Hey there! I know it seems like I completely dropped off the map, and I sort of did. Been busy, been sick. Back on my feet now and I have some all new reviews at ThinkLeet.com and ComicAttack.net.

Go and check them out by clicking the links below!

Dragon Age II – Review

Aspen Reviews: Charismagic #0 and #1

Twister Humor: Lio: Happiness is a Warm Cephalopod

Taking A Look Back: Batman: The Long Halloween

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…aka Why You Shouldn’t Spend Sixty Bucks On Fable III

Let me go ahead and say that this will NOT be a spoiler-free review. If you don’t want spoilers, turn back now. You’ve been warned.

After playing Fable II and enjoying it thoroughly, I was more than willing to lay down sixty bucks for Fable III. I’d heard some shaky things about it, but I doubted it could really be that bad. How wrong I was.

I happily took my purchased game home and when the time finally came to start it, I cheerfully put the disc in the XBox and booted it up. It took maybe all of twenty minutes for the luster of it to wear off. I don’t know how they did it, but they managed to take the things that worked in Fable II and break them.

The simply explanation of the plot of the game is that you are a prince or princess and your brother is in charge of the kingdom and is messing it up royally. (Pun intended.) You end up having to flee the castle and go to work on building a revolution to take your kingdom back. You do and then find out there’s actually an even bigger threat and defeating it is the real goal of the game. The more in depth explanation of the game is about the same. There’s really not a lot to it.

Overall, the game is pretty dull. Even the characters are pretty bland. You waste a lot of time on what generally seem like pointless tasks that lack much creativity. I also found a few glitches that kept me from finishing (and even starting) a couple of the quests. The main point of the game is to run around your kingdom, trying to gain support and making promises to various groups in return for their promise to fight in the revolution. Each task that you complete earns you Guild Seals which unlock certain items on the Road to Rule. I’ll elaborate…

The Road to Rule is what was put in place in Fable III to help explain your progress and allow you to unlock more powerful spells, weapon abilities and so forth. The creepy blind woman from Fable II is back and appears on the Road to Rule as some kind of strange spirit guide. There are a few problems with the Road to Rule. The first is that you have to play a lot of side quests to earn enough seals to unlock the treasure chests containing various skills, so you have to pick and choose carefully or do just about every quest in the game. However, a lot of those chests are for things that I feel your character should be able to do from the beginning. Did we really need to unlock the ability to buy houses, to buy businesses, to have other characters fall in love with you, to earn additional character expressions, to go up levels in the mini games and dye your clothes? Are you saying my character is too stupid to be able to fall in love without wasting seals for them to learn how? Or how hard is it to go and buy a house? Did I actually unlock some kind of medieval home buyers guide?

The combat in the game is pretty easy. You have three focuses you can work with: melee, ranged and magic. Depending on which you focus on more, your character’s physical appearance will change. Melee combat makes you more muscled, ranged makes you taller and magic makes you all glowy. Attacking is really basic and there aren’t really any special moves. The best part about training your character up in any of the three options is that with a focus in melee or ranged weapons, your weapons actually evolve to look more bad ass. With magic, you are able to do a thing called spell-weaving which actually lets you combine two different magic spells together. For example: fire and electricity or ice and magic daggers.

Individual enemies in the game are pretty simple to beat, but it’s easy to get swarmed by bad guys and have your ass handed to you. This wouldn’t be so bad except that the only times I ever got knocked out were because of random swarms of baddies and not the final boss fight. How does that work? I also got tired of the non-randomized enemy encounters that seemed to happen every five feet. It wasn’t exciting, it was annoying.

Instead of tweaking the menu system from Fable II that so many complained about, they removed it entirely. This removed easy access to your inventory, stats, saving, etc. Instead they decided to give you a sanctuary that you could return to any time by pressing the “start” button. Even once you arrived there, you had to go into a separate room for you weapons, clothing/hair/makeup and money. When you access a side panel for your character’s stats, you receive a watered down status. There are no fun stats like how many chickens you’ve kicked, bad guys you’ve killed, STDs you’ve received (I’m not making this up), etc. Instead, you will see those randomly appear on your loading screens. The main room also includes a map which allows you to check in on the status of property and quests and then to teleport to different locations.

One of the other rooms in your sanctuary is basically the XBox Live room. You can locate other players and buy in-game items with your Microsoft points. That’s all very well and good, but you are constantly reminded of it when you teleport back and your butler recommends checking out the shop. I get it, you want to sell me stuff. Shut the hell up already! It was like listening to a bloody commercial on repeat. Wait, that’s exactly what it was. Infinite infomercial loop.

