A Red Panda Squeaks

the Fallout bug that will not die.

falloutfont.png

clicked a vid a friend linked to a port of Fallout to the 3DS. Pretty neat accomplishment, to be honest, though I have my doubts about the UI adaptation.

Partly because the main menu HAS THE SAME GODDAMN NEARLY 30 YEAR OLD BUG AS EVERY MODERN VERSION.

That font is not supposed to look like that! It was never supposed to look like that!

There is a very peculiar bug that happens with the Fallout engine, where if you inadvertently apply a patch from the wrong region for the version of the game you have, it ends up causing the main menu font to be squeezed to half-width.

I ran into it like 2 decades ago at one point, because I had installed FO1 from my own US CD, and then downloaded a patch from No Mutants Allowed that wasn't labeled clearly but turned out to be from the German version of the game. Was a big pain to figure out, but I eventually found the US patch, reinstalled, and the font was normal again.

Fast-forward some years, and Interplay are broke and desperate for money, and start throwing up the old Fallout games on GoG. Somewhere in the half-assed effort they did in porting the game to modern PCs, they presumably took a US build, slapped the EU patch on it, and shipped it to an unassuming public.

And now that fucking bug has ended up persisting in every modern re-release of these fucking games, because no one can be arsed to actually correct it, they just keep shipping the same broken binaries over and over and over again. It's persisted for so damn long that it increasingly seems like no one even remembers that the game isn't supposed to look like this, because here we even have a port based on a reverse-engineered version of the game, and it STILL HAS THE BUG.

The only way you can play Fallout properly at this point is to find or pirate an actual original US CD image, and play that. I don't even know if you can trust any of the copies of the patches in circulation at this point.

And yes, I know it's a minor issue, but it's fucking ugly, and more importantly, emblematic of how little of a shit any of these companies actually give about games history.

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