I wonder if the crown would like to hold hands for a while?

The strongest memory I have from the entire Fable series is way back at it’s beginnings.  My hero is old.  Very old.  Deeply wrinkled skin and baggy eyes stare out of a face framed with grey hair and a golden halo.  He stares down at a woman who appears to be around half his age … his mother.

In a title packed with innovative features, it was this moment that defined the game for me, and remained with me all the way through the sequel.  A prime example of a brilliant concept that’s execution was fundamentally flawed.

Which is the stigma that surrounds the series as a whole, if we’re honest, due in no small part to the over-enthusiastic promises of lead designer Peter Molyneux.  After long ago promising not to discuss ideas that he can’t demonstrate, he’s actually said some rather interesting things in the lead up to Fable 3‘s release, but the one that caught my interest the most was the fact that Fable 3 would probably upset a great deal of gamers, most likely because the game has been redesigned to be less of an RPG and more of an action-adventure.

Now although that seems like a very strange thing to admit pre-release, and even though I’m generally a fan of RPGs, I took this admission as a promising sign.  I figured Lionhead finally was sitting down to fundamentally rethink Fable and enhance what worked while fixing what didn’t.

But I guess I figured wrong.

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Scantily-clad girl, big ugly guy, scrawny little guy. Yep, itsa RPG!

Welcome, dear RPG traveller, to the town of Tristram.  Shit, sorry, I meant Trinsic.  No, that’s wrong too.  Better compose myself.  Right, got it!  Welcome, dear RPG traveller, to the town of Torchlight.

Torchlight is a top-down action RPG from Runic Games.  You start by picking a character from either the destroyer (warrior), vanquisher (rogue) or alchemist (mage) classes.  Then you choose a pet (cat, dog or “invisible pet”*) and you’re off adventuring!   Torchlight is a remote mining town, and there’s something shifty going on inside it’s mineral rich caverns.  You’re given the job of finding out what that might be.

Control of the game is straightforward.  If you want to walk somewhere, you left click there.  If you want to kill something, you left click on it until it dies.  If you want to cast a spell, you right click on the spot you want to cast it.  Numerical shortcuts can be set for potions, spells and abilities too so in no time at all you’ll be wading through paths of dead critters.

Your pet helps you out a little in combat and in other ways that we’ll get to in a bit.  During your adventures you’ll pick up fairly standard bits and pieces of kit – better weapons, armour and items.  The game is set in some kind of gunpowder age so in addition to swords, axes and bows you also get to play with ye olde style pistols and muskets.

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Surprisingly few rats!

Let me preface this review: I’m not really a fan of this kind of game. In fact, frequent readers have probably heard/read about my flailing hatred of the RPG genre in general. Having watched Matt and various others walk through mindnumbingly boring landscapes, interact with dull voiced peasants while constantly being ‘surprise attacked’ by various rats/mutant rats while searching for armour made out of a glass, for what seems like days on end, I have nursed extreme prejudice against all games of their ilk. I’ve tried playing them, but I can never get more than a couple of hours past character creation.

The one exception was Knights of the Old Republic, and even then I ended up quitting half way through because it was easier to watch Matt play than slog through leveling up and grinding. All I wanted to know was who the main character was, whether Bastilla was good or not and if you could hook up with Carth. This lead to my standard game playing trick of ‘set it to baby-easy, play through, auto level up’. Weak as piss, right?

That’s probably what kills me. These games are meant to be immersing you in an interactive storyline that compels you to keep playing to find out what happens next. Nothing is more tedious to me than three seconds of storyline followed by twelve hours of collecting the hides from seventeen rats to make a rat blanket to warm a peasant who turns out to be a rat god with acne. Fucking … I don’t know. I just can’t justify putting in time into such a fruitless exercise. How does this help the story? It doesn’t, so I’m not interested. But obviously that doesn’t mean it’s a bad game. I’ve seen Matt play Elder Scrolls: Morrowind for thirteen hours straight, with very little idea of what is going on around him, so it must be engaging on some level. There’s some kind of ‘hook’ that allows days worth of time to be squandered on finding every candle in the map and putting it in your house.*

Finally, with Dragon Age: Origins, I think I’ve found what that hook is.

