Dream of Waking

… there’s some dudes up around the bend. They will most likely shoot up my boat. :(

I don’t know how I made it through this one. I’m going to gloss over the technical details so I can get to why this game really pisses me off.

It’s visually competent even though everything has a plasticky look. All the weapons sound weaker than they should and halfway through you get a crossbow that kills every enemy  in one shot. Combined with the ability to slow and pause time, this is basically god-mode. Even though it starts out kind of rough (lots of enemies, weak weapons), this one weapons eliminates nearly all difficulty in the game. There’s four types of enemies. In the entire game. Everything takes place in dirty brick buildings. This is the most mediocre first-person shooter I have ever played.

This brings me to the crux of my disappointment in this game; its blatant disregard for the materials it centers itself around. This is a game where you play a nameless guy in a prototype time-travelling suit. Your boss takes off with the first prototype to go back to 1939 (???) and use his advanced technology to install himself as a Hitleresque fascist dictator. You take off through time after him only to have your prototype time-travelling suit damaged in the landing, which results in your quest to track down the big bad guy to get a piece off of his time-travelling suit to send yourself back to your own time. Along the way you help the local resistance overthrow their oppressors through your localized ability to pause, slowdown, and (sometimes) reverse time.

Okay, brain surgeons. When the bad guy, aptly named Dr. Aiden Krone (are you fucking serious?), takes his time-travelling suit to some random point in the past and radically alters the timestream that lead to the creation of his time-travelling suit, he creates a time paradox! Let’s ignore that though.

So you have been building another suit through which to travel time. I guess if one time-travelling suit is good, two is better! You’re violently thrown through time, and while you manage to mystically avoid reappearing in the timestream in a location free of materials dense enough to kill you outright, you’re tossed like a rag doll into a wall that damages your time-travelling suit to the point of stopping you from further jaunts through time. From then on your suit is unaffected by bullets, rockets, exploding crossbow bolts, jolts of electricity, and balls of weaponized plasma.

In fact, your suit can still slow, pause, and when gameplay allows, reverse time! These are the skills you will absolutely rely on to survive your adventure to find Dr. Aiden Krone! These too, inexorably, damage the timestream and create paradoxes! When you reverse time to put yourself in a position you wouldn’t be able to get to without reversing time, congratulations! You’ve just created a time paradox!

The story about what happened before Dr. Aiden Krone took off with his time suit is dribbled out in short (like 10 seconds) cutscenes that (often) interrupt the gameplay and occur with increasing frequency as you get to the end of the game. Apparently the nameless protagonist has been sleeping with one of Krone’s female lackeys who has been leaking information on Krone’s time suit to him. In the opening cutscene Krone disappears through time but not before he’s planted a bomb in his old lab. The bomb explodes and you see the female lackey engulfed in flames and almost certainly dead.

Now spoilers follow but I guarantee I am doing you a favor if the story is the reason you’re playing this. When you find Dr. Aiden Krone, he’s piloting an enormous mechanical spider. Seriously. To destroy the spider, you have to blow up the plasma turrets on it’s back and underside. With your guns. Once it comes crashing down you’re treated to a cutscene of the nameless protagonist blasting Krone’s brains out and taking the vital piece of the his time suit needed to return to his own time, which was helpfully taped to Krone’s wrist. He returns to his own time with just enough time to see his lover destroyed, only to reverse time, disarm the bomb, and save her. In the absolute game’s final slap to the face, the wrist computer on the protagonist’s time suit flashes “PARADOX CREATED” and he flashes out of existence. WHAT??? In terms of the time-fuckery that this game commits, this is a relatively small infraction!

So here it is, don’t play TimeShift. Especially if you’ve ever put a single brain cell into thinking about time travel. If you absolutely must play a first-person shooter, you can do much better but this will give you a weekend of “entertainment”. Right now I’m trying to reverse time to prevent myself from buying this in the first place.

I don’t know why I waited so long to play this one. I love the original F.E.A.R. so you’d think this would’ve been a no-brainer.

