Dharma Bum

[ Mood: Happy ]
[ Currently: Reading , just kidding. I’m playing videogames. ]
2003. It was a good year. I assume fine wines were fermented, babies were born, a certain young blogger lost his virginity to a morbidly obese female bus driver. Frasier and Friends dominated Thursday nights for office workers who had many children to keep quiet and away from their wallets, quoting Seinfeld was funny in a non-ironic way, and Saddam Hussein statues were being shoe’d by the charming yet exotic Iraqi people. But what stood out the most about the abyss of that calenderial black hole of nothing that was 2003, was Fable.

Google image search is a cruel bitch.

Fable had a rabid fan following only The Phantom Menace could be nonchalant about. The producers of the game were promising the world at first – well, at least, everything that was in Oblivion in 2006, was supposed to be in Fable in 2003. Considering how fast the exponential improvement of feats game developers are capable of grows, that would have been an epic task, on par with understanding the previous convoluted sentence fragment.

Sadly, while the developers did have the skill to deliver on their promises, they were limited by the X-Box’s capabilities and a publishing schedule pushed on them by Microsoft. Rabid fan demands and rumor mongering also brought upon a flurry of ludicrous expectations, such as the ability to horribly murder children, engage in air to ground combat while riding a dragon, and explicit cartoon sex scenes. They wanted it to be a mini-game that involved "thrusting" the analogue sticks in different directions. I guess you could use the right stick to write the alphabet with to simulate cunnilingus.

Every review of the game said the same thing. Something along the lines of, "This isn’t the same as what we were promised, but its still an okay game." Bullshit. It is a great game, with plenty to do and plenty of replay value. If its still fun to play three years later, it was fun to play to begin with. If people had abstained from ruining every detail of the game’s playability, they would have found Fable to be absolutely the most innovative game of its time (2003). And I say that with a deep, loving respect of KotOR. The morality meter, the combat, the magic – everything moves at an aggressive and fun pace, at least when the disc isn’t loading.

The game is a bit more tedious than I remembered. I’m surprised by how the load times are moving so slowly, especially on a backwards compatible 360. I can understand why having an open world was scratched given the limitations of the original X-Box, but they could have designed the maps and quests so things could move more efficiently, so that the gameplay might actually last longer than the loading screens.

I get to make out with Legolas first!

Fable 2 is currently in development, and to my understanding, with a whole new team, which is good. Big Blue Box, a Lionhead subsidiary, made the first game, and they just loved their fans too much to implement fun game elements over fan demands. And they loved themselves a bit too much, too. You can customize your character to have the same haircuts and facial hair as many of the game’s project leads, including the Carter brothers, who I am a dork for knowing what they look like. If I ever made a game, I’d also be a bit narcicistic, but at least I’ve got an interesting, sexy, psychotic clown thing going for me. The Carters are just pudgy, bald englishmen, and thus, your character often becomes a pudgy, bald englishman.

Hi. We’re here to save the world and eat your last jelly donut.

In the end, Fable will always have a black spot in its franchise history. The franchise is marred forever by the high expectations of the proletariat, which is a shame, because its a great showcase for innovative concepts in gaming. If Fable 2 does not deliver for petty magazine game reviewers, whiny fan boys, and GameStop employees, the backlash will be so bad that there will be no Fable 3. So, the solution is to kill and eat all of those people before Fable 2 ships. Yeah, yeah, I know, "But that’s your solution to everything." When I stops working, I’ll start talking out my problems.