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Now with character closure!

Knights of the Old Republic II was a deeply flawed game. Legend has it the developers were pushed to release the game in time for the holiday season and as a result giant chunks of plot, missions, even entire worlds were left out of the game and it was riddled with bugs.

I played (or should that be suffered?) through the original version once, sent Matt a text immediately afterwards saying “OMFG worst ending EVAR!”, then uninstalled the game and tried never to think about it again. Little did I know, however, that others reached the end and instead of sending derisive text messages they decided they could improve the game. Now there are dozens of third party mods and patches for the game which do everything from improving its graphics to resurrecting missions that were cut from the original to … uh … making the characters wear less clothes. Bless you, shut in programmers!

The most complete effort to date has just been released in beta format – the TSL Restored Content Mod v1.4. Snappy title, huh? It won’t litter the game with n00dz and it won’t make your lightsaber any bigger, but what it will attempt to do is restore all the bits of plot that were cut from the original game.

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Inferno Armour. Looks ... snug.

Finally dispelling the blanket “Q1 2010″ release date, EA has announced that BioWare’s much anticipated Mass Effect 2 will be available on shelves January 26th for America, and on January 29th for the rest of us.

Gamers who pre-order their copy through approved outlets will also be awarded with some bonus DLC.  Depending where you order, you’ll be picking up either the Terminus Gear (which includes armour and a heavy weapon) or the Inferno Armour.  Here’s the details:

The Terminus Armor is designed for use in extreme planetary conditions, increasing run speed and personal shields, and augmenting weapons with an additional magazine of reserve ammo. The M-490 Blackstorm Heavy Weapon generates a high-powered localized gravity well, accelerating particles to near-infinite mass, and ultimately expanding the selection of heavy weapons available to players when they gear up for combat missions in Mass Effect 2.

Players that pre-order Mass Effect 2 at other retail outlets will receive the potent Inferno Armor, which is used by officers to monitor battlefield conditions by recognizing elevated heart rates, and regulates sub-systems with extreme efficiency to allow for greater response times – together these abilities translate in-game into a negotiation bonus for Commander Shepard and an increase in run speed and augmented damage from combat powers.

Mass Effect 2 is being released for PC and 360.  Recent rumours that the title would also be available for PlayStation 3 seem to have been throughly squashed, with BioWare’s Jay Watamaniuk stating in no uncertain terms on BioWare’s forums that the game is only being released for 360 and PC.

There is a report circulating today based on an appearance I made in Poland yesterday. Seems there was a misunderstanding about ME2 coming to PS3.

Let me clarify today: ME2 is coming to PC and X360 only. Look for them both on Jan 26 in NA and Jan 29 in Europe.

-Jay Watamaniuk, BioWare’s Community Manager

I suppose this doesn’t exactly rule out the idea of an eventual port, but it seems pretty clear that it won’t be any time soon after the game’s release.

Oh well, only a three month wait then!  Take a gander at the press release for yourself, if you like.

Look at Garrus, acting all serious with his crossed arms

I’ve had a little bit of a axe to grind with BioWare, ever since I finished the original Knights of the Old Republic. BioWare make great games. Truly fantastic, well made games. It’s just that, well … when the time comes to finish their games, for some reason they seem all too eager to wrap things up as quick as possible. For technical reasons (that are apparent to anyone who knows what I’m talking about) I call this “Fable-failure”.

Remember that great game Fable? You know the one, it was where you chose your own moral path through the game, invested a great deal of time on side-quests, real estate, started a family and then when the game ended it was a 15 second, no-shades-of-grey, either-good-or-evil recap over a single painting ending?

Well BioWare were never that bad, it’s true, but they suffered the same kind of problems when it came to ending their in-depth epic games.  Both Jade Empire and Knights of the Old Republic never seemed to pay off quite the scope that was available to them, which made the games seem unfinished somehow. Don’t get me wrong, I loved playing both titles, but the completion was always the down point of the game.

So this may have been the reason that I didn’t pay much attention when Mass Effect was originally released back in 2007. Other available reasons are:

• I was broke
• I was drunk
• It was Jackie Chan week on SBS

In truth, it could of been any of these things, because I really don’t know how I came to miss a gem like Mass Effect. But after a year or so hearing about how great a title it was, and hearing that it was one of the first titles to be announced for the upcoming Games On Demand for Xbox Live, I decided to catch myself up on a little gaming history.

