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Entry tags:
Fable, Oblivion
Although I bought Oblivion recently, I ended up playing Fable instead. It was somehow simpler and more appealing. The start of Oblivion was rather dark and gloomy, literally so: you begin as a prisoner, and spend a good amount of time knocking around in a dungeon, trying to escape.
Fable is by Peter Molyneaux, the guy who did "Black & White" and (I believe) "Populous". I thought that Black & White was visually stunning, and had some neat concepts, but suffered from a serious flaw: the divine creature. You play a god in the game, and the divine creature is your physical representation in the world - apart from your divine hand and viewpoint, that is.
The problem is that the damned creature learns things, and it often doesn't learn what you want it to. You may want it to be kind and help the villagers, and it will instead for some reason learn to poop on them and eat them. It's really really annoying. Having a key element of the game THAT far out of your control is not a recipe for a satisfactory gaming experience!
There was also some sort of glitch in the game which made it impossible for me to exit the introductory stage.
Teri had bought Fable for me as a Christmas present a couple of years ago. My computer hadn't been able to play it. The new one can, of course, so I installed it and gave it a try.
Visually, it's quite impressive. It's an old game, but it looked pretty cutting-edge to me! The voice acting is rather twee in spots; I'm a bit of an Anglophile, but some of the voice actors were really laying it on thick with the most annoying and cloying kinds of cutesy British accents. Incidentally, I'm rather sure that the voice actors were actually Brits, and not Americans or Canadians doing a lame impression.
The game itself...well, the controls were not as convenient as (for example) Diablo II. And it didn't come with a manual, which was annoying (I later looked it up on the official site and printed out a copy - it wasn't large). There was one annoying thing that I can't call a bug, but it was definitely a problem: blocking. You don't use a shield in Fable, you see. Instead, you sort of hold your weapon up in a blocking position. That doesn't make a lot of sense with bladed weapons, of course, since logically you'd cut your fingers off. And with flaming or electrical swords, blocking looks even sillier. But the problem with blocking is that by default it's mapped to your middle mouse button. And for some reason, that middle mouse button (which is also the mouse wheel) didn't work right in that implementation. Instead, it snapped me back to my desktop.
Eventually I mapped blocking to the Alt key, which worked well enough. But the truth is that movement and control is a bit of a pain in the ass. Not that Fable is particularly lame in that regard, mind you! It's just that after the Wii, anything else seems burdensome.
Once I got comfortable with some of controls, though, I started having some fun. The main point of Fable is that as you make choices in the game world, your character changes to match. If you're good, your hair turns blond, your eyes turn blue, and eventually you develop a halo and aura of dancing butterflies.
I find it hard to be bad, so my character was soon maxed out on goodness. He ended up winning the game after about 30 hours of play, and looked very much like cheesy representations of Jehovah at the end. Here he is standing in front of statues of his parents in the memorial garden of his home town. Looks kind of saccharine, doesn't he?
Eventually I got him a chicken hat, which makes his head look like a giant chicken's. It makes him a bit easier to take. But with his mastery of the Stop Time and Divine Fury spells, he's pretty much invincible.
Later, for the hell of it, I decided to create an evil character - just to see what it would be like. At first, it was hard to be bad. But eventually I was able to get into it. What helped a lot was the decapitation feature. If you can put an arrow at exactly the right spot on a trader or bandit's neck, their head pops off spinning in midair, while a great spurt of blood shoots up from their neck-stump. When the head hits the ground, you can kick it around like a soccer ball. Your total number of decapitations are recorded, which is good because you don't get many experience points for killing helpless traders.
Here's my evil guy. I admit that the Freddy Mercury-style mustache looks very gay. I later picked up a beard for him, so he now looks rather like a cheesy cartoon version of the Devil.
Eventually I got tired of the game. It's not bad - in fact, it's quite good - but I exhausted most of the possibilities after about 30-40 intensive hours of play. That's a little disappointing.
