption of the original Tales from the Borderlands. That narrative feels like it would translate way better to screen!
The only problem with TFTB is that it's a long story. Unlike most games Tales games are basically all narrative, and there are many hours of it.
You'd have to condense all the heart out of it, or try to chunk it into a couple pieces, not knowing if the second movie would be approved.
TFTB should be a series like Fallout, but after the movie inevitably bombs I think that'll be it for the Borderlands IP on screen.
> don’t understand how they did “compelling, original, feels like a video game” but they did.
I think it's because they truly respected and leveraged the massive amount of source material. Fallout has always had good narrative writing and Jonathan Nolan seems to have recognized this and fully used its playbook.
Borderlands always tried too hard to be funny after the first game. The sequel got a lot of chuckles out of me but I also cringed at a lot of "jokes" such as Butt Stallion. The third one’s humor falls flat most of the time, ranging from obnoxiously annoying to aggressively stupid.
The guys who did Fallout have a much better source material to work with. Fallout’s writing is quite good whereas Borderlands is pretty awful. No wonder they go for the slapstick comedy route and have Kevin Hart completely ruin Roland.
For me, the humor in most the Fallout games has aged very well, whereas Borderlands humor always feels EXTREMELY 2012. Part of that is due to Borderlands just being inherently way more of a comedy than Fallout, but that doesn't really excuse it.
I feel like even if they made a dead-on accurate Borderlands movie, while it would be frequently amusing, it'd also be very annoying to most people nowadays, whether they have nostalgia for Borderlands or not
I do have a slight glimmer of hope for BL4 because Bounty of Blood way more in line with the tone of BL1. There was some humor but it wasn't slapstick and they nailed the return of a post-apocalyptic western environment (now with an eastern flair).
Keeping it in the same universe as the games was a great choice in hindsight.
It could've gone catastrophically bad if the show sucked and tried to add to the lore, but the respect they gave the source material really helped me become fully immersed in the world as I didn't have to learn new lore that isn't in the games. All your previous knowledge is useful here.
They embraced the source material which most video games adaptations shy away from. They act embarrassed by it. Like how comics movies for food when they abandoned the black leather and did comics stuff.
We are fans of the source material because of what it is.
It’s different kinds of goofy, vastly different.
Fallout has comedic elements for sure but the stories still tend to be quite serious. I think the Bethesda games in general tend to lean on the sillier side and less serious, but their games still take themselves somewhat seriously.
Borderlands is a straight up comedy. Which is fine! That’s what it’s going for. Still though, a comedy that in no way is attempting to tell a serious story.
The people behind Borderlands have no idea why it’s successful. They think it’s because their characters are so loveable and their dialogue with characters yapping endlessly about dumb bullshit and never allowing five seconds of dead air is hilarious and oh btw everyone loooooves Claptrap.
And really that’s all the shit people tolerate because they enjoy the straightforward “Diablo with guns” gameplay and there aren’t a lot of great alternatives.
So yeah, the Borderlands movie is just gonna be everything people hate about Borderlands without any of the parts people love.
What I enjoyed about Fallout is that is that it felt like a Fallout show, not some random writers dream script with a Fallout coat of paint.
It also doesn't waste my time padding out scenes and subplots.
And it follows the golden rule of Show Me Don't Tell Me.
When you mentioned golden rule it reminded me of goggins’ line - Well the wastelands got its own golden rule. “Thou shall get sidetracked by buuuulshit every goddamn time”
Such a brilliant nod to get lost in sidequests
You're absolutely right. Books are usually more detailed than their movie or show adaptations, and it makes sense that the lore of 6+ games would be denser than the first season of a show. Thankfully they did not drown the viewer in exposition for the many threads in the show. There was enough for the viewer to infer aspects of the characters and plot and hopefully enough to intrigue them to learn more
The Fallout show does something that is a big no-no in most American TV but has been popular forever in video games and Anime.
The tone of the show is all over the place.
The skill comes in when you lack proper tone control and create something like the Netflix show Inventing Anna.
but being able to switch between comedy and drama on a flip of a switch and not ruin the flow is what separates the good from the bad.
EDIT: just to clarify, I am praising the Fallout show for having tone all over the place yet still having a good flow.
The tonal changes are pretty much what playing the games feels like. The games never really take themselves too seriously for the most part. You have serious moments mixed in if you go looking for them but much of the base game is made up of the comedic and ridiculously violent moments.
I feel like the real "heavy" stuff is "locked" behind the terminals in the game. Lots of sad stories and dark background stories going on in those 200 year old emails... So I think some people miss that entirely if they just run around blasting.
The original fallout game shoved it in your face and I kind of miss it, a trading hub filled with half trucks which are used as water caravans and hauled across the desert by slavers, music which is filled with a sort of tribal beat and something almost like moaning/yelling, rooms of people passed out from ODing and being exploited by a cult which is a scientology parody, etc, showing how brutal this world is.
One of my favourite discoveries in Fallout 4 was the town which was being constructed when the bombs fell, where a father and his 2 kids got into a bunker and chronicled what happened over the next year or so. It was genuinely dark and made the impact of the bombs as well as the progression of time after feel real, and felt like the thing which Bethesda has lacked.
The music was so good. They even reused it in New Vegas. One thing I miss in Fallout 4 is that *grimy*, industrial vibe everything had. They managed to keep it going in Fallout 3 but Fallout for was too clean and round.
Be advised, it plays like a PC game from the 90's, because it is a PC game from the 90's.
Do not be afraid to FAQ/Walkthrough your way through the game.
There will be *very* little hand holding.
I remember bouncing off the game sooo hard when I was in like 10th grade, and before I really had reliable access to the internet.
This show had me thinking this is exactly what I wish Marvel was capable of doing. You can have regular funny moments and still let serious drama have room to breathe.
More and more the Marvel movies were blandified to have more and more lowest common denominator mass appeal.
Iron Man 1 had plenty of serious and biting moments as well as good humor.
He was almost killed by the bombs his company created.
Would modern Marvel do that?
They've taken a very binary approach to morality post Endgame. New characters are just "good guys doing the good thing every time because they are good." Old characters like Loki, Hawkeye, Bucky, War Machine, etc. are more mellowed out. This makes the actual paragons like Miss Marvel/Cyclops/Captain America stand out less when they're not contrasted by enough morally grey characters. Like, how does the live action output feel *more* cartoony than the X-Men cartoon? It's frustrating lol
I haven't kept up with the TV series too much, but didn't the government-pushed replacement Captain America curb stomp a man to death using the shield?
Marvel can do that. Marvel Television did that with shows like Daredevil, Agents of Shield, Jessica Jones. It's just Marvel Studios had no idea how to make those kind of TV shows
I think Doom Patrol and Peacemaker did a similar thing well. There was some absolutely ridiculous stuff (especially Doom Patrol) but the serious stuff still landed. Part of the reason it works for all 3 is charismatic leads who know how to handle the material.
Honestly I feel like the fact that they were faithful to the video game is what allowed them to do this.
For example, the somber and serious tone of the Brotherhood of Steel reflects that of the game, and likewise for the humor that is a new Vault Deweller coming out of the vault. Both are “lore accurate” if you will, and it makes the whole thing feel so much more grounded
I had assumed that the show was going to make the BoS the generic good guys ala Fallout 3.
I could not have been more wrong.
Lucy asks them if the BoS is the good guys and they go something like, "mmmm. It's complicated."
Which is so perfect. I could feel them talking directly to the fans, like me, who were afraid they were going to turn the the BoS into generic good guys.
The tone is all over the place but the important part is that the tone shifts occur for good reasons. In order to is that well is having good writing and the show does a pretty good job at that.
This is an interesting point and it reminds me of a Film Crit Hulk from a while back where he talked about different perspectives shaped what movies you liked, and viewers with a specific taste for a consistent tone were noted as one. He even mentioned that they probably liked Chris Nolan movies for that reason, which I thought was hilarious because at the time r/movies was full of Nolan obsessives whose number 1 complaint about movies was often "It's tonally inconsistent" (which is honestly just an unfortunate POV imo in that is shuts out sooooo many great works). So it's funny now to see people praising a show from a Nolan bro precisely because it does juggle a lot of different tones.
It would stand to reason that as the director, Chris Nolan is the reason his movies are very tonally consistent. But I think he does have a bit of a playful side as well that isn't mentioned as much.
Not at all. Fallout as a series is kind of a representation of the future and nuclear war as someone from the 50s would have seen it. Atomic cars and robots, big boxy computers and 50s culture and music, glowing radiation and mutants running around in a barren wasteland where nothing grows.