F.E.A.R. 2 takes place concurrently (only for a short time) and during the aftermath of the first F.E.A.R. You play a SFOD soldier named Becket whose team is grabbed by Armacham, juiced full of experimental drugs, and then sent on a mission to stop Alma while chasing down leads on the how and the why of it all. You get the gist of the story in radio communications and in-game cutscenes but all the details are in logs scattered throughout the levels, similar to the first game but there’s a lot of more of them this time.

F.E.A.R. had amazing graphics at the time and Project Origin doesn’t disappoint. The effects are similar to the first game with lots of sparks and dust when the bullets fly. The best looking effects come when you’re having hallucinations. Colors fade, return, your view goes blurry and sharp, lights flash on and off. It’s impossible to describe effectively.

A big complaint about the first game was the lack of variety in environments. It was a lot of offices and industrial areas. Personally it didn’t bother me much, but Monolith took it to heart. Of course there’s more offices and industrial parks but there’s also a school, a medical facility, research labs, and the destroyed streets of Auburn. You never feel like you’re walking the same corridors over and over and no one environment really overstays its welcome.

F.E.A.R. 2 also has the same fantastic gunplay that the first game had. Enemies are quasi-intelligent in dropping for cover and flanking your positions. That said, on normal difficulty, the game never gets too hard. I don’t think I died a single time. Between the abundance of armor and health packs, the whole game is just a little easy. The only nuance that threw me at the beginning is that when you hit the slo-mo button on and off, there’s a little bit of a spin-up and spin-down. It was basically an on-off switch in the first game so having a second of delay really threw me off at the beginning.

My favorite part of this game were the areas where you get to stomp around in the elite power armor. It isn’t just for the amazing amounts of firepower the elite power armor brings, or the carnage of the fights you get into with it, but the effects while you’re in it. As it takes more damage, alarms scream, the screen gets distorted, and warnings flash manically. It’s a hell of a lot of fun and really makes me clamor for Monolith to make good on the easter eggs it’s put in recent games and make a sequel to SHOGO: Mobile Armor Division, a mech game they made a decade ago.

There’s no easier way to put it: F.E.A.R. 2 is an awesome first-person shooter. I played through it all in a single day, which is a task I don’t think I’ve ever done. It’s basically amazing.

Using the elite power armor in F.E.A.R. 2.

Jedi Knight is one of those games I would’ve been best off leaving in my memories of it. To say it has not aged well is an understatement. Some of these levels that I fondly remembered are absolutely godawful, in particular the last three and early Jedi levels. Though you get a lightsaber in this iteration and it does become your primary weapon through most levels, reflecting blaster fire with it simply doesn’t work early in the game and late in the game it’s still easier to use Force Pull to rip the weapon out of your enemies hands before you get shot up too bad than it is to reflect shots back at them till they die. The last boss was a total pain in the balls and left me with this sour feeling. I don’t think I’ll be playing Jedi Knight again anytime soon.

I’ve said this before but Dark Forces is probably my favorite Doom clone. It brought the Star Wars universe with all its diverse locations and creatures into a two-and-a-half dimensional game with an engine capable of faking 3D environments and set pieces. It didn’t and still doesn’t get near enough respect.

Let’s get the negatives out the way first. Though there are 10 weapons, nearly all of them fall into two categories; repeating lasers and explosives more likely to blow yourself up rather than the enemy. An enemy type, the Grans, are armed with their fists and grenades, and they throw those grenades with laser precision. They are easily the most annoying enemy in the game and they come in ridiculous numbers. One of the levels takes place on Jabba’s space cruiser and that level is filled with Grans and nowhere near enough health or shields. The absolute worst level in the game is the third one, Anoat City. Really too early for a level as un-fun as Anoat City, which is a pain in the balls that begins with a switch-flipping sewer puzzle and ends with platform jumping followed by a swarm of health-sapping enemies. The whole level is filled with enemies of the health-sapping variety and by the end of it, after you’ve performed the olympic triple-jump marathon, you’re either dangerously low on ammo or (in my case) completely out and stuck running a gauntlet to the end. And the final, minorest of quibbles, some of the level music (which is fantastic and ramps up appropriately when you’re in the action) repeats itself.

