G-pinions

It's kind of funny the way things work out. Since Fable became a reality, I said I would not buy this game. "Nick is buying it," I reasoned, "There is no need for me to buy it as well. I'll simply borrow it when he's done. How long can that take anyway?" Then, a week before release, my good friend and next door neighbor Scott was conned into pre ordering the thing. If I had any inkling to purchase this game before, certainly that was extinguished when someone not 5 minutes from my home purchased it. Now that the game is released, do I still feel like waiting for sloppy seconds?

As class was canceled yesterday, I had an entire day with nothing to do. My thought turned to Scott and hopefully many hours of Timesplitters and Pikmin 2. How silly of me, not realizing what yesterday was. Scott told me that, in just a few hours, Fable was going to be available and he was going to pick that up. For the first time ever, it actually seemed like Fable was really going to come out.

I have been reading about this game for years now. When I first heard about it, back in the Project Ego days, I burst out a most evil laugh. This crappy new console, headed by the most evil man in computing, was going to be the home of the most ambitious game in the history of video games? How could I not laugh? Only a year or two before Fable was announced, Nintendo had a similar idea for their system. When they revealed the 64DD, the disk drive for the N64, they showed a game called Mother 3. The third game in the beloved Earthbound series would feature a completely wide open world with the ability to affect change as time passed. The example Nintendo gave, of planting a seed and coming back years later to find a massive tree, was the same one Peter Molyneux gave about the world of Fable. Surely, if Nintendo wasn't able to finish this game, Lionhead wouldn't be able to.

Now, a dog year after it was first announced, I was actually going to walk to Gamestop to pick it up.

I have to admit, I don't know if any game is worth a 7 year wait, but my 2 hours with Fable were absolutely incredible. First of all, unlike Galleon, another game exclusive to the Xbox that was in development forever, Fable looks gorgeous. The world looks kind of like Hyrule, but everything is so much more detailed. It seemed like every 5 minutes, Scott would stop controlling the character and just admire the scenery for a second. It looks that good.

The story is, apparently, much cooler than I imagined. Considering how much I read about the game beforehand, it's kind of weird how I never came across why this quest existed in the first place. Towards the very beginning of the game, your home town is ransacked by bandits. Good times, right? Apparently, you don't know bandits. They kill everyone in the town and kidnap your sister and mother. They don't say what the bandit's intentions are with the women, but I assume they are most unpleasant.

A stranger appears and tells the boy he is not safe in town (duh!) and promptly whisks him away to some secret training facility. This is as far as we got before I had to leave, but any story revolving around vengeance has to be great. Furthermore, it now makes perfect sense why you can chose to be evil or good. With the weight of the world on your shoulders, it's understandable if you want to fart in ladies faces and kill everyone you see. Why not? You've had a hard life.

As far as problems with the game go... I couldn't find any. It's impossible to judge an epic quest in only two hours of playing, but I really saw nothing wrong with the game. It seems like talk of this being a mere 15 - 20 hours was a gross exaggeration. Considering how almost nothing happened, story wise, in 2 hours of playing, combined with how fun it is to talk to everyone and explore every inch of your surroundings, the game seems like it could last a very long time.

I guess if I have to complain about something, it would be the omission of a female main character. I know, I'm crazy. Every game where you have the option to play as a woman I take them up on it. But this game could really benefit from that. In such a realistic and wide open world, where you decide everything that happens to you from when you're a small child through adulthood, it would be a blast to play as a girl as well.

Speaking about the decision making ability, for some reason, decisions in this game seemed far more important than in Knight of the Old Republic, another game that let you be good or evil. I think it has to do with starting this game off as a child. In KotOR, though your decisions affected an entire galaxy, it never felt as important. You were on a quest and it was hard to take yourself out of your immediate task and realize this is your life. This is who you are.

Fable does an amazing job of making you realize that you can build what kind of person you are from the ground up. Even though it was fun to punch a child and destroy a man's possessions, I felt guilty watching Scott do it because I was scared about being punished. Any game that can force you to have a moral fiber is certainly doing something right.

I could probably talk about this game for 1,000 or more words, but I'll have to save that for another post. Suffice it to say, I am not going to run out and buy this game today, but only because I don't have the money right now. The game seems to be everything the hype promised, if not more. I always thought the Game of the Year would be decided between Halo 2 and Grand Theft Auto 3.3, but Fable looks like it can be right there. Maybe they had to cut a lot of things during the course of development, who cares? The game is a blast as is.


UPDATE - Better Out Than In

Remember when I said I would be back with another post about Fable? School got canceled again today and, instead of going home like I normally would, I found my way back to Scott's to play some more Fable. Man this game is good.

Scott played a few hours without me yesterday and I was quite upset to see what he had done with the character. Choosing the path of the dark side, his character was turning out to be a horrible, horrible man. By committing random crimes, Scott made everyone hate him. Some people may like this, but I was a little bummed out watching Scott walk around and hearing everyone insult him or fear him. It's fun being a jerk sometimes, but when no one likes you it's kind of sad...

We started a new game, though, so I was able to play the beginning this time. The control of this game is just perfect. The D pad is used for quickly accessing items. So, if you're in battle and need health, an apple will all of a sudden equip itself on Up D and let you heal yourself easily. Awesomeness.

The first mission you are given in the game is to kill a bunch of beetles with a stick. As you enter the forest, you hear the booming, Obi Wan-aqua voice of your master remind you to "Use your stick!" This promted many jokes about how great Star Wars would have been if the ultimate power was The Stick instead of The Force.

Another thing that made me laugh was one of the first little tasks you have in the very beginning of the game. A man runs hurriedly towards you, crying that his bladder is full and ask if you would please watch his store while he takes care of business. This is one of your first good/evil choices in the game. You can choose to break his barrels while he's gone. Scott and I did this the first time, though nothing was even in the barrels. Kind of lame when you break the law only to fight more mosquitoes.

Anyway, the second time I played through this I actually did stand watch. Then this little kid comes up, even smaller than me, and starts egging me on. "Come on! Smash the barrels!" he urged with his British whine. Then he called me a sissy. I tell you, if Scott wasn't there saying we had to play this guy as pure good, I would have ripped the kid's head off. The nerve, calling me a sissy! Maybe if there actually was anything worth stealing in the barrels.

There's a great boasting system in the game too. At one point, you go into battle with a friend. Before battle you can boast that, not only will you kill more enemies than her, but that you'll kill 10 more than whatever she will kill! Of course, it would be cooler if Scott could back up his talk, but it's pretty cool anyway.

I guess that's it for now... I'll write more later, though. You can count on that.