I awake in a cave. I walk up to a guy. "Fight me", he says, "but not to the death". He punches me until I die. It was from this moment I knew I was cursed.

I awake in a cave. I have re-allocated all my stats to punching harder. I walk up to a guy. "Actually we don't need to fight". Awesome.

Fallout 2 is way more finished than 1. That is to say, it is finished at all. Quests and cities are way better. There's much more sex. Every encounter has 60 enemies and 30 allies (making the combat take at least 8 years). The wasteland is a tough place - any child born with an Agility stat of less than 12 is immediately killed.

Being a punchy guy I am incredibly weak for 90% of my blind fumbling crawl through the videogame. I die repeatedly. This is the only game where I am extremely elated to hit 1/3 hits on a 73% hit chance. I like to imagine that every time my character dies I awaken in that same cave and retrace my steps until I inevitably blow myself up in a hurricane of shit trying to kill a rat in a toilet.

My tribal grug player character has immediately started doing Monty Python references and saying shit like "the narwhal bacons at midnight" the moment I hit the first town. At other points he says shit like "Door? What is door? Me live in tent what is door?". I find this a bit odd. But he's trying his best. My first companion who is here to investigate a slaver, doesn't seem to care that I've just bought my second companion from that same slaver. Luckily the slave is soon destroyed in milliseconds as I try to use a grenade with a thrown skill of 14.

At this point I can walk in any of 5 directions. I end up walking to the place where I get my semen guzzled out by a machine to store in a sperm bank. I knew I made the right choice.

At the remaining 10% of the game I suddenly cannot be defeated in combat by anyone ever, and I do 90 billion damage per punch, because I am awesome. As long as my fist doesn't run out of batteries.

Ultimately there's still a lot of leftover jank that it's hard to justify not fixing in a sequel - the fact that you have to open doors manually, the fact that I still can't see any of my items on the floor ever in any universe, the fact that companions can still choose to lock you inside a bar by piling on the entrance like my stupid dog in front of the kitchen door. The biggest problem is really the extremely long combat sequences - who the HELL wants to fight 20 wolves? All that being said it's still an immediate and obvious upgrade to Fallout 1. Hopefully they will make more!!! LOL!!!