bought fallout 1+2 @gog some time ago

while waiting till wasteland 2 is finished i want to play them again
(man .. last time i played them was after original release :D)

but i ask myself are the gog versions uncut ? or do i need "blood" / kid patches

would be a shame if these version are censored

hope someone played the gog versions and may tell me whats going on :)

So basically, Fallout 1 is the UK version, meaning there's still blood but no children (not like it makes a big difference anyway though)

Fallout 2 is uncensored (US version). If you install FIXT for FO1 then you can get the children and play uncensored FO1, but I've never been able to get that or the Restoration Project for Fallout 2 working on my macbook so I just play vanilla FO1 and FO2 (plus killaps patch for Fallout 2)

In fact, there are kids in the GOG version of Fallout 1, but they are made invisible and you can't target them for dialogue or attacking. Nonetheless, they are shown as dots on minimap and they can be accidentally harmed/killed with splash damage or missed shot, so you can have a Childkiller status.

OMG. That's ridiculous. I mean the lengths that liberals will go to, just to do something no one but them cares about.

Yeah, I can totally sympathise with the coders for implementing the "child removal" in this lame way, despite the fact that it screws over the players.

At least this way it draws attention to this utter stupidity of this move many years later. After all, here we are still complaining about it (as we should).

Although isn't it normally conservatives and not liberals who are to blame for censorship? Unless by "liberals" you mean "won't someone please save the children!"-slogan-touting cotton-wool coddling freedom-squashers.

It's both actually, but their methods and reasoning are different.

Conservatives like to point out that all the violence happening today is because of degeneration in entertainment media. TV, movies, rock music, video games have all been targets. This group usually takes the moral high ground on issues. In a nutshell, their thinking is "I don't like this because it's evil, censor it!!!"

Liberals on the other hand force censorship through conformity. They believe there should be no censorship unless it promotes ideals contrary to our own. Anyone who has beliefs that deviate from their norm or hasn't conformed into a "non-conformist" liberal are ridiclued for being a conformist sheep. In a nutshell, their thinking is "Everyone has a right to our opinion!!!"

Then again, this logic may have flaws as I've automatically assumed conservatives are older people and liberals are younger people. When I lived in Canada many years ago, it always amused me when some of the people I knew there got on their high horse about Canada being the freeist country in the world then supporting censorship on things they didn't like and wanting certain people dead for whatever things they've done. They like freedom yet support actions despots would be proud of, people sure are versatile eh? ;)

OK I getcha. And I pretty much agree with your reasoning - we get EXACTLY the same thing here (in Australia), though as you pointed out age isn't necessarily a determining factor (although conservatives do tend to be older, we have a few Greens senators (who are pro free speech, unless it doesn't suit them) who are older).

Although personally I prefer to call them lefties instead of liberals, primarily because our mainstream conservative party is called the Liberal Party of Australia, and that can get confusing. :)

That and those lefties tend to give "true" liberals a bad rap with their hypocrisy. Also parties like the Greens tend to be excessively socialist (at least in Australia), bordering on communism. Actually at last one Greens senator studied at the Lenin School in Moscow - the same University that Erich Honnecker (the former leader of Communist East Germany) studied at!

You are all coming at this the wrong way. This was actually a rather brilliant move by the Fallout 1 developers/publishers. The UK release was not accepted because it allowed players to inflict violence and death upon children. Instead of cutting content, they only made the sprites transparent. The censors passed the "new" build and the game was sold even though the game still have killable children!

Just leave it to the community to create an unofficial patch to reinstate the opaque sprites for children. Minimum fuss, and it got the game through the censors without doing any actual content cuts. Well, there is also the fact that all mentions of the word "Drug" has been changed to "Chem", but that never bothered me and I find it actually enhances and makes the world of Fallout feel like a unique sci-fi universe.

The reason GOG carries this censored but easily restorable release is because the UK version was patched for longer than the US release.

Well OK but how long did it take the community to release a patch that adds children? Months or years? Also remember this was 1997, when many people (myself included) only had dial-up access, and that was to a bulletin board and not "the internet" as we know it today. Many other people had no modems at all.

So I partly agree. They simply "removed" just enough code to satisfy the censors while technically still having the killable children in there - so on the one hand, a subversive middle finger to the censors, on the other because time is money and this was the quickest and easiest way to satisfy them.

The fact that this would ultimately show how useless/pathetic/outdated/tech-unaware the censors are was probably an afterthought or a happy coincidence. Likewise, the fact that this enabled the community to add them back in via an unofficial patch was probably not at the forefront of their minds, given that it was 1997 and community patches back then were not that common (AFAIK).

BTW had anyone ever actually asked any of the devs about this? I know there were a number of interviews conducted with some of the devs and designers over the years, some quite recently, but I don't recall anyone asking about this...

Well, since whenever GOG is forced to remove a game from their catalog, said game still remains in the digital libraries of everyone who had bought them before the removal, in a way, GOG still carries all the Fallout games they once sold. They just aren't allowed to sell them anymore.

Yeah Interplay lost the rights to sell Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics on December 31, 2013, meaning GOG couldn't sell them any more either (or a team of lawyers would drop from the sky and appropriate all their servers).

Bethesda now has the rights to all the Fallouts, so they could, in theory, sell them. Apparently they're going to be available on some other digital games site soon (an evil one I won't mention since I don't like installing third-party crap on my machine which insists I connect to some damn server just to play my damn games), but for some reason they don't have a price. Which either means they're free (not likely) or not yet available (most likely because Bethesda needs to add some crap to them to make them work with said digital store maybe?).

One wonders why Bethesda didn't simply continue the GOG deal to sell them. One theory is because they're assholes, but this hasn't been confirmed.

The Bethesda legal team has proven themselves to be asshole bean counters before. If they represented a record label they would probably be on youtube all day filing for take down notices on every amateur music videos ever made. Art be damned, if the expected return profit is not significantly higher than the investment risk it is not happening. Who cares about preserving gaming history, it's all about the money!

OK but I can't imagine putting Fallout up for sale to GOG - which already had it - would be an almost zero cost exercise, with guaranteed return judging by the numbers of people that are wanting to buy it.

What I should have said is, that it hasn't been confirmed that they're STUPID assholes - since it's a guaranteed net profit with minimal outlay, not to mention additional exposure and possible good will for their brand.

You're right in that their general asshole-credentials have been well-documented. Maybe that is why they won't do it after all - they LIKE being known as assholes, and putting Fallout back on GOG may go some (small) way to reduce their asshole-status.

Bethesda simply does not want to sell anything without DRM. End of story.