As we’ve discussed before, it probably goes without saying that one of the most satisfying parts of playing an RPG is watching your character grow and develop over the course of the game. In a party-based RPG, of course, you get to spread that joy across your entire party, watching each of them flourish into the doctor/safecracker/killing machine you know them to truly be. I bring this up again because it is in this that I believe Wasteland takes its biggest stumble.

Experience, lifeblood of the RPG character, is handed out in Wasteland for one thing and one thing only: killing enemies. And here I mean that very specifically: characters ONLY get experience if they deal the killing blow. In practice, what this means is that even if Eddard deals 99 damage to an enemy, if Tyrion hits it for that final 1 point, Tyrion gets all of the experience and Eddard is left with nothing.

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After wrapping up in Needles, we take a quick detour back to the Rail Nomad’s camp to pick up another engine. Bringing it back to the garage, the mechanic fixes up the jeep for us and Ace gets us back on the road to Vegas. A short jaunt to the northwest, we arrive just in time to get jumped by a gang of thugs who steal our car. While I understand that the jeep was merely being used as a way to (quite literally) drive us along the plot, I have never much appreciated that it is taken away without so much as a fight. We are the the Rangers – we enforce justice, we stop blood cults, we hit on barmaids. We do not like “thugs” making off with our car without us even getting a chance to shoot back.

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Despite Ace’s insistence that we get our butts up to Vegas to help out, it seems that leaving a shadowy, murderous cult unattended to in Needles would fly sharply in the face of our devotion to carrying out justice at any cost. A detective at the local police station tells us that the cultists have been grabbing people for months and draining them of their blood. He believes they have been using something called the Bloodstaff, but he doesn’t know much more about it. This story is confirmed by a bishop at the Temple of the Mushroom Cloud, who tells us that one of his priests was kidnapped and the Bloodstaff stolen from him. He promises us a great reward if we can get it back. While we Rangers are not driven by materialistic aims, we will certainly not refuse a little sweetening of the pot now and again.

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Computer role-playing games can have a lot of things going for them. Some of them may have amazing character building options, letting you decide everything from how skilled your character is with a glaive-guisarme to what zodiac sign they are. Others may have incredible crafting systems that let you fashion items of amazing power from the various bits of scrap metal and bat guano you’ve gathered on your journey. Some have dialog options that let you play anything from a silver-tongued devil to a bone-headed lug barely capable of stringing a few words together.

Really, though, when you get right down to it, what most of us are really looking for in a CRPG is some rock-solid combat.

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With Ugly eliminated, the Mayor free, and Felicia rescued, it looks like we’ve wrapped up our business in Quartz. Thanks to Ace’s tip about trouble in Vegas, that seems to be our next most likely destination. Mayor Pedros – obviously an expert politician – sticks with us when we leave town. I assume Felicia will be running things in his absence, but we Rangers aren’t here to muck around with local politics.

Just north of Quartz is an abandoned, broken down jeep that we passed earlier. At the time, we couldn’t do anything for it. Ace, however, seems to be quite the hand at fixing cars, and gets it up and running again. Taking us for a quick drive, Ace heads north to the town of Needles where the jeep promptly breaks down again. Fortunately, we manage to get it to what I can only assume is the only functioning garage left in the wasteland. The mechanic tells us he can fix it, but he needs an engine. Not having one on hand at the moment, we set about exploring this new city instead.

Needles is laid out quite a bit differently from Quartz, with several spread out buildings forming the “suburbs,” and a dense cluster of buildings around a large main street that forms the downtown area. Downtown seems like the place to be, so that’s where we head to start things off.

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