YMMV / Wasteland

• Demonic Spiders: The defenses and robots in Base Cochise have much more powerful attacks than the average mooks you face in the wastes and are able to bypass your Power Armor-wearing party with little to no effort. You should at least put in some points in the Doctor skill for either one of your PCs to prevent your party from being unconscious or mortally wounded after an encounter with these foes.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • The radiation symbols appear and disappear off the map seemingly at random; however if you pay attention you can figure out the pattern: the symbols appear only at night. That's because the radioactive areas glow in the dark.
  • No explanation is offered for why certain characters using certain weapons have a certain number of attacks during a round. If you'd play Fallout, you'd know it was due to Action Points, which are never exposed to the player in Wasteland.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Glass Roof Exploit. After killing the guards on the rooftop of Ugly's Hideout in Quartz, have one of your characters use a rope directly towards the southwesternmost wall at the entrance and climb up. You will encounter more guards so kill the rest of them. After they've been dealt with, move your party towards the glass panels and you will receive a message stating "It's possible to surprise them, etc.". If you keep walking down and up across the panels, you will slowly gain experience points and eventually receive promotions and skill points once you keep radioing your Ranger Center for your efforts. This exploit can be done repeatedly for multiple promotions and skill points and makes the game trivially easy.
  • The Super Loot Bag Exploit. First, put at least one skill point in the Gambling skill for your character and play a casino game at either Spade's Casino in Las Vegas or the Acapulco Private Gambling House in the eastern part of Downtown Needles (which requires a password to enter and it is the same name as the casino's only without the latter three words in the sentence) and keep playing until you win. Both have two chairs to play on and when you win, leave the cash on the first chair that you gambled on. Go to the second chair and repeat the process. Once that is done, go back to the first chair, take the cash, and then drop an item from your inventory while you are on it. Go back to the second chair, open the loot inventory and press the down button more than once to find every available item you can get in the game in usually huge quantities. Among the loot are the Proton Ax (the best melee weapon in the game), the Red Ryder Rifle (the most powerful ranged weapon in the game) and the NAME AC armor (the best armor in the game with an AC rating of 27, better than the Power Armor's AC 14 rating. It at first is treated as a weapon and when you equip it, the game will ask you to unjam it. Select the option 'No' and then equip it as a proper armor item). The latter two are normally unobtainable in the game outside of this one exploit and with these two, you can quite literally breeze through the game without any enemy touching you for any damage at all.
  • Do note that once you reset the game with your save file intact, the loot bag remains there indefinitely but the game will remove all the items in the bag as a precautionary measure. The only way to have them appear again is to win another game, take the loot from the chair you just played on, and then drop an item on that chair. The items in the bag on the second chair will then appear again to you once you press the down button. This is a repeatable process for however many times you want once you replay the game.
  • There is also the Needles climbing exploit. Give all your characters a single skill point in Climb, and just go up and down the dunes on the southern end of town. Not only does this score you the password to Savage Village (and assault rifles), it also boosts your Climb to ridiculous levels, which gives you more skill points to use. There is even a library in the SE corner of the town, so you can spend them right away!
• Goddamned Bats: Desert Dwellers, Radioactive Vermin, Wasteland Warriors and other random encounters on the world map, which just love to bother you when you're trying to rest your party after a tough battle at Base Cochise.
• Memetic Mutation: Turning enemies into "a fine red mist" and "exploding them like a blood sausage" is something that is brought up by fans whenever Wasteland is mentioned. The game's Spiritual Successor series Fallout references nearly every memorable joke or gag from Wasteland at least once per game, to the point that many people misattribute them to the Fallout series.

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