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“Do something for me, and I’ll be your friend.” Musings on Fable III

November 13, 2010 / posted in Games / No Comments

Fable III

Bored now!

Now that I’m about 20 hours in, and biding my time until the oh-so-obvious ‘battle to defeat my evil King-brother’ which opens up the next half of the game, I have time to pause and admit that there’s something (plural?) off about Fable III.

Full disclosure, I’ve played Fable II to over-completion (yeah yeah I’m missing a few achievements but I have more than most of my friends) and I loved Albion, Theresa, Hammer, my dog, the experience system, my magic, my outfits and their effects on the world, the DLC for Knothole, everything.

But despite hours of frustrating hand-holding, I am NOT even halfway as invested in Fable III. The world is similar, the maps and housing are almost the same, the animations are eerily familiar, but something just isn’t right.

The new and improved ‘friends quests’ left me disinterested in impressing the NPC’s of Albion. In Fable II the ease of reputation building lead to a full-on obsession with being the most popular person in the game. I was narcissistically posing and singing and seducing people in the town square and spent hours making Albion residents my bitches. And whenever I accidentally let a magic spell loose with a finger slip, I would stop whatever quest I was doing to re-up my friendship levels. The new system relies on individual quests that are simple fetching tasks, a tedium that results in hopping through the sanctuary too many times to count. Some are hidden items that require the dog to dig, but considering how little this gets you, I just don’t care. The new system isn’t any harder than the last one, it just takes the fun out of interacting with the NPC’s.

Speaking of things that have had the fun sucked from them, let’s talk about my dog. I was wholly attached to this creature in Fable II; whenever he got hurt aiding me in battle I would rush to his aid with a doggie potion (despite there being no need to) and would play fetch with him constantly. The interaction screen is now rarely seen as there is no need to even pretend or bother to train the dog as the dog training books come out so quickly that my dog was level 5 everything before the halfway mark. He is a shadow of my former best friend. I chose the kill your loved ones option to end Fable II and got all misty about my puppy, but in this game I would chose that option with this dog in an instant and not care since all this dog is useful for is for finding jet and 50g dig spots.

While housing is now easier to buy, the repair option is the most tedious thing ever. Especially since I didn’t realize you could do it via the sanctuary map and was running from HOUSE TO HOUSE, TOWN TO TOWN, for about 10 hours. (This was totally my bad.) I also didn’t know how to teleport to locations in an area like Silverpines and spent a lot of time killing zee hollow men in Mourningwood, the buggers.

In Fable II I was an epic polygamous, you know the song Area Codes by Ludacris? He wrote it about me. But my game came with an extra bonus of danger, it was glitched to high hell so sometimes my spouses would get extra tricky and follow me to another city, watch me woo and wed and then pick a cat-fight with my new spouse. (Not to mention the graphic glitches, I had a forest full of fireballs and a dog who surfed on the terrain for a few hours.) But for this Fable, even my philandering ways are not appeased. I don’t care for the characters, there are few unique NPC’s that you can interact with and whores are few and far between. I did marry my adopted child’s nanny (the adopted child being one I had with an Xbox Live player who gets abandoned when you divorce who I then found IN the orphanage) to see the outcome but all it does is require you to house them and replace them with a NEW nanny. Yawn.

There are a few things I do enjoy. Weapon customization is brilliant in this game. I find myself switching between muskets and pistols and hammers and swords all to level them up for maximum carnage. My favourite weapon for the first few quests was the Slimquick so I could chubb up on pies for healing and have my sword cut the fat. In the second half I’ve favoured Mallet’s Mallet, which has devastating blows that make balvarine killing easier. (They are the only enemy I find much harder in this game! What gives???)