Now that I’ve taken a dump on one of my favorite games, why don’t we explore its merits! There’s a fantastic variety to the levels. Imperial bases, desolate moons, hazy mines, scummy bars, and the ubiquitous ice planet are just examples. One minute you’re crawling through a disgusting sewer and the next you’re blasting stormtroopers in an Imperial detention facility. The variety extends to the creatures you encounter along the way. Of course there’s stormtroopers and Imperial officers, then there’s aliens, droids, and mindless monsters. You do spend an inordinate amount of time blasting stormtroopers and those damned Grans but the other enemies of the game are by no means underrepresented.

Though I list the lack of variety in the weapons as one of the game’s detractors, the weapons all feel sufficiently destructive and Dark Forces has one of my favorite video game weapons of all time: the Stouker concussion rifle. It’s one of the most powerful weapons in the game so you don’t get it until you’re three-fourths finished with it but when you do it’s like the heavens open up and you can hear a choir of angels praising your new implement of destruction. It is neither repeating laser nor explosive. It’s basically a rocket launcher, minus the rocket. You fire it, with an amazingly satisfying sound, and things in the distance blow up in a blast of white-blue. No projectile, just a flash and and explosion. If you fire it at something too close to yourself, it gets you too, but it’s a risk well worth taking. You can clear whole rooms of enemies in one or two shots of the concussion rifle and while it only uses 4 units of ammo, it comes with 100 each time it’s dropped. Oh yes, you get the Stouker concussion rifle only after feeling its effects a couple times at the hands of your enemies. I absolutely love this weapon and though it’s been replicated in Jedi Knight and Jedi Knight 2, it never feels as good as it does in Dark Forces.

Dark Forces isn’t all action and no brains though. There’s a number of rather enjoyable level puzzles. Breaking out a prisoner in a maximum security in the Imperial detention and gaining access to an Imperial computer vault stand out as two of the better ones, though as said before, Anoat City has an absolutely ridiculous switch-flipping puzzle in the sewers and that one sucks.

Everything about Dark Forces feels right. The movement, controls, weapons, enemies, levels, even the lack of lightsaber. About the only thing missing is a multiplayer mode, which would’ve been awesome, but the game stands on its own without it. Any Star Wars or action game fan would be remiss to pass up playing through Dark Forces.

I’m not very good at adventure games. I bought this in a two pack with Time Gentlemen, Please on Steam for $5 on the Idle Thumbs’ recommendation. I didn’t quite know what I was getting into except that they were adventure games by indie developers that were rather good.

To be honest, when I fired it up the first time I felt like I’d been scammed. It opened in a small window with no apparent option to switch to fullscreen. There’s sparse music but no voice-overs. The graphics and animations were very base and simple. Despite these, the game is absolutely charming. It’s well-written, funny, and at times absurd. It’s short and easy (remember, I suck at adventure games so if I beat this one, it must be easy) and completely enjoyable. I haven’t touched Time Gentlemen, Please yet, but I feel I may have already surpassed an acceptable dollars-spent to entertainment-gained ratio.

I personally enjoy supporting “the little guys” when I can, apparently even to the point of buying two games I may not even finish, so if you’re into adventure games and you have $5 to spare, you should probably check these out.

Note: There’s some controversy surrounding this game. I’m not addressing the politics of it in this review but I’ll post my thoughts in the comments.