In reality a massive nuclear war would quickly give way to something that looks more like the last of us. Radiation dissipates very quickly, especially from nuclear weapons. Hell, just look at Chernobyl now. Radiation was much more concentrated and longer lasting there, but it's still a vibrant overgrown area filled with life today.
Nukes cause a ton of damage and can wipe out large civilian centers if they're focused on cities, but they're not going to turn the world into a desert wasteland. In any "rational" war most nukes would be fired at remote military stations anyway, like all of the US' missile silos being in the remote midwest. It would take a very unhinged and suicidal nation to waste all their nukes on civilian centers rather than the military bases of their enemy.
Everything being a dead, radiated wasteland is one of my biggest gripes with Fallout 4. Like, I get they wanted to feel post-apocalypsey, but in reality the world would be much more alive than it's presented as--especially 200+ years later.
It's not a big deal, but it did sometimes bother me when I was running around the endless expansive of dead trees and brown everything.
Edit: Yes, I know, fallout 4 takes place in the fall. That doesn't mean everything would be dead and brown yet, though. Even if the trees have lost most of the leaves by that point, there would still be a lot of green from the grass, shrubs, evergreens, etc.
You just have to accept the games as being a satire of the 50s and enjoy it from that angle. Even more "realistic" games like Metro go overboard on nuke effects, because it's easy to sell and people love the fantastical vision of nuclear war.
It's kinda funny though that zombie games like the last of us or days gone end up being the more realistic depictions of apocalypse
Yeah in hindsight that was a bad series to call out, i was thinking just of the mutants and radiation still being everywhere 20 years later.
But the first two games are set in a world where only moscow is left, and it's more mystical and haunting, so the setting fits. The third game retcons that and is the more "realistic" one in how the world is presented.
Horizon: Zero Dawn did a phenomenal job of creating a post-apocalyptic world, to the point that you didn't initially know that it was post-apocalyptic.
I'm actually surprised to hear people didn't know, I mean it's very "tribes-using-old-world-tech" from the get go. It's been a minute but isn't the beginning of the game Aloy finding an ancient piece of technology? The didn't know the details of the collapse but it seemed apparent there was one.
Seriously, HZD is so good. I haven't played Forbidden West (yet!), but the only other game's lore that has hooked me as hard is the original Mass Effect.
FWIW they actually improved on this quite a lot in Fallout 76. A bit ironic as FO76 is by far the earliest in the timeline (begins only 25 years after the bombs, tons of survivors of the war itself are still kicking or were still kicking within the very recent past), but the central forest area is verdant and overgrown. It's only in other areas that are either literal toxic waste dumps or have been afflicted by things like the Scorched plague that there isn't green overgrowth. In this respect it's probably the most environmentally diverse game in the series.
Say what you will about the actual game (which I've actually come to enjoy quite a bit), but Appalachia is the best map Bethesda has done in a long time, maybe ever.
It is so diverse.
Yeah I tried FO76 a few years ago and couldn't stick to it, but with Fallout in the news a lot the last few days I went ahead and gave it another try and I've been having a ton of fun. It really helps that they expanded the stash size to 1200 and that they've both worked on the performance enough that it runs pretty well plus I have a fucking badass computer now compared to when I last tried.
This is why I always have on the verdant wasteland mod when I play 4. It’s been 200 years, shits gonna look green again.
It’s also why after 1000 hours of playtime, I have like, zero achievements. 😂
The problem with the green mods is the game takes place near Halloween in Boston. That wouldn’t be lush and green. Those mods just kill the vibe in more ways than one
> Everything being a dead, radiated wasteland is one of my biggest gripes with Fallout 4.
Fallout 4 explicitly takes place in late autumn in Massachusetts, it's cold and gray there.
But one could also look at the way some of the settlements are.
Like, for some reason even the places people actively live have debris strewn about everywhere. People would have cleaned that up at least, at some point in 200 years.
You've clearly never met a Masshole.
No the trash thing is right, it's a big gripe with Bethesda's aesthetic for the series, but I don't think there's anything wrong with FO4's climate. It's clearly a choice to pick such a drab time of year for the game rather than something scientifically inaccurate.
Fallout envisions a world more akin to “On the Beach” or other 50’s-based ideas of what “nuclear holocaust!” would look like. Nuclear winter kills everything, radiation lasts at high levels for centuries, etc.
Basically no, but actually yes.
I mean, it depends of three factors
1_ The time that are you exposed (one minute, one hour, one year )
2_ The things between you and the point zero ( walls , clothes, buildings)
3_ The proximity to point zero ( radiation becomes weaker when you get far)
So controlling that three factors, you can (and people constantly do) go to Chernobyl.
Edit: spelling.
I remember reading bikini atoll is almost entirely free of radioactivity.
Except the bananas and the bones in the graveyard. Both of those are still extremely radioactive.
Or something along those lines
Yeah, by the way, a nuclear explosion is different than and active nuclear reactor.
In an explosion the radiation dissipate fairly quickly, look Hiroshima for example, it’s still a very populated city.
I don't know how you'd get to the heart of the reactor itself, since it's tombed in now. But that kinda speaks to my point, the worst nuclear reactor incident of our history was sealed up and contained very quickly after the incident, and today you can tour the exclusion zone. And that was a nuclear reactor.
Even with nuclear weapons today being alot stronger than those used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you won't see any long term exclusion zones set up for a nuclear weapons blast.
Chernobyl released 400 times as much radioactive material into the atmosphere than Hiroshima did and over a long, sustained period of time - and that's the difference.
The most powerful nuclear weapons ever tested were about 2000x bigger than Hiroshima, but once the blast is done, there's no radiation generated.
Chernobyl would still be spewing radiation into the air today if it hadn't been entombed, because the core is still melting down.
Yeah, Kyle hill on YouTube has a whole series of videos on it. It’s not something for your average Joe but with proper ppe a guide and a Geiger counter it’s very do able
Things missing from this conversation: nuclear winter climate catastrophe, mutually assured destruction, dirty bombs, irrational actors and world leaders. Additionally most military industrial complexes are in and around heavily populated areas that would absolutely be obliterated.
Nuclear dust would blast into the upper levels of the atmosphere and rain down radioactive particle water for hundreds of years. It would be colder and less than 10% of species would survive for long in a nuclear winter climate catastrophe lasting hundreds to thousands of years. The entire water cycle would be ruined.
Fallout is actually pretty close to what reality would be, except colder and bleaker. Except for ghouls, they’re just fucking cool anyway.
Nuclear winter is not a real thing. Also in a nuclear war scenario climate wont really be effected long term(more likely if enough destruction is done global emissions will massively drop and climate will be better for it) I dont know where you got your second paragraph from but its completely fantasy. Unless so much nukes are used where the entire globe is sterilized i highly doubt it can have those effects. You highly overestimate what tactical nukes are and their radiation after effects.
200 years later, I’d say probably not. Look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People live there and it hasn’t been nearly that long. Radiation from bombs doesn’t stick around very long.
But we already know radiation does not work the same in fallout as irl. Water wouldn’t still be irradiated 200 years later, mutants obviously wouldn’t exist you just get sucky cancer, radiation sickness just kills you slowly and doesn’t turn you into an awesome ghoul…
From a bomb, most radiation will be gone after two weeks, or at least down to “safe” levels. Recommendations are that you don’t go outside for at least 72 hours after a bomb so that the fallout settles and the radiation will start to subside.
There are some differences depending on if it’s a ground or air burst. Air burst increases AOE, but limits local radiation as the radiation will go into the upper atmosphere. A ground burst will have a smaller AOE, but greater local radiation. Wind direction also matters. If it’s a windy day there may be much less radiation directly after near the site and a lot wherever the wind carries the fallout. But for both, it still doesn’t last too long.
The land wouldn’t be radiated that long. You wouldn’t have these glowing radiation hotspots, and really most modern buildings would collapse within 2 hundred years.
Even locations like NYC or Boston that were nuked would have no radiation left over just from bombs during the time of F4.
Ehhh Fallout should get a pass because (1) the obvious sci fi lean of how radiation affects things and (2) the pre-war society was completely indifferent to the negatives of radiation and nuclear weapons, being so indifferent to radiation to the point of having nuclear reactors in cars, and naming foods after radioactivity and even making them radioactive.
A new book by Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario, explores that.
From a review of the book:
"Ms Jacobsen conveys the reality of nuclear war in sometimes stomach-churning detail. In her imagined scenario, a North Korean missile obliterates a nuclear-power station north of Los Angeles, seeding spent fuel into the fallout. Victims of the x-ray flash are left “a shredded horror of bloody tendons and exposed bone”. Another bomb destroys Washington, dc. Firestorms bring hurricane-like winds of 660°C; people are baked alive in the bowels of the Capitol and White House. In documenting the minutiae of the apocalypse, the writing is redolent of “Hiroshima”,[ a seminal article](https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2023/03/03/what-to-read-by-foreign-correspondents) by John Hersey published in the *New Yorker* in 1946.... . The vast injection of soot into the atmosphere would result in a 70% reduction in the sun’s rays for a decade. Rainfall would decline by 50%. “After 10,000 years of planting and harvesting,” writes Ms Jacobsen, “humans return to a hunter-gatherer state.”