Without giving too much away, up until the Shifting Sands section of the game, nothing is really different and I feel no urgency to advance the plot. I know that you become king and then the rest of the game really begins, Molyneux and crew spilled those beans last year, but I adamently hate doing things because a god figure told me to, so I’m biding my time until I’m so goddamn bored that I HAVE to be king. Sadly at this point I’ve bought all available houses, clothing and weapons, and despite my best efforts, my clothes and outfits don’t REALLY matter (unless I wear a beard) and there isn’t as much variety as there used to be. I’ve got about 8 million dollars and nothing to do with it, yet that is.

I think the most depressing thing about Fable III is that it takes you into the same towns, the same areas you had already cleared and conquered in Fable II and then, within a lifetime, run them down with wear, tear, tyranny and negligence. You are armed with experience from playing almost the exact same game so the learning curve is virtually non existent. The fun is gone, the challenge is gone. Fable III failed the audience by keeping us once again in Albion after we’ve already completely mastered it without introducing any new elements for us to seize. We basically have to take it over…again.

Lionhead needs to spearhead a new game, a new start, Fable III was not what was promised, but what did we expect?

And this little piggy went Wii Wii Wii Wii all the way home.

April 1, 2008 / posted in Games / No Comments

rabbit.jpg

Sometimes I feel that owning a Nintendo Wii, instead of one of the bigger of the seventh generation consoles like the XBOX360 or the PS3, leaves me on the outskirts of gamer culture due to the constant association of the Nintendo Wii with the casual gamer. But at the same time, how can I argue that this isn’t quite true?

Maybe I just feel rejected because I haven’t become very attached to any of the Wii games that I’ve been introduced to so far. Super Paper Mario was abandoned halfway through, Wii Sports became dull and repetitive when my friends stopped coming over to play, Twilight Princess failed to engage me and Marvel Ultimate Alliance entertained me for a few hours and I haven’t picked it up since. I rented Mario Party the other week and realized how superior the DS version of the game was. It was even easier just to get people to play the Gamecube version of Mario Party or an N64 version than the Wii, which offers less variety in the classic board type.

I’m hoping that my eventual purchase of Smash Bros Melee would revive my Wii-love with hours spent perfecting kills with a variety of characters, but I feel apathetic at the same time. My friends don’t want to come over and play the Wii like I thought they would, the ones who do would rather play their own, or something inane like Army of Two on 360 instead. It’s lonely being a Wii owner these days. If the Nintendo online multiplayer for Brawl was better, perhaps I wouldn’t feel so alone, but like all their online ventures it is half-attempted and not their priority.

(I do own a DS and find that the innovation and gameplay on DS games are still very hard to beat, I love my handheld. I do NOT love that the flash cart I’ve had for almost a year recently died and deleted a 50 hour Pokemon Pearl game, dozens of hours of Chibi Robo, my Animal Crossing village, almost a year of Brain Age 2, TWO separate saves of Professor Layton and Trauma Centre saves, however. My DS is dead to me for at least another two weeks as I get over this dark time.)

Photo credit: Bettisue

How Fire Emblem: Paths of Radiance lead to me sending a smack-down to EB Games.

December 3, 2007 / posted in Entertainment, Games / No Comments

Admission: I’m a big video gamer, I own a Nintendo Wii and I cart my DS around with me everywhere. I kept my PS1 until it started spinning dust, I still have my childhood Sega Genesis sitting underneath my TV and I got prickly when an ex-boyfriend ‘won’ custody of our shared Dreamcast. That and I’m quite proud of all these facts.

I usually only shop from independent gaming retailers, but I have been known to stray into EB Games from time to time. This has been happening more frequently now that I live and work very close to a mall where EB probably has the only real selection of video games (apart from some surprises at Toys R Us.)