And I certainly wasn’t disappointed. (more…)

These used to be bleeding edge graphics

Some news for the older school: to celebrate it’s 15th anniversary, Bethseda have released Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall for free download to the public.

While the series solidified it’s spot at the top of the RPG genre with Morrowind and Oblivion, Daggerfall was the game that introduced a lot of us to the sheer idea of size in a RPG.  Not only being able to travel around to hundreds of different towns, but being able to travel in-between them as well (usually being chased by pesky wolves).

The game shows it’s age of course (you’ll need DOSBox to run it!) but I loved the game when I first played it, and it’s still a classic.  And it’s friggin’ FREE, what more do you need?

Head over to the Elder Scrolls site to grab a copy.

I can only assume this one came about by either chance Googling or a misprinted article, but according to a recent marriage announcement in the New York Times, Lionhead’s Fable 3 could already be in the early stages of production.

Mr. Atkins, 34, is the lead game designer for Fable III, a video game series produced by Lionhead Studios in Guildford, England. He graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

-New York Times, 26th of June

If it’s true, then it’s the most amusing place I’ve seen a rumour come out of in a little while. Given that I still haven’t played Fable 2 however (residual bad feelings over the first), the news hasn’t really excited me much. Maybe it’s time to give it a chance, I’m sure hundreds of copies are probably clogging up pre-owned shelves at the moment.

Given that Molyneux has stated in the past that they have plans for Fable 3, 4 and 5, it’s probably safe to say that this isn’t just rumour, but as no-one has made an official announcement yet, we’ll stick this one as “highly probable”.  An even better rumour would be that players take the role of 11 year old Milo in Fable 3, and you battle enemies for PR domination … but I just made that up.  To the hashtags!

Anyhoo, read the announcement for yourself. And don’t forget to congratulate the happy couple!

Your snappy dressing friends Gabe and Tycho

Penny Arcade’s On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness came to me as a “gift” from the wife. I quotation “gift” because what I really think she wanted was to see the game and anticipated fortuitous side-effects by claiming it was a present. But she paid for it with her her very own Microsoft Points, from her account, so I guess it still counts.

She was right anyway, because this game checks all the boxes of things that appeal to me as a gamer and as an individual. This game has the classic artistic style of Penny Arcade, the gameplay of Final Fantasy, off-colour humour, swearing, drinking, robot monkey fighting, and all in a little slice of steam-punk suburbia. Class!

On The Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness is an episodical RPG available through Xbox Live Arcade. At the moment two episodes are available, with a further two on the way (Episode 3 is supposed to be available sometime this year).  The episodes are a decent length each, but not amazingly long (maybe 9-10 hours play apiece?).  This is why you may want to wait until the desired Episode gets a discount on Live, or if you’re not really too keen on Penny Arcade, until the whole thing gets released in one package (read: what I’m waiting for the Fallout 3 DLC to do).  Any character you create that has completed the previous episode can be ported to the next, essentially allowing you to play the whole game through with the charater you created in Episode 1.  The game’s level system is set up in such a way that this can be allowed too. (more…)

Even Hello Kitty thought this design was cutesy

On starting this site there were a few games that I figured I’d drag back out of my collection to review, if simply because, at the time, they actually managed to have enough of an effect on the frontal lobes to warrant a mention.

Eternal Sonata is one such game. I purchased it originally while looking for some extra RPG titles for the 360. The cover looks a bit kidsy and the story is beyond the ability of a short blurb to encapsulate, but it was cheap and definately an RPG, so I bought it. The other deciding factor was that the game advertises co-op (more on that later), so I figured it’d be good for a laugh. It turns out to be one of the strangest little titles I’ve seen in a long time, and with an oddly mature theme for a game soaked in a cutesy-manga visuals.

OK, where to start on the plot on this one…

This game’s world is set (perhaps, the game could get a bit metaphysical on this one) in the dreams of 19th century classical composer Frederic Francois Chopin. In the “real world” he’s on his death bed, being watched over by his mother, his sister and a doctor.

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