I've been listening to Too Much Future, and finishing up a Fallout 2 playthrough of my own (although I might just live out the end of the game by listening because the end of Fallout 2 gets very frustrating to play). The show really helped me sort out my own thoughts on how well the pre-Bethesda Fallouts live up to the fond nostalgia people have for them. I had played a bit of Fallout 2 as a teen in the early 2000's, and at the time I was really impressed by how open the game felt. On top of that, the edgelord tendencies of the humor and writing really worked for teen me. In my memory, the game gave you way more options to solve problems than Fallout 3, and had way better writing. As Michael and Cameron mention, I remembered it (mostly incorrectly) as a great satire.
Going back to it, it's evident that most of these memories I have don't live up to how that game plays in a modern context. It isn't really more open, you don't really have more options for solving problems, the humor often sucks in pretty gross ways, and it isn't really a satire very often. It makes me wonder why so many people, myself included, remember it so differently. Obviously nostalgia is a big factor, but I think some of it is in the presentation. When you are playing a game that is more crudely represented, and you aren't in a 3D space, it gives your imagination more room to fill in the gaps. Because you are imagining more of the experience, the roleplay feels more real. Some people complain about immersion being broken in Bethesda games when the clockwork of the game goes haywire (which happens a lot). In an isometric view with less things to go wrong where your imagination is doing a lot of the work, it's much harder for this to happen.
To be clear, I think there is a lot of great stuff in Fallout 2. Some of the writing is clever, or interesting. The ideas here are built upon in later games, not just in the fallout lineage, to make better games. The biggest letdown for me is how often the humor goes to just horrible shit with racism, bigotry and sexual assault. As is mentioned often in another Ranged Touch podcast, when they don't have a better idea, they go for the gross-out. I just don't think they were very good at it.