Fallout

- The rats are in case you need enough experience to level, so ignore them.

- Allies are extremely helpful in the early to mid-game.

- Psycho (or two) is your best friend in the wasteland and he works best over quests with tons of enemies in tight spaces.

- Aim for Speech as it is very important at high percentages.

- Tycho gets very angry when you kill people in his town.

- Stick to small guns early on and then energy weapons when you have hundreds of ammo for it.

- A few more points in barter allows you to trade your stimpack for almost two of theirs.

- Don't bother with using the keyword system unless you read about them on some other site.

- Tag small guns, tag speech. The last one is up to you, I like steal. Small guns will get you through 90% of the game, start putting points in energy weapons for the big finish. The other combat choices are viable, but extremely difficult for first time players.

- Steal from everyone, everywhere, all the time.

- Save all the time, quicksave all the time, have layered saves. Reload if you're caught stealing - ripping off one kid for a rock will turn an entire town against you.

- As soon as you start the game, go back into the vault. There are some minor quests available in there that will net you some early xp.

- Always try to alternate methods of solving problems. Not only will talking people into things save your life early on, you'll often get more xp for it than shooting them in the face would have earned you.

- Try to keep your NPCs alive, but after a certain point their usefulness expires.

- Killing people in some towns could make recruitable NPC's angry. One will try to kill you after you recruit him and then harm some citizen. Tycho will attack you during every map change.

- Do NOT give NPCs burst-capable weapons. Ever. Friendly fire is in full effect and NPCs don't give a shit if you're in the line of fire

- Reading books on higher difficulty (lower stats) will give you better returns when you switch to lower difficulty (higher stats).

- Don't destroy the eggs in the Deathclaw lair in the original Fallout until you're sure that you're done grinding, or you hit level 50. You get tons of XP from Deathclaws, and if you don't smash the eggs, you can leave the area, go right back, and they'll have re-spawned.

- http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/dload.php?action=category&cat_id=12

- Play a character you think will be fun to play and don't read any guides or anything. Fallout is designed to A) have multiple solutions to each quest and B) simulate, at least on some level, the feeling of desolation that comes with living in a post nuclear world. If you just follow the hints and wander around you'll have a much better time, I think.

- Agility is the best stat because it gives you more actions per round.

- Intelligence is important too for any kind of dialog focused character.

- Don't bother putting much into strength. See that guy on the title screen? He's wearing power armor. When you get it you get a +4 to strength.

- Small guns own in the beginning, energy weapons in the end but you can make any combination work.

- Lockpicking is useful. Speech is super useful.

- If you can pull off the shot, the best place to aim is the eyes.

- If you enjoy Fallout 1, I heartily recommend Fallout 2. The story is a little poorer but there is so much more to do it's amazing. It's my favorite PC game.

Mods

For the people asking about Fallout 1 mods, the basic ones you should get are:

1) TeamX's 1.3 unofficial patch (fixes a heap of bugs remaining in the game)

2) The child patch if you need it (the GOG version of fallout 1 is the UK version, which had the children models removed, leading to things like "ghost" voices and other such fun)

3) The NPC mod (makes the NPCs more like the fallout 2 versions where you can give them basic tactics to follow, change their armor and so on)

4) Sfall, lets you use the mouse wheel to scroll through inventory, speed up the game, use your middle mouse button etc.

5) High Res Patch, lets you boost the resolution above 640x480, and just updated this year with new stuff. Due to the way the fallout engine works, you probably won't want to play too much above 800x600 (the various interface graphics don't scale, so they'll be stuck at 640 width and whatever height, even on a higher resolution), but even at 800x600 the game looks much nicer.

Install them in that order.