I love the fact these two games are so unbalanced from the combat perspective.

You never know when you'll suffer a big critical or get attacked by a mob of gun wielding drug addicts, each and every one of them carrying a burst weapon... It is so refreshing to play these old games again and see various design ideas that somehow died out in the last 10 years and more.

Every game today, no matter what the genre, tries to have balanced and symetrical gameplay. It's not only the multiplayer games that have this sickness, single player games are the real offenders. Remember Oblivion? When is the last time you seriously tried to "run away" during battle when playing modern games? I think today's games don't even have the option to do so, everything is so linear and easy...

Every year I play Fallout and Fallout 2 once and I try to progress through the games as much as I can using only one life. This year while playing Fallout 1 I expired after foolishly entering the mutant base alone. There were 3 mutants there that blew me to hell with miniguns, although i had quality Brotherhood armour. A question for the veterans, can you ask for help in the city before entering the military base?

Next year, another chance at the circle of post-apocalyptic life...

Ha! Frankly, I only played two RPG games before: Pokemon Red/Yellow/Silver (OK, that's actually three already, though all differ one from another at most slightly) and... South Park: The Stick of Truth (obviously, very recently). The rest just seemed to repel me throughout all the years. That was until very recently, when I finally installed Fallout I had been presented on a GOG give-away, that is.

The game might be 17 years old, but I don't care, most games I play are of similar age. I fell in love with its complexity, with the overall dystopian mood (which has enough juice to make one think the world after nuclear holocaust might actually be a decent, interesting place to live), as well as much freedom given.
Surely, there are things I hate; lots of minor quests being unmarked in the pip-boy (thus me eventually forgetting about them if not for the Fallout Wiki) start the list, or other of them follow with being to vaguely defined, expecting me to figure out too much myself (after all, it's an RPG, not an adventure) or expecting me to read between the lines to get information of utmost importance. I don't mind the random factor (a.k.a. inequality) playing an important role. It goes the same in real life, actually, yet still Fallout does have the save/load feature.

Nevertheless, it's one of the most engrossing games I've ever played. Shame I didn't come across it back in the 1990s. Still, most of RPGs, that are set in fantasy universes, fail to appeal to me miserably (so does Lord of the Rings, by the way, it might be just me).

You can convince The Brotherhood of Steel to send some paladins with you to attack the base, but they won't follow you once you go inside.

Yeah. It is unbalanced and everything can kill you. Although by San Francisco you can become virtually invincible, with critters and humans scoring critical hits but not doing any damage. That's not a bad thing because it shows just how much you've grown since being that peasant from Arroyo.

I do agree about quests having little to no explanation. That's fine if you're playing the game fresh and remember every conversation etc. Not so much if you didn't touch the game for several months. I just re-installed it today to finish my playthrough and I can't remember half of the things. Luckily I'm near the end, so it's not all that bad.