When Shadow Complex was announced a couple months ago, I was somewhat torn by it. It was described as a metroidvania style game, which I like. It’s developed by Chair, who made Undertow, which sucked. But the lead designer at Chair also made Advent Rising, which I liked! But Advent Rising and Shadow Complex are based on properties Orson Scott Card is involved in, whom I do not like. The hype coming out of E3 was strong though, and then they released the trailer and I was sold. When was the last time I played a good metroidvania anyway? (Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin)

To put it simply, Shadow Complex sets a new standard for $15 XBLA games. It’s a great game. It’s clearly more Metroid than Vania, with no currency and  a small number of weapons and bosses. It’s map and method of impeding progress (doors and what not that require certain weapons to get past) are straight out of Super Metroid while it adds in enemies that you can fight in the background, and a couple of fully 3D turret sequences. The in-game cutscenes are relatively bad because the faces of the characters suffer from Unreal 3 engine syndrome but they’re all skippable. The sounds are all spot on and the soundtrack fits great while you’re progressing through the early game but towards the end when you’re filling up on collectibles it feels a little out of place or it’s completely absent.

The amount of detail in the gameworld is staggering for a game that costs so little. If they had given me a solid geometry map with unanimated models I would’ve been happy so long as the gameplay were the same, but this game is as beautiful as it’s gameplay. The controls are very close to Metroid’s with the exception of the shooting. It uses the second analog stick for precise aiming, which means taking a thumb off of the jump button. It took just a little to get used to but later I came to appreciate the level of precision I could get using the aiming stick.

I’ve played through the game once, with 100% map and item completion. I got to probably 90% on my own before resorting to youtube videos on how to get some of the trickier items. There’s items in some really sticky areas but never so badly that you feel the designers were being cheap. The ending is wide open for a sequel (or rumored DLC) but doesn’t really live up to the build up. After finding all 100% of the items, the final battle was rather simple. I guess that’s my reward for persistence. I finished in a little over 8 hours, which is probably more time than I spent playing through the single player campaign of Gears of War 2, and Gears of War 2 isn’t nearly as replayable.

Should you buy Shadow Complex? Yes. Double yes. It’s a fantastic single player game.

No, I’m not deployed again, I’m just playing Clive Barker’s Jericho! Ha!

Seriously. Can this game get more brown? I’m in the World War 2 period of it and I’m not shooting undead nazis, I’m shooting big brown monsters with chainguns and flamethrowers. At one point I was shooting a dead woman with a German accent named Lichthammer whom I assume was in nazi regalia but I can’t be sure because everything was brown. I could only tell by her stylish hat.

And the voice acting. It’s god awful. I want to strangle Father Rawlings and Delgado and I’m positive I only don’t hate the rest of the characters because they don’t talk as much as those two. The best one so far is Arnold Leach and he has barely spoken at all.

This is all such a far cry from Undying it’s unreal. Undying was a colorful, well voiced, genuinely scary game. The best I can say about Jericho is that the fiction is pretty good (but not as good as Undying so far) and Leach is a well designed monster. He looks like he’s straight out of Hellraiser. The concept art is impressive but seeing him in motion at the end of the first section of the game is damned near terrifying.

I know Undying didn’t sell well, despite being a great game, so that probably limited Clive Barker’s options for studios willing to take the risk in developing another game for him (especially after Demonik was cancelled) but I do hope if he has it in him to give us another game he shops it around until it gets picked up by a studio that can do him some justice and stays involved in it’s development. Until I get further all I can tell is that he gave the studio a script and a couple of concept sketches and let them fill in the blanks and when his name is in the title, it really only hurts his reputation that this game turned out to be a big disappointment.

This one took about 10 days which is about 50 times faster than the amount of time it took me to beat the first Gears of War. Stupid pumping station. Stupid RAAM. Thankfully, Gears of War 2 has nothing as frustrating as either of those, though it’s not without it’s glitches.

I loved Gears of War and Gears of War 2 is just like the original but better. Better graphics, better levels, better balance. I never felt like any of my deaths were the result of cheap tricks or bad level design. Like I said, no pumping station situations and no damned General RAAM. There’s some difficult fights and a one on one boss that is less about putting him full of bullets and more about patterns and timing.

