On my way home last night I stopped in my local news agents, I noticed the man in front of me in the cue who purchased an impressive £250 worth of lottery numbers… now I’m not sure if this was a syndicate or his own personal gambling fund but I do hope the National Lottery decides to let him win…
Thought of the day “Come on England, glad I have Setanta.”
I couldn’t sleep last night and in my insomniac state I came across a Derren Brown live show to an audience in a theatre some where. I’ve always enjoyed watching his shows, while I am sceptical to some of his performances in regards to the legitimacy of them I have to say I’m always impressed with the performance he puts on, he’s a good showman.
So the performance at the theatre was a lot of small stunts where he would guess peoples first crush’s last name, whether they were lying that accumulated in a grand final where he had orchestrated through a variety of persuasive techniques to manipulate the audience into selecting one word from impossible odds - influential. Basically this was done by cutting out a random section of a news paper and an audience member selecting one word… and they selected influential. At the end of the performance, just to add salt to the wounds I suppose, he showed a small video of him though out the performance dropping these suggestions, at one point he just said “Daily, Mail, 14, influential” which was the name of the paper, page number the word was on and the word… I did notice he was saying some odd things, but I attributed them to him being on stage live and some of stunts he was performing appeared to take their toll on him. So, hands up he fooled me to.
I didn’t like one of his smaller segments, where he asphyxiated himself with a plastic bag to slow his heart rate down so he could walk over a pile of broken glass, not nice. One thing he did mention which I do agree with entirely is about pain, it’s completely subjective to the individual like how some times you look down and realise you’re bleeding without realising at that instance you begin to experience pain. It’s amazing how our brains work, so much potential not used.
I’ve decided I want to attend one of his live events now along with Top Gear, Have I Got News For You and Never Mind The Buzzcocks.
Thought of the day “Come on the Wolves!”
Amazing brilliant game, got a spare copy of the Fable 2 coaster sitting about? Then I suggest you trade it in as soon as possible and get this instead.
Thought of the day “America has it’s first black (half cast I would argue) president and I could not care less, surely there are more pressing issues in Europe or even this country?“
Let me warn you know, this post contains spoilers so if you’re looking forward to the entire five minutes you will need to complete Fable 2 then I suggest you read no more.
Hype, the game industry is built on the solid foundations of hype. One of the game industry mafia dons of hype has to be Lion Head studio’s Peter Molineux (speaking of the Molineux, Wolves are proudly top of the championship). Molineux has a long and varied history in the games industry; he’s released classics like the old school populous to the modern classic of Black and White. He’s also the brains behind the operation of the Fable series.
I owned the original Fable on the Xbox, I also owned the lost chapters (which was the same version of Fable but with an extra couple of missions thumb tacked on at the end - I never completed this due to not wishing to complete the game again to reach said content). Now the original game Fable was one such game that was all hype, I recall reading all of the previews prior to the games launch and there was a lot, no scratch that, an incredible amount of grandiose claims being made to what this titles would achieve, so the first thing I did was test these claims out, well for the most part they were all present in the game, marriage, having children, murder, owning property and so forth. But all of which lacked any real depth, they had no purpose and just felt like poor efforts in adding features to what can only be described as substandard claim.
So now we have Fable 2, the game that Peter Molineux claimed to be the game that the original Fable was meant to be. I think one reviewer claimed Fable to be a ‘demo’ in comparison to Fable 2, my logic however is different. I’d consider Fable and Alpha build and Fable 2 to be a public beta. It’s got all of the flaws of the original Fable has and then some. You again have a title promoted on pure unadulterated hype all of which fail to deliver on so many fronts. The weaponry, the character customisation, the enemies, the economy and trading and most importantly the story are all disappointing.
Out of all of those mentioned the storyline has to the biggest bag of fail, it’s far too short. Just when you think you’re about to fight the final boss, the killer moment the game has been building up to… you don’t fight him as another Hero named Reaver kills him and that’s it game over. Stick around for the credits and get the fuck out, thanks for playing! After this you can complete some extra additional quests that I suspect were again thrown together quickly to add something extra to the game. But there’s absolutely no reason to do this.
Visually Fable 2 looks the part, well apart from the scene where you see the ‘tower’ being constructed in the distance it looks like something a two year old would draw in MS paint no less, but that falls under my laziness criticism again I suspect. The music is good, if not tedious at times; however I did enjoy the voice acting for the most part. Though I do think the effort put into these areas would have been better spent else where to add some much needed depth.
I have no doubt we’ll be offered some downloadable content for Fable 2 at some point, but I for one will not be purchasing it. So let this be a lesson learned, it certainly is for me, wait for some poor sucker to spend their hard earned cash and tell you how good the next hype title is before you do yours. I can’t help but feel in a couple of years time Fable 3 will be declared the game the Fable 2 was meant to be…
Fable 2 gets a poor 2.0 tugs out 5. It’s a weekend renter for you gamerscore whores.
My copy of Fall Out Three arrived yesterday, I have no doubt this game will be a million times more playable than
Thought of the day ‘The Arsenal Tottenham match last night was a blinder’.