As for the city of zombies. Well eventually I arrived at the city and when I met the first Ghouls I opened fire on them, thinking that they were just more emaciated versions of the Romero ones.
When I met several Ghouls in a sewer just a bit later that started to talk to me and asked me not to shoot them I suddenly thought "Shit, these guys can think and talk! and I have been shooting them thinking they were mindless flesh eaters!"
Fallout really took fan expectations and RPG concepts that had been so established that they had come to feel like rules on how to do things and put a big twist on them.
Man, you just exactly described my experience when I played that bit in FO1! I, too, felt guilty for murdering 10-20 ghouls above ground when I discovered in the sewers that ghouls were intelligent NPCs that you can actually talk to. I think I even posted about this a few years ago when I was ranting about the "feral ghouls" bullshit in FO3.
That was FO1 and FO2 for me, really (haven't played FoT or anything else in the series yet, except for 6-8 boring hours of FO3, which I didn't manage to finish). Relatively modest games that gave you great, memorable moments (gameplay or story-wise) when you didn't expect them. From what I've read or seen on this site and elsewhere, it looks like Bethesda's games could never offer the same. A pity, really. How many beloved franchises destroyed beyond recognition does this add up to then? Besides Fallout, I'm still sad about the ignoble deaths of SimCity, Command & Conquer, Mass Effect, and Star Wars Battlefront (notice a trend here?)
As for the Vault Boy vs. Pip-Boy debate, what can I say? I love Vault Boy for his cheerful optimism in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, though now the joke became the real thing. Fallout was turned to shit and yet good ol' Vault Boy keeps on smiling and wandering the wasteland, doing whatever asinine thing Bethesda wants it to. I have nothing against the Pip-Boy but he's been around so little as TorontRayne said that he might as well not exist. I think, like most other lore-related debates, this will become a moot issue as the Fallout brand evolves into something farther and farther away than its once-excellent origins. The future will have super mutants crawling around 25 years after the nukes went off and "feral ghouls" and after we or this site are dead and gone, who will be there to dispute it?