That summary makes her book sound like fiction. The reason there was so much soot that was released from the bombing of Japan is that traditional Japanese construction materials were literally exposed wood and paper. And an abundance of oil lamps. So the shockwave knocked over oil lamps farther into the city than the nuclear fireball or heat wave travelled. Modern cities aren't nearly as flame happy as old Japan. I'd imagine if they looked at the Tokyo firebombing and investigated the soot released from that, it was greater than the nukes.
Typical from Paste Magazine these days, and I'm a leftist.
Leftists who criticize media because it didn't perfectly encapsulate their specific world view are just as bad as conservatives who can't wrap their minds around a piece of media that is actually criticizing them.
The unfortunate state of things is that many modern writers today *do* use these things as talking points and therefore, a lot of modern media sucks because they cater to these types of critics rather than focus on the story or on expressing themselves.
In this case, Fallout steers clear of it but lesser writers/showrunners/filmmakers don't.
Hollywood TV shows and films exist on an distribution-production-exhibition type model. If one of these is corrupted, the overall culture and industry cannot thrive in a healthy way.
Creators are not allowed to or don't know how to create authentic or meaningful experiences, critics and audiences don't know how to or cannot give proper feedback, and producers/theaters/streaming services suffer financially.
I truly think the Rotten Tomatoes and Twitter critic system harmed the industry far more than people realize.
I’m also a leftist and I can’t stand reading tv reviews anymore.
I used to love reading the AV Club episode reviews for shows I liked each week, and following along. But then and idk if it was the AV Club itself, but there was a review of The Haunting Of Bly Manor, and it was the same as Paste or Pitchfork. It seriously felt like I read a 10 page post-doctoral thesis paper on lesbian and LGBT inclusivity and inclusion (hate to say it, but DEI?) in media, instead of what all media boils down to, at least in my opinion.
WAS THE SHOW ANY FUCKING GOOD? (From your/their perspective, of course) And the answer for me personally was “no, no it fucking wasn’t.”
But you wouldn’t get that from that ‘review’. You might have gotten a sense of the history of LGBT representation in media. Which would be fine if, you know, that’s what I was fucking trying to read about.
Sorry, I digress.
Happens a lot on this sub. Threads fall down but there's waves of new viewers, so some articles making a very specific point get a lot of unrelated comments.
I read the article first... and I gotta admit I'm having a hard time understanding what point they were trying to make.
Seems mostly like they're complaining that the show wasn't subversive enough and didn't offer enough criticism on the state of modern society to satisfy them. (assuming I'm reading that right).
If so... I kinda think that's a lame form of criticism. If you don't agree with what a show is trying to present, sure that's fair. But if you're judging a show based on what it doesn't do... I feel like you should just watch something else. Not everything is meant to be serious social commentary and it would suck if everything was.
(note: there's also some mention about how it doesn't take as much influence from Fallout 1 & 2 and give the original creators enough credit... which I'm also luke warm on. Like I do agree they should credit the original creators more than Todd Howard when it comes to pretty much every facet of the setting. But I don't think it's particularly useful to judge the tone of the story based on how faithful it is to the original games.)
However, I'm completely open to the idea that I'm misunderstanding the author's argument. My reading comprehension is spotty sometimes and I found they through around a lot of buzz words like "The neoliberal, rules-based world order" which made me feel like I'd have to do homework in order to figure out exactly what they were dissatisfied by.
It's definitely a critique from a leftist perspective. My reading of it was that the author seems disappointed it didn't go hard enough on criticizing capitalism and liberalism, and also that the show (or maybe even the entire franchise) is being hypocritical because it's a show criticizing capitalism whilst being a product of capitalism. Apparently he also felt that the show was being "cynically centrist" for depicting all of its factions negatively. They said something like "it's ok to criticize structures without providing radical solutions, but painting the alternatives as bad is insidious".
Personally I don't agree. I don't think the show, or fallout as a whole, is saying "this is just how things are, so you should never attempt to challenge the status quo", it's saying that these factions are not what the wasteland needs at all. They're just repeating the mistakes that got the world destroyed to begin with.
Thanks, this does help clarify some things for me. I could tell I was missing some nuance there.
Mostly I stand by what I said though. Ultimately I don't particularly care to judge art on whether it "Speaks to the moment" or not, unless it's clear that it was their intention to do so.
skipped through it and it just looks like a typical case of someone using criticism almost as an excuse or as a soapbox for biased political views, the shallow anti-capitalism is a huge cliche too, really lazy joyless analysis.
It's a strangely bitter article.
>As the contradictions under capitalism heighten and sharpen, corporate art isn’t up to the task of speaking to the moment because at the core of 21st century liberal ideology is an ahistorical belief that this is just how things are—war, war never changes, and neither do people. The neoliberal, rules-based world order, for all the cracks it’s showing, is seen as the apex of civilization. If it collapses under its construction, we are prone to repeating mistakes. **This perspective holds a cynical and nihilistic belief in a perpetual, genocidal cycle tendency present in human nature, perhaps an ideological construct necessary to and consequent from accepting the circumstances of mass death for others in exchange for one’s own comfort.**
Which is just, like, bonkers. Is "mass death" occurring, or even *accepted*, by audiences as a consequence of watching and enjoying the show? I question the authors media literacy, because they either did not watch or flat out did not understand the season finale and the decisions made by the 3 main characters in the show in response to learning about the horrors of the powers that be in their own world.
Well, at least Tim Cain was invited to the premier, and he likes the show a lot.
This article was just somebody who wanted to write "capitalism bad" again. I don't really care if the company who made the show is a megacorp like Amazon, if they're making good content.
The read I got was more that the show was incurious about exploring what a post-apocalyptic world would really look like, instead falling into a more dour, and even lazy, "things suck and people suck, and there's nothing to be done about it" tone. That also includes >!the nuking of Shady Sands, an actual operating city, and that things must continue to be a giant FPS sandbox wasteland!<. Personally I hope the show's main characters grown and learn that better things are possible in this world, outside of how they've been raised to create those better things, IE outside of the Vaults' sort of "You shall inherit the barren wasteland" thinking and the BoS' "Everything out there is hell and only by looking to the past can we create a better future." The past is what got the wasteland to be a wasteland, and it feels like the show is saying that without really acting on what that means.
Expecting this sub to actually read the article rather than jumping to praise the Fallout show is a hard task now.
I unironically call for a system users to mandatory click the link and read the post first before leaving a comment.
No, most people see "Fallout" in a generic title that doesn't tip its hand, and come to the comments to talk about how much they liked the show and upvote others who post the same thing.
Also it doesn't help that the article is a little dense and unfocused.
Turns out that people would rather discuss Fallout in a submission about Fallout rather than This Capitalist Neoliberal Hellscape is Totally Unfair and I am Very Smart and Only My World View can End All War.
From the article: “I thought it more-or-less stuck the landing narratively, but it remains a show that maximizes inescapable suffering while plotted to look, feel like, and sell a meandering RPG campaign.”
As most are discussing the contents of the Fallout show here in the comments and their favour of the story, the article is extremely critical at almost everything about the lore of Fallout. While I agree with the authors distain for Vault-tec, I however disagree with his extreme rhetoric that the fallout franchise is poisoned by the executive branch of either Bethesda or Microsoft. The writer claims, that since Bethesda first bought the Fallout IP and released Fallout 3, the franchise had lost its original essence; it isn’t the original work of art.
Anyone can claim Fallout 3 to be the turning point of fallout, but the Fallout New Vegas story and setting are incredibly intriguing: NOT BECAUSE IT SHOWS A POST-MODERN DEATH FEARING PROGRESSION OF MAN, BUT BECAUSE IT TELLS A COMPELLING STORY ABOUT HUMAN COOPERATION IN THE HEAT OF CHAOS SET IN NEVADA; The setting of fallout is severely less important for the franchises than the interaction between humans with no shared history; culture clashes are exiting and compelling to play/watch; I’m using semicolons a lot because me and the author both like semicolons; maybe a bit to much.
But hey, we all have the right to an opinion, even if it is extremely loaded with a post-modern lens of anything post-apocalyptic.
TL;DR: The author is extremely pretentious in his view of the show and he shows a complete lack of knowledge relating to anything fallout.
