Fable 2: choice

Although not without it's problems, I'm really enjoying Fable 2. I'm now roughly 12 hours in so I reckon I'm about halfway through. I'm married to a traveller named Emma, with a lovely baby girl called Liz. I own half of Bowerstone and I'm not even slightly embarrassed to say any of that.

Despite not being a big RPG fan, having never played a Final Fantasy, not understainding augments, or XP, or any of that cliched RPG nonsense, I'm fully getting into it. I see it more as GTA 4 but with forests, elves and swords instead of New York, machine guns and prostitutes. My reasoning for this is when you boil Fable 2 down to its roots, it's just a bunch of missions that constititue "go to point A, do something, go to point B, go back to A" etc. But then again, I guess that's what pretty much all adventure games are. Hell, that's what pretty much all games are.

My biggest issue with the game so far is the much-vaunted choice, or lack of in my opinion. Lionhead make it very clear that in pretty much every area of the game you have choice: you can choose to be good or evil with most interactions in the game, you can choose what kind of life you lead, which quests you take, who you impress and piss off: I could go on ... except there isn't any true choice in Fable 2: just the choices that Lionhead want you to have. I'll go back to the GTA comparison here, I don't think GTA offers any more or any less choice than Fable 2, but it feels like it does ... maybe it's something as simple as GTA not having loading times.

Choice is an incredibly complicated thing to implement in a game. I think the tech is there (the tech is there for pretty much anything), but I don't think as an industry we are mature and experienced enough to offer gamers true choice ... or even something approaching it.

Of course I haven't finished it yet so my opinion may yet change. We'll see.

Wii wish you a merry Christmas

I was lucky enough to receive a Wii for Christmas. I had a Wii once, bought on release day but sold a few months later on ebay for a healthy profit. I sold it primarily for the money (I was skint at the time), but partly also because I was unimpressed both by the technology (or lack of) inside the Wii, and the poor game selection on offer.

As far as the tech goes, I didn't find the remote particularly accurate but was most disappointed by the lack of any kind of HD or digital audio connects. The thing looked and sounded terrible on my first generation Samsung set. And as for the the games ... well, you can hardly call a set of sports-based demos and a copy of Zelda a library.

This time round though, things are different. It's still the same TV, but the games selection is vastly improved. I received the same set of sports-based demos, but also Mario Kart Wii and FIFA 09. I intend to pick up Zak and Wiki along with Mario Galaxy and Boom Blox. Can anyone recommend me anything else? Comments below or email to the left welcome.