Today’s Free Game Friday special is a long-time favorite of mine. Taking the best aspects from that era’s Ultima and Bard’s Tale games, Wasteland improved upon them and created something unique. In the post-nuclear world of Wasteland, you create a party of desert rangers, assigning points to their pistol, SMG, assault rifle, and other various skills, my favorite being brawling. It’s quite obviously a predecessor to the Fallout games. You can eat hobo dogs and drink snake squeezins, fight outlaws and robots, and can even contract wasteland herpes.

The game marries Ultima’s top-down view with Bard’s Tale’s portrait-and-text battle system beautifully to create a strategic combat system not equaled until Baldur’s Gate was created years later. And the game is so small that you can store the exe on a USB drive and play it during your lunch hour.

If you play the game, a bit of advice: rope is always important, melee combat is a surprisingly good option, the toaster repair skill is actually not useless, and for the love of god, keep every servomotor you find.

Download from Abandonia