Fable 3: Starting again as pure evil?

I’m still playing the awesome Fable 3. I’m still on my first save game, as a wise and just Queen of Albion. I’m slowly accumulating money in the treasury to save my civilians from certain death in the big end battle. I still have a few days to go in game, but thoughts have turned to playing the game from the beginning again.

Throughout this game, I’ve pretty much played as good. Well, okay, I may have chosen not to rebuild a few things and may have slaughtered just a few innocents but overall I’m saintly. It is a brilliant, absorbing game and I like the fact that the game world is all pretty and light and shiny. Fable makes me happy. I do get in a bad mood occasionally though, in real life, and often I’d like to reflect this in Fable life.  I want the world to be dark and foreboding. I want my weapons to drip blood, not emit a halo like glow. I want scars and tattoos, not ethereal translucent skin. I might even turn the safety on the weapons off! So I’ve decided to start Fable 3 again, from the start but right from the get go make the most evil, devilish, wrong and bloodthirsty decisions that I can. I think it will be fun! Has anyone else replayed as the opposite moral standing that they started with? How did it go?

p.s I may have to resort to this page - http://fable.wikia.com/wiki/Gnomes_are_Evil! – which has been bookmarked for a few weeks now, but never read. I have 41 gnomes and am going mad, mad I tell you, trying to find the last few.

Fallout New Vegas: A most excellent staff benefit!

So this week saw me starting my new Christmas temp job at Game. The time of year and the slash in spending brought to culture and heritage by the Tories means that now certainly isn’t the best time to be looking for an archaeology job. Game appears so far to have lovely people to work with and lets face it, there isn’t really any sell needed as people wouldn’t be in there if they didn’t want a game of some sort. We even have something called Tractor Simulator, so there really is something for everyone.

But I digress – back to Fallout. It came out on Friday which happily was my first shift. Staff discount and one trade in card later I was home with the shiny sequel to Fallout 3 for £0.00. Woo!

On first looks it appears much like Fallout 3 but it has a lot more depth, I think. The scenery and characters are brighter, more colourful – since the nuclear fallout hasn’t hit the east coast so badly and we’re a few years further on, Vegas has electricity and lights! Stick Fallout 3 back on for a bit and the contrast between colours is marked. Scavenging becomes a much bigger deal. Sure, you can still pick up ammo and weapons around the world but the new ‘Reloading bench’ means that you can craft your own ammo from parts or breakdown unwanted bullets to turn them into something useful. High enough Science points and you can even make your own Plasma and Energy weapons. You also have to make like Ray Mears and use your survival skills at campfires dotted around the Mojave. Bring ingredients (and sometimes science or survival points) and you can cook up a healthy dinner from nothing more than a mole rat and a jalapeno. Yum. The map is much smaller than Fallout3, but so far I think its more detailed. I’ve only had about 4 hours gametime though – the joys of a one xbox household and two people wanting to play a dead courier out for revenge :p

I’m off to kick the OH off the xbox and get me some headshots.

Assassinations and Biscuits

Sunday. A day for rest and relaxation. Or, as was the case today, eating yummy homemade vanilla heart biscuits with yesterdays Marmalade ice cream and playing Assassins Creed 2.

What an awesome game. Okay, so I have to play a young Italian man which is not my favourite demographic but that can’t take away from the fantastic gameplay and visually stunning scenery. Today, I’ve travelled around Florence and its hinterland trying to avenge my familys murder whilst making as much cash as I can. My favourite type of assassination so far is hiding in a haystack then thrusting my arms out, slashing a throat then pulling the body back into the haystack and then skulking away. Nice. If this sounds too mean, then a side story in the game is rebuilding an old family villa and the surrounding town. You do this by bringing money back to the villa and paying an architect. I rebuilt the brothel first and it increased the value of my town my a few hundred florins, which I then get in interest to spend on more weapons, fancier outfits – you get the picture. I started playing at teatime, then looked up and it was 10pm. How? Who knows.

I had to force myself to put the xbox controller down, but only because the dishes needed done and the washing machine emptied before tomorrow and the start of the working week. What would Ezio say?

Friday already?

