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Fallout has been a great hit on the desktop. On the Pocket PC, there are very few similar games. It’s probably only Nuclear Time by Mallocware that is similar (and, to some degree, Pyromania), but it’s “only” a non-animated German language RPG (without a really decent and up-to-date English version) than a real Fallout-alike. (See the Roundup of All PPC Games Part I for more info on the two mentioned PPC games.)

Now, a real, free (!) Fallout clone has emerged from Russia. Russia has lately been exceptionally active on the Pocket PC gaming scene: it was just a few weeks ago that Death Drive, a really excellent Carmageddon / Destruction Derby / Twisted Metal / Death Rally clone and some days ago the first WarCraft III clone have been released. As I understand Russian quite well, I gave it a thorough go right away.

Availability, compatibility, installation

The game is available here for download. You may want to thank the great German Pocket PC gaming site PocketGaming.de for hosting it.

After downloading, unpack the contents of the ZIP file and copy ALL files to anywhere on your PDA. It runs in both the built-in RAM and a storage card.

It’s compatible with all ARM-based Pocket PC operating systems prior to WM5. This means it’s compatible with Pocket PC 2002, WM2003 and WM2003SE. Currently, it is NOT compatible with WM5.

In my tests, it ran flawlessly on my Pocket PC 2002 Compaq iPAQ h3660, WM2003 HP iPAQ h2210 and WM2003SE VGA Pocket Loox 720.

Visuals

They’re just great. For example, the four splash screens (OK, I know some of them are pretty similar to the artwork of the original Fallout game) look very cool. In the file system, these files are in the Graphics\splash\ directory. (In the following sections, I elaborate on the file availability in the file system if you do want to play with them / have a look at them).

Sound, music

The game has excellent in-game music (\Sounds\Music\17ARROYO.ogg; you can safely swap it to a music track of your own), which is played back at high quality and stereo. The sound effects aren’t bad either.

Language

Unfortunately, the game is all in Russian. If you do know the language, make sure you set the regional setting to Russian (Start / Settings / Regional Settings) to be able to fully see the Cyrillic text before starting. Otherwise, not all characters will be displayed as they should.

Fortunately, the game can be easily converted into English by just translating the textual resource files in \Maps\e1m1\ with a simple text editor. Some examples of having them edited by me: question answer.

Even the in-game graphics is easier to modify than in many other games; for example, the char / map / other buttons can be pixel-edited at Graphics\art\*_btn.bmp.png and inventories at Graphics\art\invbox.bmp.png.

Copyright

The “Author” dialog explicitly states it uses artwork from the original game. Hope they don’t get into trouble because of this.

Verdict

As with Death Drive, this title has set a new standard for free games. If you do speak / understand Russian and happen to have a pre-WM5 device, definitely give this title a go. If you don’t but love Fallout, consider starting to study the language – it seems it’s really worth it, not just because of this game but because of Pocket PC-related sources (there are a lot of genuine and unique, Russian-only Pocket PC-related information around on some Russian Pocket PC forums and boards – see for example this) and genuine Russian games in general.

News source

As with Death Drive, it was the great German Pocket PC gaming site PocketGaming.de that first reported on the game. Note that the original review states you must edit config.cfg to point to the installation directory of the game; I haven’t found any disadvantage of not setting this properly.