I almost forgot about you folks today. I was outside scraping some rust off the bottom of my car's driver side door. Man, I'm glad I caught that fairly early. I sealed it up with some rust treatment gunk. Some tidbits follow, btw, just assume SIC goes around all of these quotes. :-)

• Q) Will npcs you talk to be repricented my the nice 3d rendered heads that we all remember from the old games? or Will the just be text? or maybe both like in the old games?
  A. No talking heads. There is no extended dialogue mode. Depending on the final size of the dialogue script, we are going to try and record all dialogue as audio. My boss would like you to be able to play the game without ever reading a line of text.

• Some vehicles will have built in weaponry.
• There will be more crippling criticals than in F and F2 (I almost never saw that happen in F or F2).
• They are shooting for 30-40 hours of single player gameplay.

RE: The editor.

• Q) will it be possible to script events?
  A) Yes.
• Q) will it be possible to create NPC dialogue?
  A) Yes.

I really liked the talking heads, they were great. Plus the voice acting in the games was always top notch. Oh well, this isn't an RPG anyway.

The unarmed combat will be more "cinematic." I assume this means it will be more flashy than the one kick and punch animation in F and F2. Being a martial artist, I find myself happy with this. While the unarmed combat in F2 was more advanced it sucked that there was still only a few animations for it.

Another day, more Fallout news right? Hmmm, what can we find here. Interesting tidbits include...

• No two handed weapon use will be included in F:BOS.
• Ammo will be limited, forcing you to use different weapons.
• There will be multiple ways to complete the different missions.

• Q) I assume the team has been testing the multiplayer game. I'm curious how it will work, do games tend to play out with the teams charging eachother immediately and fighting to the death, or have your matches lasted longer?
  A) Matches are currently lasting 5-10 minutes or so with 2 player, 6 character squads. Sneakiness works (flanking, setting up a sniper down a long street, using a hound to flush out opponents and waste their APs then bringing the whole squad around the corner).

This game is sounding more and more cool as time goes on. The fact that it has multiplayer support is reason enough to go for it. I can't remember a good squad based game that had multiplayer included.

Try checking out some of the games that have come before this one in terms of tactical combat. The best are probably the X-COM series (excepting Apocalypse) and the Jagged Alliance series. I've seen the XCOM games for sale in the bargain racks at EB and Software ETC. Realistically, I'd say you could just go with XCOM: UFO Defense and skip the rest. Although Terror From The Deep was okay, it didn't have the same great atmosphere that UFO did, Apocalypse is just not worth it. Pick up Jagged Alliance 2 as it improves on the older JA games greatly. BTW, if anyone has any good XCOM: UFO Defense sites let me know. Hasbro/Microprose doesn't even promote it anymore on their website.

A few items from the F:BOS forums.

• Q. (Regarding Pistols in the game) We all know what's going to happen, we'll use them for the first mission then never use them again. Waste of animations. Give us weapons we want to keep!
  A. There is a good reason for pistols now.
• Q. Are the characters 3D?
  A. Only when they are being modelled... They are 2D sprites in the game.
• Q. Will any kind of Mecha be available?
  A. Probably not.

Looks like things are settling down a little in the F:BOS forums as many of the important questions get answered. Also with the weekend here, there isn't anyone around from the development team to answer stuff. A couple of items interested me from the forums. The confirmation from Chris Taylor that in F1 and F2 NPC's did take targeted shots, but only very rarely. Since you control the NPC's in F:BOS that is a moot point for this new game, but still an interesting tidbit for the other games.

Also, for all you folks out there that experienced the long loading times between levels in F1 and especially in F2 (my 32X Plextor Ultra SCSI CDROM definitely cut that down, heh), Chris Taylor has indicated that loading times are quite snappy in this new game so far, faster than F1 and F2. Found this cool link to some Fallout inspired artwork in the forums as well.

A little tidbit that people seem to be having trouble with is that in the screenshots for Fallout Tactics: BOS up on the Interplay website the guns in some of the screenshots are mislabeled. The developers have indicated several times in the forums that those screenshots are pre-alpha artwork and they were using placeholder pieces to fill things in. So, the guns will be labeled correctly in the final version of the game, no need to ask about this anymore. I found these questions related to the vehicles that will be included in the game interesting.

• Q) if you are in a car, for example, does this mean the car will take all damage directed at you?
  A) Perhaps all, perhaps some.
• Q) does the car have a damage limit at which point it explodes in a pretty fireball eg.hollywood style ?
  A) Absolutely. Not fun for the occupants either.
• Q) im also asuming you would be made away of this so you may exit the vehicle and leave it careening on to its firey death...interesting tactic...the old flaming car raming trick.
  A) Nice. That may be possible under the rules we are considering.
• Q) after all this would it be possible to repair a car? if it hasnt been totally destroyed.
  A) Maybe. This is one likely use for the repair skill.

The flaming car death trick would be cool if they could implement it. An earlier post did mention that you won't be able to use melee weapons from vehicles. So no baseball bat out the car window or Ripper for that matter. I also like the idea of being able to repair vehicles. It would be great if you could scavenge parts from wrecks and what not and fix them up. I'm sure that is probably getting a little too in depth for a turn based strategy game though.