There were a couple parts where Dom (the AI buddy) would stop fighting. He’d take cover and just sit there. At first I thought it was story related, until I realized that Dom is only an AI buddy when there’s no human behind the controller. There’s no reason or solution that would cripple a coop partner by stopping them from fighting. I had to chalk it up to some kind of pathing or AI glitch. It wasn’t a big deal until I got to a fight in the last act where I was vastly outgunned and outnumbered. I could almost beat it alone until the last pair of enemies where without an AI drawing their fire, I was just mowed down. I had to restart the chapter, which wasn’t an enormous setback and fixed the problem. It was still a huge impediment to my progress though.

I haven’t touched the multiplayer. I probably won’t until I can afford to buy the All Fronts collection.

Overall, 100% awesome. I’m totally lame for waiting so long to get this.

I got Gears of War 2 on sale at Best Buy today. I’ve played up to the title screen. Surprise! It’s a lot like Gears of War 1! Not that that’s a bad thing, I loved Gears of War 1. Except for the pumping station. And General RAAM.

I’ve been slowly playing through Halo 3 again, to get the metagame achievements this time. I’m hoping playing with half of the skulls enabled will help me get my skills up enough to complete the game on heroic difficulty. Fuck the haters. Halo 3 is a great game.

Going back to a basically normal work week this week. I’m not looking forward to it.

Neotokyo is a Source engine mod that released last weekend. I started playing Monday night and I’ve put maybe 2 hours into it. I like it. There’s a lot of people on the internet bitching about it and I think I’m going to chalk it up to either clueless idiots who don’t “get it” and Dystopia fanboys who wanted another Dystopia.

Neotokyo has been described as Ghost in the Shell meets Counter-Strike and that’s not far off the mark. It’s class-based and centered around a capture the flag variant called Capture the Ghost. The ghost is a limb-less torso that requires the capturor to drop his primary weapon in exchange for the ability to see all enemies within 50m of the capturor. In a pinch you can put the ghost on your back to arm yourself with your pistol or knife but if you have any teammates alive around you, you’re better off holding the ghost and telling the rest of the team where to shoot. The setting is near-future (30-40 year) Japan, so while you have things like thermoptic camouflage and all manner of alternative vision, there’s no lasers or rocket launchers. The armature is strictly SMGs, assault rifles, long rifles, and pistols.

I’m not entirely sure why I enjoy this so much. I play recon, which is the lightest class, and I almost never survive a whole round. It’s fun to sneak around back and try to get the drop on as many members of the other team as I can before I’m inevitably sniped. The game doesn’t count assists or else I’d probably score much higher but I’m usually in the top five.

I started this entry to provide counterpoints to other people’s gripes about it but that’s an uphill battle, in the rain, wearing greased shoes. The official forums aren’t up so there’s no real outlet to voice your approval to the dev team so I’m just going to do it here. Keep it up, Studio Radi-8! Neotokyo is pretty bad ass!

I love the Silent Hill series. My first one was Silent Hill 2 on PS2. It was an amazing experience and I’ve been a fan ever since. That said, Silent Hill: Homecoming probably holds the record for the longest period of time it’s taken me to finish a Silent Hill game.

I spent the last four hours (or so Katie says) playing it and though at first I was frustrated with it (for it’s lack of health items and somewhat steep difficulty), I can safely say there’s nothing really inherently wrong with Silent Hill: Homecoming. It doesn’t have a godawful long escort mission like The Room did. The combat is a little more involved than previous games but not to the point of turning Silent Hill into River City Ransom. There’s some fresh new enemies, and that ol’ chestnut Pyramid Head makes a couple of cameos. He just pops his big old head in, does something fucked up, and ducks out.

I suppose my biggest complaint about it is that it’s kind of boring. The enemies don’t come off as scary more than they do annoying. There’s a spider thing that is an utter pain in the ass as you need to duck and dodge his attacks and he’s CONSTANTLY blocking yours. You encounter more living people in this Silent Hill than any of the others, yet none of them really contribute much.