It seems like that last week (actually, last few weeks) have just flown by. Amazingly, I think in a good way!

Managed to move house and unpack without to much disaster, have got more work done than I thought I would and managed to get back in touch with people I was in danger of losing.

Most importantly though, I finally managed to get my xbox profile and saved games back, after trying and forgetting or not having the time etc since Christmas.

Yes, Christmas. So when I loaded up my profile on xbox live last night it told me:

• I hadn’t been online since November 2009.
• I last played Fallout in November 2009.
• I hadn’t played GTA4 or Lego Batman since last summer.
• Reminded me that I completed Tombraider over a year ago!

All very shocking. I felt the need to remedy that lack of xbox playing rather quickly so much to the annoyance of the OH started on Assassins Creed 2. I’ve not played much yet, so I’ve only done the first few missions up to collecting feathers for my little brother and beating up a guy for cheating on my sister. All very family orientated and lovely so far then. Oh, and I managed to press the right button combination to see my virtual girlfriend Christina strip off  -  I’m guessing there weren’t many girls in the production team. It is a very pretty game and the scenery on a big lcd tv looks awesome.  Tonight after work I hope to actually assassinate someone, in full technicolour goodness.

It’s been *how* long?

A year. A year since my last blog post. Not really sure why but I have just promised myself to blog at least once a week – if only to get out the knitting and xbox angst.

Knitting: current projects include a lovely mohair lace scarf which i’m not making it for anyone in particular and a massive frankenblanket of odd yarn squares which might take me two years to finish based on current estimates.

Xbox: Haven’t got xbox live at the moment – boo! Still playing though, including ‘Viking: Fall of Asgard’, ‘Lego Indiana Jones 2′ and best of all, an original xbox classic – ‘Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis’.

I’ll write about them soon!

Fable 2 – rediscovering the love!

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!

Tombraider Underworld – my new addiction

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!

Lego Indiana – 100% done!

Lego Indiana Jones is now flashing up that I’ve done 100% of the game, a little incorrect, as there are still at least 20 acheivements I haven’t unlocked so should it really be saying 100% done? Not sure.

It was an incredibly fun game to play, with loads of laughs and movie refs which I guess woudl have been amusing even to non archaeologists For example, Indy is, like in the films, scared of snakes. Willie still hates bugs. Gameplay wise, this means that you have to be someone else to solve a puzzle or cross a space that has snakes, adding another level of puzzles!

Free play in this is so much cooler than in Lego Star Wars and the characters so much cuter.  The replayability in trying to find every single piece of treasure and artefact is addictive, but in some levels gets really irritating when you have 9/10 and *really* can’t see the last bit (the treasure detector parcel comes in handy here). The sheer amount of unlockable characters is also excellent, with each fitting into a special ability category so that you might need an academic (Henry Jones Sr, Marcus etc), an excavator or high jumping girly to solve puzzle types.

The vehicles are also way better than in Star Wars, with loads to unlock and the vehicles are a lot easier to handle than the dodgy x, y, b wings so you can have more fun exploring the level and less frustration crashing.

The biggest downside is that the camera is still fixed, so you end up falling ledges and cliffs quite a lot because you can’t quite see where you are going. I guess in a game that is probably aimed at kids then adding a camera manipluation button might have been a bit much. Grown ups might appreciate it though!

Addicted to adventuring: Fable 2

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

86.5% complete and I *really* don’t want to finish Lego Indy :(

I’m nearly finished Lego Indy on the xbox and this upsets me. What will I do when it ends?! Lego Batman still has two weeks before it comes out

Anyone who hasn’t seen the game, where have you been? Inspired by the Indy Lego, it came out in May but I managed some self control and didn’t buy it until after Silchester. It got 8 out of 10 on IGN and it *so* deserves it. It takes at least three goes through a level to get all the coins, treasure and artefact parts out of it. It’s just so cool, you have to play it. See my gamer score in the sidebar there? What I don’t get, is that I only have about 14% left to play but still need to unlock about 20 achievements! Where are they? There are excellent secret levels too! Lego Star Wars was really good fun but the characters are so much cooler in this, and have better personalities of their own. I can only imagine how great Batman will be! Hooray!