Dealing with backlog: The Wasteland series

The original Wasteland game is older than I am, released in 1988, and I haven't played it, but I've heard good things about the game and it's subsequent sequels/reboot. I decided to start from the first modern game; Wasteland 2, and then go from there, finishing by playing the remaster of the original if I enjoyed my time in the sequels. 

Wasteland 2: The four rookie Rangers in your party are pretty much like the soldiers in XCOM: just characters without much of a personality aside from what their blurb says; but even so I became strangely attached to Pills and Slick. My favourite companion became Corran Cain and his end was strangely poetic. I allowed him to sacrifice himself to save the rest of the Rangers from Cochise. The gameplay is nice and smooth although the dice-rolling mechanic for skill checks are extremely annoying. It became a habit of mine to manually save before any skill check (like lockpicking or disarming a bomb) because even if the meter said 93% chance to succeed, you bet I'd fail *sigh* The story picks up some 20+ years after the events of the original Wasteland, but seeing as the sequel came out so very long after the original the devs are kind enough to not expect anyone to have played the original beforehand (thank you) and there's a lot of storytelling from veteran Rangers to your rookie squad about the events that led up to Vargas being general. I liked Vargas. I was happy I managed to tweak the ending to save him and the others. I enjoyed most of the gameplay and the story. The suicide bombers were massively annoying considering they'd literally blow my squad's clothes off if they happened to stand too close to an explosion. By the time I finished in the Canyon/Temple of Titan my squad was running around butt naked, and I treated every piece of clothing I could find as if it were made of gold and diamonds. The first part of the game takes place in the barren wasteland of Arizona, but the second part takes place in the slightly less barren wasteland of California. Actually it's pretty nice. There's greenery in California. I much preferred the time I spent playing in California. The side stories in California were all much better than the side stories in Arizona. I really enjoyed this game. That song in the end didn't hurt either.

Wasteland 3: It became pretty obvious very quickly that the devs' canon ending to Wasteland 2 is that everyone died. Which made me feel pretty sad. I also didn't like what they did to Angela Deth in this game and I wish they could've left her well-enough alone with her being MIA after the events of Wasteland 2. I much prefer the nuclear winter wasteland of Colorado over the arid barren wasteland of Arizona. After the events in Wasteland 2 the Rangers are in desperate need of help and they reach out to Colorado where a man calling himself the Patriarch his leading a community. He invites the Rangers up to negotiate a deal. Nothing about it goes smoothly. The Patriarch isn't as good of a man as he makes out (but that's just reality imo) and Angela pops up and offers an alternative to the Patriarch's wishes. An alternative that I find to be extremely anti-Ranger and I can't believe they did that to her. No, imho the Patriarch isn't perfect, nobody is, but he's the best they've (we've) got. I became weirdly attached to Vic and if I do another playthrough of this game I might just do everything he wants so that I can keep him in the end. I played this game 1½ years after release and any bugs have been ironed out. From what I've read it was a buggy mess when it released and as usual people were hating on it because of that. But I got no bugs whatsoever. This has been one of the smoothest gameplay experiences ever. I also really enjoyed that they had actual songs to every single defining battle and not just instrumental soundtrack. It added a unique layer to the game that I appreciated. There were so many references ot Wasteland 2 and I loved it. Lucia and Jodie are my girls ♥ I also really liked Darius Kwon. This game went from "alright this seems pretty good" to favourite so fast. 

Wasteland Remastered: So if I understand this correctly this game is the same as the original 80s game only with updated graphics and music  and with modernized controls. Even if "modernized" seems to be pushing it a bit... In any case the 80s is still clearly visible through the polished exterior. Games were simpler in the 80s and 90s and not always in a good way. This game seems shallow compared to the other two, and while I get that they had less to work with 30+ years ago it's still a bit disappointing that there isn't more depth to it. I didn't finish the game, so maybe there's more to the story later on, but in the beginning it's pretty much the world ended; this is the Rangers; you're one of them. The gameplay is pretty simple, but with a lot of odd things that are completely unexplained and you get to figure out through trial and error. I might pick it up again at some other time to finish it, but for now I feel pretty much done.