The game has a couple decision points where what you choose determines the ending you get. They occur late in the game and if you save before the first one, you can revert back to that save and you’ll only have to redo the last two hours of the game to get the majority of the alternate endings and then there’s one more for finishing the game on Hard difficulty. I may have the gamerpoint greed to see the low hanging fruit (the decision point endings) but I probably don’t have it in me to grind through the whole game again to see that Hard difficulty ending.

I won’t play the Rate Silent Hill Games game because I haven’t played the first three in so long but I’ll put Homecoming above The Room but definitely below 2 and maybe below 1 and 3. It’s a good game if you’re a fan and you can get it for cheap.

This is an expansion pack. Does this count? Sure!

Though I’ve finished Doom 3 around four times, this is only my second time finishing Resurrection of Evil. It took even more tweaking to get running than Doom 3 did. For weapons it adds the grabber (a gravity gun) and the double-barrel shotgun. For monsters it adds the Forsaken (it’s an original Doom lost soul), the Vulgar (it’s an imp, and basically replaces the imp in every occasion) and the Bruiser (the size of a hellknight, shoots like a mancubus). It replaces the soulcube with the hellstone, which accumulates abilities like invulnerability as you beat bosses.

The grabber feels like a lost opportunity. RoE sticks to the Doom 3 formula of straight forward demon shooting so doggedly that it can’t toss in a physics puzzle or any other use for the grabber besides tossing boxes and barrels at demons or catching projectiles and tossing those instead. So, given an opportunity, I prefered to use the grabber to save on ammo.

The hellstone by the end of the game basically becomes thirty seconds of god mode, as you’re invulnerable, do way more damage, and everything else is moving in slow-mo. Until that point, I barely used it. Between the grabber and the double-barrel I felt I had enough firepower to deal with anything. It’s at the end when they’re tossing three revnants and two hellknights at you at once that you feel the need for that thirty seconds of god mode.

There’s nothing new in the games’ environments. Dig site, tech base, hell, they’re all there. There’s less monster closests, which is appreciated, and more demons that teleport in at will, which is not.

As far as expansions go, this one’s not bad. It’s more Doom 3, which I liked, with a couple new toys and a couple new targets and not much else.

I guess you can get simpler in gameplay than Doom 3. No updates were made to this XBLA port of a 17 year old game, just shooting nazis in pixelated mazes. I played through every single level, on Bring ‘Em On difficulty (that’s one short of I Am Death Incarnate), and I may never play this game again. Six episodes, with ten levels per episode, makes for one long game. Here’s some dead simple notes on each episode:

1. Hans Grosse is harder to kill now that I’m older than 8 years old.
2. Zombie nazis can eat my balls. Fuck this episode!
3. Mecha Hitler.
4. Completely forgettable.
5. THE BEST EPISODE. Simple-ish levels with lots of nazis to mow down!
6. FUCK THIS EPISODE. Hell-ish levels, lots of those damned fast nazis, nowhere near enough ammo. Imagine every step is at an intersection. To either your left or right is a nazi. Or both. You have to crawl through each step because if you run through, a nazi is going to step out and shoot you in the face. This is the first four levels of this episode! I HATE IT.

This may have been my fourth time playing through Doom 3. It’s barely compatible with Vista and took entirely too much work to get running the way I wanted but it works. It still looks amazing, with the exception of some blurry textures particularly on other people in the game. As far as gameplay goes, it can’t get much simpler than Doom 3. Shoot demon, collect ammo, open door, end level. There’s not a ton of variety to it and that’s probably one of the reasons I enjoy it so much. When all you want to do is shoot stuff in a beautiful, tense environment, you can’t get much better than Doom 3.

No one keeps the case, art, or manual. If my searches on ebay and amazon.com are any indication, nearly everyone buys their game, throws out the packaging, and lightly scratches the disc but keeps the game in perfectly playable condition.