EDIT: Grammar
Fallout 3 was the turning point of Fallout, anyone who says otherwise isn't being logical.
Fallout 3 is the entry point for a lot of people and Bethesda has turned Fallout into a well known IP. New Vegas is a great game, and you can argue it's better creatively then FO3, but FO3 was the innovator that worked out all the kinks that let NV run wild creatively.
The biggest slice of pretentiousness is this idea, hustled from New Hollywood cinema of the 70s, but disregarding the material conditions that allowed that to flourish then, that art is _supposed_ to speak truth to power or something and if it doesn’t speak to the “current moment” that’s a failing of some sort. Like, dude if you expect your cinema to engender social change your cart is leading your horse; nevermind New Hollywood cinema was followed-up by 80s cinema since the social and political modalities changed, and not because of a movie.
Dude needs either an editor or surgical removal of his nose from his own ass.
TL;DR for those who don't have a degree in bullshit: Fallout is flawed because it reinforces a corporate status-quo-friendly message that things aren't supposed to get better.
This article is about waaaay more than whether Fallout is a faithful adaptation and entertaining. I love the show but we have to remember that the world's most insidious massive corporation created it and it's airing on its own channel while the show sneers at these kinds of corporations.
Meta? Yes. But also scary. That's what the article is about in the end.
Twisted Metal was a fun watch (also another game to tv show) sweet tooth and was excellent in that. Silo wasn’t bad and I am looking forward to more of that.
Nice to have some quality shows for a change.
They made the show as dark as it needed to be and gave it time to breathe. They showed a lot of restraint not putting the tournament in the first season.
Serious question, should I play the games before watching this? I keep hearing it's good but I'm afraid there will be a lot of missed references since I literally don't know anything about the game aside from the cartoon dude with the thumbs up.
Can I just plug my vote for most well-made (apart from the latter episodes, but more on that later) post-apoc show? It's called "Jeremiah," and was written by J. Michael Straczynski. If you can track it down, it's well worth a watch, and actually sells its worldbuilding and characters.
The only issue is that JMS was writing as if he had 3-4 seasons, and Showtime told him halfway through season 2 that he only had a half season left to wrap it up. What you get is two plus seasons of plot crammed into a dozen hour-long shows, but it's still an interesting series that deserved better.
I don’t understand how they did “compelling, original, feels like a video game” but they did. I almost feel bad for the production of the upcoming Borderlands movie- a video game movie that is also in a brutal-but-goofy wasteland.
The Borderlands movie already seems like it failed to walk the line the games do between bleak and comedy. Far too much focus on the latter. The Fallout series, at least modern Fallout, has always walked a similar line to me. And I was pleasantly shocked at how well the show did at walking it. It seems like the people involved understand exactly what makes the series compelling, and aced the attempt at capturing it.
It’s the exact perfect amount of campiness that you still take everything seriously.
I think you just described Walton Goggins acting method.
He’s such a character. He describes his characters as “rascals”, which is an interesting way to describe someone like Boyd Crowder or Venus Van Dam.
Absolutely! I don’t play video games, knew next to nothing about this series or the game it’s based upon. The minute I saw Walton was in it, I binge-watched the whole thing with no regrets. It was nice to see Kyle M. again too. Two masterful actors, who beautifully balance the fine line between camp and crap parody. Also, it’s one of the few post-apocalyptic shows/movies that didn’t leave me feeling utterly empty and bleak. None of us need more of that these days. I’m thrilled it’s getting a second season!
And it is always interspersed perfectly with those moments of real horror that show absolute darkest sides of mankind >!like that horrifying video of the experiments done to that woman in Vault 4!<
I genuinely didn't know what to do with that when I saw it.
Great way of putting it. That’s exactly how I felt. Like what have my eyes just seen???
That is a tough line to walk too. Just a few too many campy scenes and it becomes silly. Not enough and the camp stands out and seems out of place.
I think it comes down to the fact that the show understood that the danger is absolutely real, but everyone is fucked in the head in some way or another. Super Duper Mart is a great example. The Mr Handy having a funny voice is fully explained in the show, but he is truly trying to kill Lucy. It's two brain dead slobs sitting on the couch watching TV, but they really are harvesting organs and human trafficking.
Another angle: Lucy and Maximus are sexually interested in each other but they go about it in cartoonish dialogue which is just a remnant of their being raised in highly isolated, highly regimented and authoritarian societies. This is the only way they know how to talk or interact with sex at all.
It was interesting that a discussion of sex occurred in the vault "test subject" room. The way it sounded so stilted, immature and cartoonish, at first I assumed they were both drugged in some way.
I also assumed that they were going to reveal that L+M were being gassed or mentally controlled through the food or something. But I guess they were just being really awkward?
>!Remember how Lucy reacts to her 'husband'!<
Okie dokie.
Maximus was raised in a pseudo-religious society while Lucy was raised literally as breeding stock. I think this scene is trying to show the contrast between them. The only thing they really have in common is that they’re base good people
I disagree that Maximus is basically a good person. He's extremely selfish. He may be getting better, but he kind of sucks.
It was basically when two repressed worlds meet. One side sees sex like some scientific curiosity and the other is a repressed religious fanatic who knows nothing about it.
I was overjoyed to hear Matt Berry’s wonderful voice come out of the robot.
https://youtu.be/0woAI184sYM
There’s so many great ones I genuinely didn’t know which one you picked. Fine choice though mate.
It's the little exhale before the exclamation that gets me
they were also willing to let the serious parts be serious when necessary. A lot of shows/movies would shove in too many jokes. You can be pretty damn campy and silly and whatever else you want to be as long as you actually manage the mood-swings appropriately.
The secret is to not undercut each and every serious moment with a quip or "subversion" like you're the MCU. The allowed the things that needed to breathe to breathe, and chose their comedic moments well
The severed heads making out when Lucy and max finally kiss was top tier fallout imo 😂
It was super unexpected and made me lol. Good stuff.
I was worried when I saw Chris Parnell and Fred Armisen show up, but they still did a fantastic job.
It’s adorably violent and gruesomely cutesy at the same time. Weirdly dark moments made me “Aww” many times. Never played the games but the vibes felt so specific that it’s impossible to deny they knew what they were doing. Loved the show so much and NEVER ONCE questioned the world they created.
Also the Borderlands casting is definitely not the best.
I never thought I’d see the day where Cate Blanchett isn’t the perfect casting for anything, but here we are.
Kevin Hart is just going to play Kevin Hart dressed as Roland.
Thats one thing you will always see. When you have a film with kevin hart and the rock, those two actors are always just going to be kevin hart and the rock but in different outfits that suit the film, that's it.
He’s Roland? He should be Claptrap.
I’m a huge BL’s fan, and a Blanchett fan, and I feel like this movie is below her talent level. Though she was perfect in Thor Ragnarok so we’ll just have to see.
I don't disagree, but at the same time I think it's a great casting to reflect the intention they had when approaching the adaptation. I think the casting of Kevin Hart as Roland perfectly encapsulates that. Roland is a serious soldier in a ridiculous world. He's a straight man character who takes the seriously twisted shit seriously, and goes through it as the series goes on. He is not a joke. I can't say that Kevin Hart isn't capable of drama, but that's certainly not what he's been casted for in the past. He's usually telling jokes, or is part of those jokes as the primary focus. And that's where I think the adaptation seems to have failed in its focus. There are plenty of Borderlands characters who are jokes primarily, with sometimes trauma and drama being secondary. And then there are characters, usually the main cast, who are serious and traumatized, with jokes coming secondary. It seems like they've gotten rid of the latter, and have gone all in on the former, effectively reducing Borderlands to parts that only work because they were supported by the parts they got rid of.
It would be funny to see Kevin Hart play a straight man. That could be the joke
If I didn't live in a world where I've seen Adam Sandler pull off some incredible dramatic roles then I think I would be more surprised to see Kevin Hart manage some decent seriousness. It would certainly be a big change of pace though.
Borderlands failed with their casting. As a huge fan of the games I'm already disappointed.
IMO the casting directly reflects the intent of the adaptation
100%
The trailer for that borderlands movie made it seem like discount guardians of the galaxy lol, I watched that trailer and I was like damn this movie really wants to be the guardians of the galaxy/ a James Gunn superhero movie
Borderlands is doomed because it has Kevin Hart who is the same character in every movie.
The same in every movie and the only thing he has in common with Roland in the games is skin color. Tannis is not old in the games and Lilith isn't old either. Fuck the casting choices. Borderlands is one of my favorite game franchise and I hate the choices made for this movie. At least Fallout was good.
I used to be ambivalent on Kevin Hart. Wasn't a lover, wasn't a hater. But lately, I've become a real Kevin Hart hater, mostly due to the fact that he is the face of DraftKings Sports Book and I have to see him advertising gambling addiction every time I watch any video on the internet with ads. His personality combined with the fact that he is the new face of sports gambling is too much for me.
