Exciting Adventures in Archaeological Computing, the Xbox and Knitting!

I came home earlier and switched on Fable 2 - not played it in ages! At least since before Christmas! I feel bad for abandoning it, but I’ve had Tombraider and Lego games calling me

I question myself – why oh why did I stop playing! It’s amazing! I completed the main story last time, and chose Love at the end. Scary blind lady, voiced by x, lets you choose between Love, Sacrifice and Wealth. Love brings your family and dog back to life so you can complete the Archaeology quest etc. My annoying hubby and child are also back though I also aged, well, my hair has turned grey!

Choosing love also made the world a happier, colourful flowery place. Seriously, it looks better. Everyone loves me, which can get annoying when you get mobbed in town for autographs but it does bring you loads of gifts.Now the game is complete, I can buy Castle Fairfax and Brightwood Tower as well a bunch of other fancy buildings. You’ll need serious amounts of money though, hundreds of thousands of thousands. That means loads of quests and buying up businesses to get rent. Apparently, if you leave the xbox on, your businesses will still accrue money (but not your houses) so that might help.

I’m going to play it again, and choose something else at the end. Bring it on!

Hours of my time since the end of the holidays have been taken up with running around after artefacts, changing outfits, and delving into mythology and archaeology. Yes, a typical day for an archaeology researcher so ticking all the boxes of my day job but also Tomb Raider underworld.

Yes, the first new opiate of 2009 has been discovered by me! And I love it. I’ve lved all the Tomb radiers. Yes, I know that the controls for the playstation were odd, i know that the pointy boobs in the early games were annoying, that the exact lining up of jumps on the pc was frustrating and that the stories just get more and more weird, but what other game makes Archaeology look so cool and therefore is the perfect antidote to the current crisis in that field? (Actually, the archaeologist quests in Fable 2 are pretty cool.) I’ll post more about it here when I get a few levels through, but so far, so good!

Fable 2 came out last Friday and i bought it on saturday. Today is tuesday. I’ve already spent a stupid amount of time heroing, and have almost put real life time after work on hold. Seriously addicted.

The sort of plot is as follows. You start life as a wee street urchin in a town. Some evil dude who lives in the castle kills your sister after the two of you discover a magic box. A blind lady (voiced by zoe wanamaker) takes you to a gypsy camp where you spend years training to seek revenge and become a hero. Oh, and oyu get a dog companion. The young adult you then has adventures, makes gold, takes mundane jobs when there are no baddies to kill, buys new clothes, buys weapons, eats, drinks rum, has sex, kills more evil things, kills some good things, makes decisions. You can use your gold to buy pretty much everything in the game, from whores to houses. You can get married and have a family (though this doesn’t really appeal, even to the adventurer me) but you have to maintain them in the manner to which they are accustomed. Every decision you make affects you, makes you pure or corrupt, ugly or attactive, good or evil and so on. These alignments take physical manifestations, so that if you are pure you look angelic and grow tall and lovely, but if you do evil things (like eat live baby chickens) you grow horns and become warty. Your appearance affects how others in the game see and react to you. Which is pretty cool.

There are a few reasons for my addiction, and for those of you without an xbox I shall explain. I probably don’t need to explain to anyone with an xbox as you all have Fable 2 anyways. The last time I looked at xbox live *everyone* i know was playing it. At 1am.

1. Fable 2 is a ridiculously pretty game.
2. The characters (Hero, Dog and NPC’s) are just so cute! Even when they are bloody ugly and have all scars and magic lines.
3. I like that eating pies and sleeping too much makes your character appear fatter, who wants to eat tofu and celery anyway?
4. The main story doesn’t have to be the point – the other quests are fun to play too. I particularly enjoy the revenge ones, and the ones that reward you with teddy bear dolls

Which make me ponder – how much time is too much time to play computer games? Previously, i was inclined to say there were never enough hours in the day for anything, and that free time is just that, free time to do as you wish. But now, seen as I’ve slept in already this week due to adventuring the previous evening, late night gaming may have to become a more weekend activity? That, or I need to earn some real life willpower points