I picked up playing Oblivion again, and managed to get my guy out of the dungeons and out into the open air. The visuals are pretty cool. I'll doubtless have more to say about Oblivion in a while. One thing I can say now, though, is that Fable seems to have been good training for Oblivion - the movement control system is quite similar.
Fable is by Peter Molyneaux, the guy who did "Black & White" and (I believe) "Populous". I thought that Black & White was visually stunning, and had some neat concepts, but suffered from a serious flaw: the divine creature. You play a god in the game, and the divine creature is your physical representation in the world - apart from your divine hand and viewpoint, that is.
The problem is that the damned creature learns things, and it often doesn't learn what you want it to. You may want it to be kind and help the villagers, and it will instead for some reason learn to poop on them and eat them. It's really really annoying. Having a key element of the game THAT far out of your control is not a recipe for a satisfactory gaming experience!
There was also some sort of glitch in the game which made it impossible for me to exit the introductory stage.
Teri had bought Fable for me as a Christmas present a couple of years ago. My computer hadn't been able to play it. The new one can, of course, so I installed it and gave it a try.
Visually, it's quite impressive. It's an old game, but it looked pretty cutting-edge to me! The voice acting is rather twee in spots; I'm a bit of an Anglophile, but some of the voice actors were really laying it on thick with the most annoying and cloying kinds of cutesy British accents. Incidentally, I'm rather sure that the voice actors were actually Brits, and not Americans or Canadians doing a lame impression.
The game itself...well, the controls were not as convenient as (for example) Diablo II. And it didn't come with a manual, which was annoying (I later looked it up on the official site and printed out a copy - it wasn't large). There was one annoying thing that I can't call a bug, but it was definitely a problem: blocking. You don't use a shield in Fable, you see. Instead, you sort of hold your weapon up in a blocking position. That doesn't make a lot of sense with bladed weapons, of course, since logically you'd cut your fingers off. And with flaming or electrical swords, blocking looks even sillier. But the problem with blocking is that by default it's mapped to your middle mouse button. And for some reason, that middle mouse button (which is also the mouse wheel) didn't work right in that implementation. Instead, it snapped me back to my desktop.
Eventually I mapped blocking to the Alt key, which worked well enough. But the truth is that movement and control is a bit of a pain in the ass. Not that Fable is particularly lame in that regard, mind you! It's just that after the Wii, anything else seems burdensome.
Once I got comfortable with some of controls, though, I started having some fun. The main point of Fable is that as you make choices in the game world, your character changes to match. If you're good, your hair turns blond, your eyes turn blue, and eventually you develop a halo and aura of dancing butterflies.
I find it hard to be bad, so my character was soon maxed out on goodness. He ended up winning the game after about 30 hours of play, and looked very much like cheesy representations of Jehovah at the end. Here he is standing in front of statues of his parents in the memorial garden of his home town. Looks kind of saccharine, doesn't he?
Eventually I got him a chicken hat, which makes his head look like a giant chicken's. It makes him a bit easier to take. But with his mastery of the Stop Time and Divine Fury spells, he's pretty much invincible.
Later, for the hell of it, I decided to create an evil character - just to see what it would be like. At first, it was hard to be bad. But eventually I was able to get into it. What helped a lot was the decapitation feature. If you can put an arrow at exactly the right spot on a trader or bandit's neck, their head pops off spinning in midair, while a great spurt of blood shoots up from their neck-stump. When the head hits the ground, you can kick it around like a soccer ball. Your total number of decapitations are recorded, which is good because you don't get many experience points for killing helpless traders.
Here's my evil guy. I admit that the Freddy Mercury-style mustache looks very gay. I later picked up a beard for him, so he now looks rather like a cheesy cartoon version of the Devil.
Eventually I got tired of the game. It's not bad - in fact, it's quite good - but I exhausted most of the possibilities after about 30-40 intensive hours of play. That's a little disappointing.
I picked up playing Oblivion again, and managed to get my guy out of the dungeons and out into the open air. The visuals are pretty cool. I'll doubtless have more to say about Oblivion in a while. One thing I can say now, though, is that Fable seems to have been good training for Oblivion - the movement control system is quite similar.