This really sucks. To those of us insane enough to care about the details such as packaging, as time goes by our selection of buyable games will continue to diminish. Thanks to others’ lack of concern, the prices of complete games will artificially jump up just for the fact of having the whole game in one piece.

What is so hard about keeping the game in the case with it’s manual? It makes sense! It’s one package that keeps the disc safe and the manual handy in an attractive package!

For not posting recently. You see I’ve been playing this two year old game. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s called Team Fortress 2.

When I got The Orange Box two years ago, I got it for Portal and Half-Life 2: Episode 2. I had probably about zero interest in Team Fortress 2. I had never played the original Team Fortress, nor Team Fortress Classic, and multiplayer gaming isn’t really my thing. Now I’ve heard the heaps of praise given to TF2. I tried to block it all out, because it’s just another multiplayer game I won’t get into like Counterstrike. Until I really knuckled down and played it about a week and a half ago.

I had an absolute fucking blast. It’s amazing! There’s not a lot that I can say that hasn’t already been said. Valve put so much effort into the details of the game that it’s always fun. Each class is balanced and full of character, the action is fast without being spammy, and it’s nearly impossible to be a true burden to your team if you’re at least playing the game. I could probably go on and on about it.

So if you’re one of those people like me who have thus far only enjoyed two-thirds of The Orange Box, jump into TF2. Play the classes, find one you like, get good at it. Play on public servers, there’s rarely any bad ones. Get a headset, it helps with teamwork! Add me to your friends, I’m emnii, we’ll shoot dudes, or each other, it’ll be great!

Wolfenstein 3D was released on XBLA today. I downloaded Doom while I was at it and even though they made no changes to either game at all, they still hold up today. I had nearly forgotten how intense playing the original Doom on Ultraviolent difficulty is and it’s been ages since the last time I played Wolf3D. I don’t even think I’ve ever played Wolf3D on anything but the easiest difficulty, it has been so long. Zombie nazis on the second episode are giving me so much hell that I get excited when I find some regular nazis because they’re easy targets. Hans Grosse utterly destroyed me the minute I opened his door.

The music and sounds in the game are so memorable that I can hear them even when the game is off and they will probably be the lullaby that puts me to sleep tonight.

Here’s a classic. I just got this one last year because it was $5 and it was completely worth it. I’d heard others praising Fable back when it was released but for some reason I let it slide off my radar.

It’s an action RPG, with a whole lot more added in to keep it from getting boring. It takes place in your average fantasy setting, it has a pretty storytale plot, and doesn’t throw too many surprises. It works on getting you attached to your character. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t have a name (except Hero or whatever title you’ve purchased) but you’re with him from birth to middle-age. Your choices determine whether he’s attractive, scary, or good/evil. You can get your hair and facial hair styled, your stats influence how you appear, and you gain scars when you come close to death. You can marry, visit a bordello, own real estate, collect rent, gamble, trade goods, and so on. Everything beyond the basic action RPG elements are either minigames or just a matter of having cash on hand. I played a good character and though I never tested it, it felt like no one was off limits in terms of killing important characters. Certainly none of the mundane characters were off limits and more than a couple passersby and gawkers caught a whack from my sword while I was trying to defend them.

The game isn’t very long, I think I finished at about the 15 hour mark. I did nearly all the quests but I didn’t complete all the boring item hunts. I got my most powerful preferred weapon and enough experience to max out the physical stats, and put a healthy amount of experience points into the skill and magic stats and finished with the highest level of renown. A lot of the Lost Chapters content is integrated into the main story so well that I hardly noticed it. It was after I finished the main storyline and picked up on the Lost Chapters that I noticed it. And it is noticable at that point. The original Fable storyline has a definitive end and the Lost Chapters adds another area and about three more hours of capital S Story quests. It feels kind of tacked on and a little hokey but it’s exactly what you can expect from an RPG expansion, more Fable.

All in all, this is one of those I’d wish I had picked up earlier so I could discuss it with more relevance but getting to play it at all is probably good enough. Looking forward to getting Fable 2!