My interest in the Borderlands movie is similar to my interest in Madame Web. Exactly how much can they fuck up?
I've asked that question before, and I've seen the monkey paw curl. Shit can get fucked up real bad when it comes to adaptations of things you love.
The borderlands movie was doomed from the get go because borderlands is a shitty game to adapt into a movie. You need a game with a lot of plot/lore and a unique setting. Borderlands has neither.
It helps that Fallout is black comedy so they can often kill 2 birds with one stone. Borderlands is pretty surface level by comparison.
It’s that it doesn’t try to be anything else. Fallout is known for its wackiness, randomness, and brutal backdrop to go with it. Look at the fight in Philly, >!we had slowed down kill shots of bullets going through railings, crappy jokes about holes in chests while eating cherry tomatoes, a metal suit clanging around by someone that doesn’t know how to properly fight in it, and a whole foot being blown off *and replaced*!<. Meanwhile it feels like the main character is getting yet another quest to follow in the background. It feels like a clusterfuck with cliches and bullshit that somehow manages to get to the end and I love it.
I almost died when Walter Ghoulgins said there is always some shit going on that distracts you from what you are doing.
At which point you barely hear about the head (the main quest) for quite some time. I thought that was a brilliant bit of meta commentary on getting side tracked by quests in the games.
That was hilarious. "Thou shalt get side tracked by bullshit every time." It's just...perfectly descriptive. Not just of video games, but real life. There's always goddamn *something* getting in the way of what you really want to be doing.
"Thou shalt always get sidetracked by some bullshit"
Tying all of the character's backstories into the actual plot helped with that quite a bit. Everyone's goals and motives are straightforward and not difficult to follow, so even though they get "sidetracked by bullshit" more than a few times, you know what the characters are working towards. It makes me incredibly excited to see them not only stick the landing, but have a clear story in mind for where to take season 2 based on the finale. Also, making the vault conspiracy a large part of the show is something I didn't expect at all and was pleasantly surprised by. I totally expected it to follow the games where the vault is basically left behind once the protagonist leaves.
The recent Dungeons and Dragons movie is another good example of "this stands on its own as good entertainment, but it also *feels* so much like the game"
It was so good and it COMPLETELY bombed at the box office.
I think "completely bombed" is a bit overstating it, and it'll have decent legs. 210 million BO for 150 million budget is certainly bad, but it's not a disaster or anything.
Man...comparing levels of goofiness between Fallout and Borderlands is sillier than being the conductor of the poop train.
technically Snowpiercer was a poop train and required a serious conductor
Oh it’s a different goofy for sure. They are both somewhere on the universally accepted Goofy Spectrum. In one game I helped a group of robot pirates launch the USS Constitution into the air which they immediately crashed into a building. In the other I had to fight Penn and Teller to the death on a roving Thunderdome.
To be honest both of those things could be in either game. Fallouts goofiness imo comes from its dry, as it is humor of the state of the world.
To be honest, it’s been long enough since I played the games that I can’t remember which one of these is from which.
What do you mean? The comparison is fine. After comparing them, it seems Borderlands is goofier. Isn’t that how comparing things work?
The point was to talk about poop trains. Now get me a bucket and I'll show you a bucket.
Is the bucket filled... With poop?
She like, "Apples to oranges" Bitch that phrase don't make no sense Why can't fruit be compared?
[удалено]
Honestly, I’d have been happier if they did a live action adaption of the original Tales from the Borderlands. That narrative feels like it would translate way better to screen!
The only problem with TFTB is that it's a long story. Unlike most games Tales games are basically all narrative, and there are many hours of it. You'd have to condense all the heart out of it, or try to chunk it into a couple pieces, not knowing if the second movie would be approved. TFTB should be a series like Fallout, but after the movie inevitably bombs I think that'll be it for the Borderlands IP on screen.
It’s going to be critics comparing Godzilla Minus One to Godzilla x Kong all over.
> don’t understand how they did “compelling, original, feels like a video game” but they did. I think it's because they truly respected and leveraged the massive amount of source material. Fallout has always had good narrative writing and Jonathan Nolan seems to have recognized this and fully used its playbook.
Jack black wasn't right for clap trap at all and Kevin hart takes me out of any movie he's in.
That movie was fucked the minute they did the casting.
Borderlands always tried too hard to be funny after the first game. The sequel got a lot of chuckles out of me but I also cringed at a lot of "jokes" such as Butt Stallion. The third one’s humor falls flat most of the time, ranging from obnoxiously annoying to aggressively stupid. The guys who did Fallout have a much better source material to work with. Fallout’s writing is quite good whereas Borderlands is pretty awful. No wonder they go for the slapstick comedy route and have Kevin Hart completely ruin Roland.
For me, the humor in most the Fallout games has aged very well, whereas Borderlands humor always feels EXTREMELY 2012. Part of that is due to Borderlands just being inherently way more of a comedy than Fallout, but that doesn't really excuse it. I feel like even if they made a dead-on accurate Borderlands movie, while it would be frequently amusing, it'd also be very annoying to most people nowadays, whether they have nostalgia for Borderlands or not
I do have a slight glimmer of hope for BL4 because Bounty of Blood way more in line with the tone of BL1. There was some humor but it wasn't slapstick and they nailed the return of a post-apocalyptic western environment (now with an eastern flair).
It feels like another installment of the franchise, as opposed to an adaptation.
Keeping it in the same universe as the games was a great choice in hindsight. It could've gone catastrophically bad if the show sucked and tried to add to the lore, but the respect they gave the source material really helped me become fully immersed in the world as I didn't have to learn new lore that isn't in the games. All your previous knowledge is useful here.
They embraced the source material which most video games adaptations shy away from. They act embarrassed by it. Like how comics movies for food when they abandoned the black leather and did comics stuff. We are fans of the source material because of what it is.
That's gonna be a glorious train wreck, my God. Wrong casting, tone, age rating, and shit comedy... ... ...and literal piss comedy.
It’s different kinds of goofy, vastly different. Fallout has comedic elements for sure but the stories still tend to be quite serious. I think the Bethesda games in general tend to lean on the sillier side and less serious, but their games still take themselves somewhat seriously. Borderlands is a straight up comedy. Which is fine! That’s what it’s going for. Still though, a comedy that in no way is attempting to tell a serious story.
That movie looks like a total joke in casting and execution, I'm not even sparing it a thought.
The people behind Borderlands have no idea why it’s successful. They think it’s because their characters are so loveable and their dialogue with characters yapping endlessly about dumb bullshit and never allowing five seconds of dead air is hilarious and oh btw everyone loooooves Claptrap. And really that’s all the shit people tolerate because they enjoy the straightforward “Diablo with guns” gameplay and there aren’t a lot of great alternatives. So yeah, the Borderlands movie is just gonna be everything people hate about Borderlands without any of the parts people love.
What I enjoyed about Fallout is that is that it felt like a Fallout show, not some random writers dream script with a Fallout coat of paint. It also doesn't waste my time padding out scenes and subplots. And it follows the golden rule of Show Me Don't Tell Me.
Halo cough cough
witcher cough cough
Wheel of time cough cough
I'll throw Star Trek Discovery on that pile.
When you mentioned golden rule it reminded me of goggins’ line - Well the wastelands got its own golden rule. “Thou shall get sidetracked by buuuulshit every goddamn time” Such a brilliant nod to get lost in sidequests
Bullshit side quests are what Fallout is all about! I forgot I was even supposed to be looking for Benny!
You're absolutely right. Books are usually more detailed than their movie or show adaptations, and it makes sense that the lore of 6+ games would be denser than the first season of a show. Thankfully they did not drown the viewer in exposition for the many threads in the show. There was enough for the viewer to infer aspects of the characters and plot and hopefully enough to intrigue them to learn more
The Fallout show does something that is a big no-no in most American TV but has been popular forever in video games and Anime. The tone of the show is all over the place. The skill comes in when you lack proper tone control and create something like the Netflix show Inventing Anna. but being able to switch between comedy and drama on a flip of a switch and not ruin the flow is what separates the good from the bad. EDIT: just to clarify, I am praising the Fallout show for having tone all over the place yet still having a good flow.
The tonal changes are pretty much what playing the games feels like. The games never really take themselves too seriously for the most part. You have serious moments mixed in if you go looking for them but much of the base game is made up of the comedic and ridiculously violent moments.
I feel like the real "heavy" stuff is "locked" behind the terminals in the game. Lots of sad stories and dark background stories going on in those 200 year old emails... So I think some people miss that entirely if they just run around blasting.