Today after work I decided to stop into the local EB to take a look at what used games had popped up and check on the ever-changing GameCube shelves. To my surprise I saw not only ‘Fire Emblem: Paths of Radiance’ but ‘Chibi Robo’! CR was unopened and new, and the Fire Emblem was used. Hemming and hawing over my luck, but also the price tags with them, I decided to get an opinion from the clerks (who didn’t acknowledge my presence in the store, despite my standing in the Wii section directly beside the cash register.) The man at the register was perhaps my age if not a year or two older and he redirected me to the nervous cashier ‘John’ with whom I was already familiar with from previous days of browsing. But when it became clear that I had a real question, the other employee took over for John.

I presented Fire Emblem and Chibi Robo and asked which he would recommend I buy since I didn’t have money for both right now but I had been searching for quite awhile (basically, which would last on the shelf longer until I could come back). The older cashier suggested Fire Emblem, as it was so rare they got a copy in the store. Chibi Robo on the otherhand he told me, came in every month or so. “Really? I’ve been looking for that for 2 years!” I said, half jokingly, but quite definitely exaggerating (it’s been only a year since it’s release) to which his response left me speechless. “You should be spending less time with your boyfriend and more time at EB then.” I couldn’t speak, I stuttered, and his response was ‘Oh just kidding’ and he turned his back on me and went back to stocking. Before I had a chance to think I receieved an important phone call and moved to the back of the store, still clutching the games in shock from what just spewed from his mouth. After my phone call I placed both of the games back on the shelf and walked around the mall to cool off. I was fully prepared to write a complaint to EB about this staff member and his conduct, but instead decided to ‘Finish Him’ as it were, rather than having nothing happen through the chain of command.

I went back to the store, identified my opponent and engaged in the conversation. “Can I get your name?” I asked, to which he looked visibly awkward and answered ‘Matt, but what for?” I explained to him, firmly, that I was offended by what he had said to me, not only as a customer but as an individual. Whether he was trying to flirt with me, figure out my sexual orientation or just lead a crude joke, it was inappropriate and offensive. Matt stammered and apologized several times about how it WAS crude but it was just ‘a joke’ and that he apologized but meant nothing by it.

I could tell he was shaking, and I could see that none of the other employees were coming to his defense. The younger one, John who had witnessed what Matt had said to me had even given a bit of an alarmed face when the comment was made and he kept his distance from our confrontation. Matt was apologizing, but ‘as a joke’ and I wanted him to realize what his comment had cost him in terms of respect for him and his store, that saying stuff like this to customers was not appropriate. I ended our awkward confrontation by letting him know that despite my query, I was planning on purchasing BOTH games (for upwards of 100$) but that I was taking my services and money to a company that had employees that respected their customers, and then I left.

What I learned from confronting him was that from his tone and stance when I came back, he KNEW he had done something wrong. Perhaps if he had actually apologized at the time it came from his mouth when he saw the look on my face, I would have been much more forgiving as opposed to offhandedly calling it a joke and waving it off. I’ve had an instance where I said something quite personal to a customer and after realizing I encroached that line, apologized immediately. (To be fair, that was a regular at a coffee shop, this incident at EB was with a cashier I wasn’t familiar with at all.)

Another thing I noticed as that there were four staff members on staff in this small floor, I’m sure one was a manager or assistant, and they fully ignored this confrontation. They made no attempt to save their co-worker or sooth me. I wasn’t yelling, but I project quite well and had just enough fury to come off quite well spoken. If this had occurred in any retail store I have ever worked at, the manager would be SPRINTING to intercept this type of interaction, instead, one of the other employees redirected a boy asking about a video game from the corner in where I was speaking to Matt.

Unfortunately I am no stranger to sexism at EB, I had experienced it before when I overheard some young male employees (I say this because they were both 20 and under) mocking me when I went into a different location to look for DS games the summer before. I didn’t hear the exact phrasing that time around and was not nearly as comfortable with confrontations as I am now, or you can bet your shit I would have engaged them too.

As a gamer, it still bothers me now, as I really wanted the games, but obviously I believe my pride is worth more than caving to EB and their insensitive staff and I’m sure most who read this will think so too.

*All names have been changed