We’re rerunning Richard Cobbett’s classic Crapshoot column, in which he rolled the dice and took a chance on obscure games—both good and bad.
From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to bring random games back into the light. This week, another chance to enter a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but one that soon turned into a mere Bidet of Nightmares. Drink of it at your own risk.
Wasteland eventually got its long-awaited sequel, and luckily it was good. Some might even say very good. Depending on who you ask though, there already was a sequel to Wasteland, only a year or so after the first one came out. Now, to be clear, the list of people who will tell you that is very small indeed. Not the original Wasteland team, which didn’t work on it, not Wasteland fans, who generally try to forget it, and not even publisher EA, who originally did tried to hold it up as a proper sequel, but were apparently convinced of their folly after three ghosts showed up to slap some goddamn sense into them.
Despite that, the lineage is obvious, and you’d think the thirst for a new Wasteland game would make anything even inspired by it worth a little hardcore fan fondness. How bad could it be that it was politely carved out of history almost as soon as it landed? Well, let’s find out! Though I think we can assume the answer is „Very, very bad.“
Fountain of Dreams takes place in post-apocalyptic Florida, so that’s at least a bit different, some 50 years after nuclear strikes carved it off from the mainland. Nobody knows if life still exists on the mainland or beyond, but all attempts to find out lead to quick death from the contaminated sea all around or the vicious monsters that pick off what radiation can’t immediately destroy. Over the last 50 years, that’s meant the major cities withdrawing into themselves and becoming city states, people increasingly mutating due to exposure to all the nasty stuff in the air and underfoot, and vicious gangs rising up in the wilderness to threaten adventurers and give everyone a damn good reason to stay home.
Or, as the manual put it, „This world is crazy. Too bad you’re sane.“
As a starting point, that all seems pretty solid. It’s a world like Wasteland, but with its own distinct area and theme, tapping into much the same ideas but with more of a focus on human threats than wandering monsters given a radiation-powered kick up the food chain. I don’t see what could possibly go—
Huh. I was expecting a goofy screenshot to appear there. A kind of ironic cut-in of sorts, taking that obvious feed line and presenting a big picture summing up the stupidity of the game in one easily digested collection of pixels, as if—
Killer Clowns. Yes, there’s about a 90% shot that having created a party and set out on your quest, the first thing that you’ll see is a gang of murderous clowns popping up and pretty much killing you dead with no more effort than throwing a custard pie. It’s not like Wasteland played things straight, but there’s a difference between having a tongue-in-cheek apocalypse where occasionally you face off against giant rabbits or murder children for their BB guns and outright making an army of killer clowns your equivalent of the NCR or Caesar’s Legion—not a goofy gag monster, but a major power base whose ground troops are no laughing matter, and which controls much of the known world.
„Other than radiation and nature itself, the only force to be reckoned with throughout the island is the Killer Clowns. The Clowns have perverted the slapstick humor of their forefathers, taking its feigned violence literally, and expanding it into the martial art Slap-Fu. These predatory Pierrots roam the island, extending the power of their ancient but still dangerous founder, Kermit Eli, and his demented family.