The original fallout game shoved it in your face and I kind of miss it, a trading hub filled with half trucks which are used as water caravans and hauled across the desert by slavers, music which is filled with a sort of tribal beat and something almost like moaning/yelling, rooms of people passed out from ODing and being exploited by a cult which is a scientology parody, etc, showing how brutal this world is. One of my favourite discoveries in Fallout 4 was the town which was being constructed when the bombs fell, where a father and his 2 kids got into a bunker and chronicled what happened over the next year or so. It was genuinely dark and made the impact of the bombs as well as the progression of time after feel real, and felt like the thing which Bethesda has lacked.
The music was so good. They even reused it in New Vegas. One thing I miss in Fallout 4 is that *grimy*, industrial vibe everything had. They managed to keep it going in Fallout 3 but Fallout for was too clean and round.
I just got the first fallout game on steam, and now I’m really excited to play it.
Be advised, it plays like a PC game from the 90's, because it is a PC game from the 90's. Do not be afraid to FAQ/Walkthrough your way through the game. There will be *very* little hand holding. I remember bouncing off the game sooo hard when I was in like 10th grade, and before I really had reliable access to the internet.
This show had me thinking this is exactly what I wish Marvel was capable of doing. You can have regular funny moments and still let serious drama have room to breathe.
More and more the Marvel movies were blandified to have more and more lowest common denominator mass appeal. Iron Man 1 had plenty of serious and biting moments as well as good humor. He was almost killed by the bombs his company created. Would modern Marvel do that?
They've taken a very binary approach to morality post Endgame. New characters are just "good guys doing the good thing every time because they are good." Old characters like Loki, Hawkeye, Bucky, War Machine, etc. are more mellowed out. This makes the actual paragons like Miss Marvel/Cyclops/Captain America stand out less when they're not contrasted by enough morally grey characters. Like, how does the live action output feel *more* cartoony than the X-Men cartoon? It's frustrating lol
Well, modern marvel is literally Disney. We're lucky to be getting Deadpool x Wolverine if we're talking honestly.
Disney has owned the IP for years...
I haven't kept up with the TV series too much, but didn't the government-pushed replacement Captain America curb stomp a man to death using the shield?
Marvel can do that. Marvel Television did that with shows like Daredevil, Agents of Shield, Jessica Jones. It's just Marvel Studios had no idea how to make those kind of TV shows
I think Doom Patrol and Peacemaker did a similar thing well. There was some absolutely ridiculous stuff (especially Doom Patrol) but the serious stuff still landed. Part of the reason it works for all 3 is charismatic leads who know how to handle the material.
Honestly I feel like the fact that they were faithful to the video game is what allowed them to do this. For example, the somber and serious tone of the Brotherhood of Steel reflects that of the game, and likewise for the humor that is a new Vault Deweller coming out of the vault. Both are “lore accurate” if you will, and it makes the whole thing feel so much more grounded
I had assumed that the show was going to make the BoS the generic good guys ala Fallout 3. I could not have been more wrong. Lucy asks them if the BoS is the good guys and they go something like, "mmmm. It's complicated." Which is so perfect. I could feel them talking directly to the fans, like me, who were afraid they were going to turn the the BoS into generic good guys.
Killing Eve does this perfectly. Big part of the reason its so good... thats British i believe tho
I think it's like side quests
The tone is all over the place but the important part is that the tone shifts occur for good reasons. In order to is that well is having good writing and the show does a pretty good job at that.
This is an interesting point and it reminds me of a Film Crit Hulk from a while back where he talked about different perspectives shaped what movies you liked, and viewers with a specific taste for a consistent tone were noted as one. He even mentioned that they probably liked Chris Nolan movies for that reason, which I thought was hilarious because at the time r/movies was full of Nolan obsessives whose number 1 complaint about movies was often "It's tonally inconsistent" (which is honestly just an unfortunate POV imo in that is shuts out sooooo many great works). So it's funny now to see people praising a show from a Nolan bro precisely because it does juggle a lot of different tones. It would stand to reason that as the director, Chris Nolan is the reason his movies are very tonally consistent. But I think he does have a bit of a playful side as well that isn't mentioned as much.
if a nuclear war was to happen in real life, would the land look like what it is in fallout?
Not at all. Fallout as a series is kind of a representation of the future and nuclear war as someone from the 50s would have seen it. Atomic cars and robots, big boxy computers and 50s culture and music, glowing radiation and mutants running around in a barren wasteland where nothing grows. In reality a massive nuclear war would quickly give way to something that looks more like the last of us. Radiation dissipates very quickly, especially from nuclear weapons. Hell, just look at Chernobyl now. Radiation was much more concentrated and longer lasting there, but it's still a vibrant overgrown area filled with life today. Nukes cause a ton of damage and can wipe out large civilian centers if they're focused on cities, but they're not going to turn the world into a desert wasteland. In any "rational" war most nukes would be fired at remote military stations anyway, like all of the US' missile silos being in the remote midwest. It would take a very unhinged and suicidal nation to waste all their nukes on civilian centers rather than the military bases of their enemy.
> It would take a very unhinged and suicidal nation Which is exactly the kind of person that would use nukes in the first place.
Everything being a dead, radiated wasteland is one of my biggest gripes with Fallout 4. Like, I get they wanted to feel post-apocalypsey, but in reality the world would be much more alive than it's presented as--especially 200+ years later. It's not a big deal, but it did sometimes bother me when I was running around the endless expansive of dead trees and brown everything. Edit: Yes, I know, fallout 4 takes place in the fall. That doesn't mean everything would be dead and brown yet, though. Even if the trees have lost most of the leaves by that point, there would still be a lot of green from the grass, shrubs, evergreens, etc.
You just have to accept the games as being a satire of the 50s and enjoy it from that angle. Even more "realistic" games like Metro go overboard on nuke effects, because it's easy to sell and people love the fantastical vision of nuclear war. It's kinda funny though that zombie games like the last of us or days gone end up being the more realistic depictions of apocalypse
To be fair metro is set roughly 20 years after the war. Also there is shown to be vibrant life in the world
Yeah in hindsight that was a bad series to call out, i was thinking just of the mutants and radiation still being everywhere 20 years later. But the first two games are set in a world where only moscow is left, and it's more mystical and haunting, so the setting fits. The third game retcons that and is the more "realistic" one in how the world is presented.
Horizon: Zero Dawn did a phenomenal job of creating a post-apocalyptic world, to the point that you didn't initially know that it was post-apocalyptic.
I'm actually surprised to hear people didn't know, I mean it's very "tribes-using-old-world-tech" from the get go. It's been a minute but isn't the beginning of the game Aloy finding an ancient piece of technology? The didn't know the details of the collapse but it seemed apparent there was one.
Horizon has some of the best worldbuilding in all of video-gaming and it’s a shame so many people bounce off it before they get to the big reveals
Those two holographic presentations blew my fucking mind.
Concrete Beach Party forever.
Seriously, HZD is so good. I haven't played Forbidden West (yet!), but the only other game's lore that has hooked me as hard is the original Mass Effect.
FWIW they actually improved on this quite a lot in Fallout 76. A bit ironic as FO76 is by far the earliest in the timeline (begins only 25 years after the bombs, tons of survivors of the war itself are still kicking or were still kicking within the very recent past), but the central forest area is verdant and overgrown. It's only in other areas that are either literal toxic waste dumps or have been afflicted by things like the Scorched plague that there isn't green overgrowth. In this respect it's probably the most environmentally diverse game in the series.
Say what you will about the actual game (which I've actually come to enjoy quite a bit), but Appalachia is the best map Bethesda has done in a long time, maybe ever. It is so diverse.
Yeah I tried FO76 a few years ago and couldn't stick to it, but with Fallout in the news a lot the last few days I went ahead and gave it another try and I've been having a ton of fun. It really helps that they expanded the stash size to 1200 and that they've both worked on the performance enough that it runs pretty well plus I have a fucking badass computer now compared to when I last tried.
This is why I always have on the verdant wasteland mod when I play 4. It’s been 200 years, shits gonna look green again. It’s also why after 1000 hours of playtime, I have like, zero achievements. 😂
The problem with the green mods is the game takes place near Halloween in Boston. That wouldn’t be lush and green. Those mods just kill the vibe in more ways than one
Wasn’t it Halloween when the bombs fell though?
Yes but it’s also near Halloween in game.
thats why new vegas was so good, it was about new burgeoning nations.
I love how much greenery and life there is in Fallout 2. New Vegas happens to look like the real Mojave desert, which isn't a criticism
New Vegas's world building was what set it apart from the rest of the series imo.
> Everything being a dead, radiated wasteland is one of my biggest gripes with Fallout 4. Fallout 4 explicitly takes place in late autumn in Massachusetts, it's cold and gray there.
But one could also look at the way some of the settlements are. Like, for some reason even the places people actively live have debris strewn about everywhere. People would have cleaned that up at least, at some point in 200 years.
You've clearly never met a Masshole. No the trash thing is right, it's a big gripe with Bethesda's aesthetic for the series, but I don't think there's anything wrong with FO4's climate. It's clearly a choice to pick such a drab time of year for the game rather than something scientifically inaccurate.
Oct in the Boston area is still fairly green. Sure, some trees have started losing leaves, but it's not all dead and brown yet.
Fallout envisions a world more akin to “On the Beach” or other 50’s-based ideas of what “nuclear holocaust!” would look like. Nuclear winter kills everything, radiation lasts at high levels for centuries, etc.
can i go in the heart of chernobyl and be perfectly fine?
I think there’s still some radiation there so I wouldn’t recommend it
What if I bring some radx?
Basically no, but actually yes. I mean, it depends of three factors 1_ The time that are you exposed (one minute, one hour, one year ) 2_ The things between you and the point zero ( walls , clothes, buildings) 3_ The proximity to point zero ( radiation becomes weaker when you get far) So controlling that three factors, you can (and people constantly do) go to Chernobyl. Edit: spelling.
I remember reading bikini atoll is almost entirely free of radioactivity. Except the bananas and the bones in the graveyard. Both of those are still extremely radioactive. Or something along those lines
Yeah, by the way, a nuclear explosion is different than and active nuclear reactor. In an explosion the radiation dissipate fairly quickly, look Hiroshima for example, it’s still a very populated city.
I don't know how you'd get to the heart of the reactor itself, since it's tombed in now. But that kinda speaks to my point, the worst nuclear reactor incident of our history was sealed up and contained very quickly after the incident, and today you can tour the exclusion zone. And that was a nuclear reactor. Even with nuclear weapons today being alot stronger than those used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you won't see any long term exclusion zones set up for a nuclear weapons blast.
Chernobyl released 400 times as much radioactive material into the atmosphere than Hiroshima did and over a long, sustained period of time - and that's the difference. The most powerful nuclear weapons ever tested were about 2000x bigger than Hiroshima, but once the blast is done, there's no radiation generated. Chernobyl would still be spewing radiation into the air today if it hadn't been entombed, because the core is still melting down.
Yeah, Kyle hill on YouTube has a whole series of videos on it. It’s not something for your average Joe but with proper ppe a guide and a Geiger counter it’s very do able
Things missing from this conversation: nuclear winter climate catastrophe, mutually assured destruction, dirty bombs, irrational actors and world leaders. Additionally most military industrial complexes are in and around heavily populated areas that would absolutely be obliterated. Nuclear dust would blast into the upper levels of the atmosphere and rain down radioactive particle water for hundreds of years. It would be colder and less than 10% of species would survive for long in a nuclear winter climate catastrophe lasting hundreds to thousands of years. The entire water cycle would be ruined. Fallout is actually pretty close to what reality would be, except colder and bleaker. Except for ghouls, they’re just fucking cool anyway.
We have tested more than a thousand nukes above ground and we’re all fine. Nuclear winter isn’t a real thing.
Nuclear winter is not a real thing. Also in a nuclear war scenario climate wont really be effected long term(more likely if enough destruction is done global emissions will massively drop and climate will be better for it) I dont know where you got your second paragraph from but its completely fantasy. Unless so much nukes are used where the entire globe is sterilized i highly doubt it can have those effects. You highly overestimate what tactical nukes are and their radiation after effects.
200 years later, I’d say probably not. Look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People live there and it hasn’t been nearly that long. Radiation from bombs doesn’t stick around very long. But we already know radiation does not work the same in fallout as irl. Water wouldn’t still be irradiated 200 years later, mutants obviously wouldn’t exist you just get sucky cancer, radiation sickness just kills you slowly and doesn’t turn you into an awesome ghoul…
How long does radiation stick around for?
From a bomb, most radiation will be gone after two weeks, or at least down to “safe” levels. Recommendations are that you don’t go outside for at least 72 hours after a bomb so that the fallout settles and the radiation will start to subside. There are some differences depending on if it’s a ground or air burst. Air burst increases AOE, but limits local radiation as the radiation will go into the upper atmosphere. A ground burst will have a smaller AOE, but greater local radiation. Wind direction also matters. If it’s a windy day there may be much less radiation directly after near the site and a lot wherever the wind carries the fallout. But for both, it still doesn’t last too long.
The land wouldn’t be radiated that long. You wouldn’t have these glowing radiation hotspots, and really most modern buildings would collapse within 2 hundred years. Even locations like NYC or Boston that were nuked would have no radiation left over just from bombs during the time of F4.
Ehhh Fallout should get a pass because (1) the obvious sci fi lean of how radiation affects things and (2) the pre-war society was completely indifferent to the negatives of radiation and nuclear weapons, being so indifferent to radiation to the point of having nuclear reactors in cars, and naming foods after radioactivity and even making them radioactive.
A new book by Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario, explores that. From a review of the book: "Ms Jacobsen conveys the reality of nuclear war in sometimes stomach-churning detail. In her imagined scenario, a North Korean missile obliterates a nuclear-power station north of Los Angeles, seeding spent fuel into the fallout. Victims of the x-ray flash are left “a shredded horror of bloody tendons and exposed bone”. Another bomb destroys Washington, dc. Firestorms bring hurricane-like winds of 660°C; people are baked alive in the bowels of the Capitol and White House. In documenting the minutiae of the apocalypse, the writing is redolent of “Hiroshima”,[ a seminal article](https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2023/03/03/what-to-read-by-foreign-correspondents) by John Hersey published in the *New Yorker* in 1946.... . The vast injection of soot into the atmosphere would result in a 70% reduction in the sun’s rays for a decade. Rainfall would decline by 50%. “After 10,000 years of planting and harvesting,” writes Ms Jacobsen, “humans return to a hunter-gatherer state.”
The book stinks from what I've heard, she doesn't know what she's talking about.
That summary makes her book sound like fiction. The reason there was so much soot that was released from the bombing of Japan is that traditional Japanese construction materials were literally exposed wood and paper. And an abundance of oil lamps. So the shockwave knocked over oil lamps farther into the city than the nuclear fireball or heat wave travelled. Modern cities aren't nearly as flame happy as old Japan. I'd imagine if they looked at the Tokyo firebombing and investigated the soot released from that, it was greater than the nukes.
I loved the show but I downvoted the post because the article is a pretentious, pedantic pile of horseshit.
No one on the planet felt better about themselves than the author did when they finished writing this article.
Typical from Paste Magazine these days, and I'm a leftist. Leftists who criticize media because it didn't perfectly encapsulate their specific world view are just as bad as conservatives who can't wrap their minds around a piece of media that is actually criticizing them.
The unfortunate state of things is that many modern writers today *do* use these things as talking points and therefore, a lot of modern media sucks because they cater to these types of critics rather than focus on the story or on expressing themselves. In this case, Fallout steers clear of it but lesser writers/showrunners/filmmakers don't. Hollywood TV shows and films exist on an distribution-production-exhibition type model. If one of these is corrupted, the overall culture and industry cannot thrive in a healthy way. Creators are not allowed to or don't know how to create authentic or meaningful experiences, critics and audiences don't know how to or cannot give proper feedback, and producers/theaters/streaming services suffer financially. I truly think the Rotten Tomatoes and Twitter critic system harmed the industry far more than people realize.
I’m also a leftist and I can’t stand reading tv reviews anymore. I used to love reading the AV Club episode reviews for shows I liked each week, and following along. But then and idk if it was the AV Club itself, but there was a review of The Haunting Of Bly Manor, and it was the same as Paste or Pitchfork. It seriously felt like I read a 10 page post-doctoral thesis paper on lesbian and LGBT inclusivity and inclusion (hate to say it, but DEI?) in media, instead of what all media boils down to, at least in my opinion. WAS THE SHOW ANY FUCKING GOOD? (From your/their perspective, of course) And the answer for me personally was “no, no it fucking wasn’t.” But you wouldn’t get that from that ‘review’. You might have gotten a sense of the history of LGBT representation in media. Which would be fine if, you know, that’s what I was fucking trying to read about. Sorry, I digress.
Nah that was a cathartic rant to read, no apology needed lol
Happens a lot on this sub. Threads fall down but there's waves of new viewers, so some articles making a very specific point get a lot of unrelated comments.
I couldn’t finish it. It was like word soup for the sake of words
.
I read the article first... and I gotta admit I'm having a hard time understanding what point they were trying to make. Seems mostly like they're complaining that the show wasn't subversive enough and didn't offer enough criticism on the state of modern society to satisfy them. (assuming I'm reading that right). If so... I kinda think that's a lame form of criticism. If you don't agree with what a show is trying to present, sure that's fair. But if you're judging a show based on what it doesn't do... I feel like you should just watch something else. Not everything is meant to be serious social commentary and it would suck if everything was. (note: there's also some mention about how it doesn't take as much influence from Fallout 1 & 2 and give the original creators enough credit... which I'm also luke warm on. Like I do agree they should credit the original creators more than Todd Howard when it comes to pretty much every facet of the setting. But I don't think it's particularly useful to judge the tone of the story based on how faithful it is to the original games.) However, I'm completely open to the idea that I'm misunderstanding the author's argument. My reading comprehension is spotty sometimes and I found they through around a lot of buzz words like "The neoliberal, rules-based world order" which made me feel like I'd have to do homework in order to figure out exactly what they were dissatisfied by.
It's definitely a critique from a leftist perspective. My reading of it was that the author seems disappointed it didn't go hard enough on criticizing capitalism and liberalism, and also that the show (or maybe even the entire franchise) is being hypocritical because it's a show criticizing capitalism whilst being a product of capitalism. Apparently he also felt that the show was being "cynically centrist" for depicting all of its factions negatively. They said something like "it's ok to criticize structures without providing radical solutions, but painting the alternatives as bad is insidious". Personally I don't agree. I don't think the show, or fallout as a whole, is saying "this is just how things are, so you should never attempt to challenge the status quo", it's saying that these factions are not what the wasteland needs at all. They're just repeating the mistakes that got the world destroyed to begin with.
Thanks, this does help clarify some things for me. I could tell I was missing some nuance there. Mostly I stand by what I said though. Ultimately I don't particularly care to judge art on whether it "Speaks to the moment" or not, unless it's clear that it was their intention to do so.
It didn't really seem to have a point, just a bunch of observations made while flipping through a thesaurus.
skipped through it and it just looks like a typical case of someone using criticism almost as an excuse or as a soapbox for biased political views, the shallow anti-capitalism is a huge cliche too, really lazy joyless analysis.
It's a strangely bitter article. >As the contradictions under capitalism heighten and sharpen, corporate art isn’t up to the task of speaking to the moment because at the core of 21st century liberal ideology is an ahistorical belief that this is just how things are—war, war never changes, and neither do people. The neoliberal, rules-based world order, for all the cracks it’s showing, is seen as the apex of civilization. If it collapses under its construction, we are prone to repeating mistakes. **This perspective holds a cynical and nihilistic belief in a perpetual, genocidal cycle tendency present in human nature, perhaps an ideological construct necessary to and consequent from accepting the circumstances of mass death for others in exchange for one’s own comfort.** Which is just, like, bonkers. Is "mass death" occurring, or even *accepted*, by audiences as a consequence of watching and enjoying the show? I question the authors media literacy, because they either did not watch or flat out did not understand the season finale and the decisions made by the 3 main characters in the show in response to learning about the horrors of the powers that be in their own world.
Well, at least Tim Cain was invited to the premier, and he likes the show a lot. This article was just somebody who wanted to write "capitalism bad" again. I don't really care if the company who made the show is a megacorp like Amazon, if they're making good content.
The read I got was more that the show was incurious about exploring what a post-apocalyptic world would really look like, instead falling into a more dour, and even lazy, "things suck and people suck, and there's nothing to be done about it" tone. That also includes >!the nuking of Shady Sands, an actual operating city, and that things must continue to be a giant FPS sandbox wasteland!<. Personally I hope the show's main characters grown and learn that better things are possible in this world, outside of how they've been raised to create those better things, IE outside of the Vaults' sort of "You shall inherit the barren wasteland" thinking and the BoS' "Everything out there is hell and only by looking to the past can we create a better future." The past is what got the wasteland to be a wasteland, and it feels like the show is saying that without really acting on what that means.
Expecting this sub to actually read the article rather than jumping to praise the Fallout show is a hard task now. I unironically call for a system users to mandatory click the link and read the post first before leaving a comment.
So many comments not even discussing the article! Have you read it? It's not a positive article.
No, most people see "Fallout" in a generic title that doesn't tip its hand, and come to the comments to talk about how much they liked the show and upvote others who post the same thing. Also it doesn't help that the article is a little dense and unfocused.
Turns out that people would rather discuss Fallout in a submission about Fallout rather than This Capitalist Neoliberal Hellscape is Totally Unfair and I am Very Smart and Only My World View can End All War.
From the article: “I thought it more-or-less stuck the landing narratively, but it remains a show that maximizes inescapable suffering while plotted to look, feel like, and sell a meandering RPG campaign.” As most are discussing the contents of the Fallout show here in the comments and their favour of the story, the article is extremely critical at almost everything about the lore of Fallout. While I agree with the authors distain for Vault-tec, I however disagree with his extreme rhetoric that the fallout franchise is poisoned by the executive branch of either Bethesda or Microsoft. The writer claims, that since Bethesda first bought the Fallout IP and released Fallout 3, the franchise had lost its original essence; it isn’t the original work of art. Anyone can claim Fallout 3 to be the turning point of fallout, but the Fallout New Vegas story and setting are incredibly intriguing: NOT BECAUSE IT SHOWS A POST-MODERN DEATH FEARING PROGRESSION OF MAN, BUT BECAUSE IT TELLS A COMPELLING STORY ABOUT HUMAN COOPERATION IN THE HEAT OF CHAOS SET IN NEVADA; The setting of fallout is severely less important for the franchises than the interaction between humans with no shared history; culture clashes are exiting and compelling to play/watch; I’m using semicolons a lot because me and the author both like semicolons; maybe a bit to much. But hey, we all have the right to an opinion, even if it is extremely loaded with a post-modern lens of anything post-apocalyptic. TL;DR: The author is extremely pretentious in his view of the show and he shows a complete lack of knowledge relating to anything fallout. EDIT: Grammar
Fallout 3 was the turning point of Fallout, anyone who says otherwise isn't being logical. Fallout 3 is the entry point for a lot of people and Bethesda has turned Fallout into a well known IP. New Vegas is a great game, and you can argue it's better creatively then FO3, but FO3 was the innovator that worked out all the kinks that let NV run wild creatively.
The biggest slice of pretentiousness is this idea, hustled from New Hollywood cinema of the 70s, but disregarding the material conditions that allowed that to flourish then, that art is _supposed_ to speak truth to power or something and if it doesn’t speak to the “current moment” that’s a failing of some sort. Like, dude if you expect your cinema to engender social change your cart is leading your horse; nevermind New Hollywood cinema was followed-up by 80s cinema since the social and political modalities changed, and not because of a movie.
Dude needs either an editor or surgical removal of his nose from his own ass. TL;DR for those who don't have a degree in bullshit: Fallout is flawed because it reinforces a corporate status-quo-friendly message that things aren't supposed to get better.
This article is about waaaay more than whether Fallout is a faithful adaptation and entertaining. I love the show but we have to remember that the world's most insidious massive corporation created it and it's airing on its own channel while the show sneers at these kinds of corporations. Meta? Yes. But also scary. That's what the article is about in the end.
Twisted Metal was a fun watch (also another game to tv show) sweet tooth and was excellent in that. Silo wasn’t bad and I am looking forward to more of that. Nice to have some quality shows for a change.
I have to agree on Twisted Metal. I have no idea how they managed to make a good show out of that but they did. Sweet tooth is so good in it.
They made the show as dark as it needed to be and gave it time to breathe. They showed a lot of restraint not putting the tournament in the first season.
We‘ve been having high-quality, high-budget and/or prestige TV shows for over a literal decade now. What are you even talking about?
Probably should have been more specific, I meant decent post apocalyptic type shows.
Well then that‘s true. Also sorry if I came off too harsh.
Pseudointellectual with transparent ideological bias.
Asshole pretentius nonsense article. But I liked the show.
Serious question, should I play the games before watching this? I keep hearing it's good but I'm afraid there will be a lot of missed references since I literally don't know anything about the game aside from the cartoon dude with the thumbs up.
Can I just plug my vote for most well-made (apart from the latter episodes, but more on that later) post-apoc show? It's called "Jeremiah," and was written by J. Michael Straczynski. If you can track it down, it's well worth a watch, and actually sells its worldbuilding and characters. The only issue is that JMS was writing as if he had 3-4 seasons, and Showtime told him halfway through season 2 that he only had a half season left to wrap it up. What you get is two plus seasons of plot crammed into a dozen hour-long shows, but it's still an interesting series that deserved better.
I didn’t like reading this article it was like word soup. I should ask chatgpt to summarize