While it may seem nice to be able to save your game at any point by traveling to the sanctuary, it’s really not that necessary. The game auto-saves a lot, but that’s also part of the problem. If you screw up, there is no going back. Maybe the point was that the game makers wanted you to have to live with your decisions, but I found it ultimately frustrating. It also means that to see an alternate outcome to something, you’d have to start a whole new game.

Also located in your sanctuary is an area for gifts you’ve received from people in the kingdom. No more finding out what they gave you when you receive them. No, you have to go back to the sanctuary to open them.

On the subject of gifts from towns people, you can no longer win over crowds with your charm. You have to approach NPCs ONE BY ONE, waste a lot of time doing things like heroic poses or whistling to win them over and then they send you on an errand to win them over completely. (Winning them over completely is a crucial step to starting a relationship should you want to have an in-game romance.) The errands get dull and repetitive for not much return.

Starting a family in Fable III is fairly consistent with how it is in Fable II. (Even though my fair skinned child changed racial backgrounds for no apparent reason at one point.) However, there is one kink. Your children will ask you for presents, but unlike Fable II where you could go to most any shop and get a lot of similar items, stalls and stores only carry two to five items or so. So you either have to find the right stall carrying the right item or find it out in the world. One of my children got all upset because I couldn’t find the porcelain doll they asked for anywhere. It was like trying to find the hot Christmas item for kids on Christmas Eve.

So, let’s link this in to the problem with shops. It is incredibly hard to find what you want half of the time. There are items that are exclusive to each town and, as noted before, each shop has a stupidly limited amount of goods. Are you really telling me the guy at the gift vending stall only carries two things? Really?

In Fable III, they bring the money-earning mini games back. The available jobs are blacksmithing, lute playing and pie making. To play, you have to hit a sequence of buttons on your controller in time with the screen (sort of like Guitar Hero or Rock Band). As you play each section of any given mini game, your gold multiplier goes up (the amount you earn per successful sequence). The problem is that I kept running into lag on my system and it would screw me up around the sixth or seventh level multiplier. It also didn’t help that the NPCs were stupid and would walk right through my character while playing the games which ended up being distracting.

So, I’ve covered a lot of what I didn’t like about the game. What about the things I did like? Well, they were few and far between. There were a couple of quests that were fun (one is particularly entertaining if you’re a D&D player). There was a lot of quirky humour throughout, including some really awesome posters that are displayed in the cities. The game does seem to pick up a little bit in the second half, but it’s too little too late. What parts I did enjoy were pretty much washed away by the major problem with the game: it sets you up to fail.

As with the last two games in the Fable series, you are allowed to be a moral and upright character, a conniving villain or something in between. This game makes it exceptionally hard to start out playing an evil character. The whole point is that you’re supposed to gain support from various factions to aid your cause. How can you do that if you just piss them off all the time? I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t change things much to be evil, but with the auto-save system, it’s hard to give it a try and back up if necessary.

Here’s where things get screwed up. If you decide to play a moral character, the ending will screw you over. What seems like the goal of the game (winning back your kingdom and being crowned ruler) is only a part of the final story. It turns out there is an evil darkness heading your way and you need to amass enough wealth to properly afford protection for your citizens and you only have one year to do it in. As ruler, you have to make decisions that will eat into your money pile or will help build it. Keeping the promises you made along the way always eats into the funds, but choosing the more corrupt options will help you build it. So, if you’re playing a moral character you have to choose between most of the population of Albion dying or deciding to become a dick. Making unpopular decisions does more than upset your people, it also ruins your kingdom. Things like using one area as a place to dump sewage and draining a lake to mine for precious materials. Out of all of the decisions you have to make, only two or three (of maybe twelve to fifteen or so) are moral and earn you money.

The year you are allotted to try to build up your treasury counts down unevenly. You start with 365 days and once you complete the tasks for one day, you’re knocked down to 320-some days and so on. There is no knowing when you’re finally going to run out of time. This caught me off guard and prevented me from transferring personal wealth to the kingdom’s treasury. Because of this, the majority of my citizens died. After a ridiculously easy boss fight where I simply spammed the magic button, I came back to find my castle strewn with dead bodies. By doing the right thing I doomed most of Albion’s citizens to death. What kind of ending is that? If you play an asshole, then you save more people? Is it like Dark Helmet says in “Spaceballs” that “evil will always triumph because good is dumb”? I can’t recall ever being so dissatisfied with the ending of a game before.

Fable III feels unfinished, forced and unoriginal. It’s a short game, and it pales in comparison to Fable II. Sequel games should get better, not worse.

Save your money. Go by Cataclysm or, if you’re looking for another fantasy game on a PS3 or 360, get Dragon Age. I guarantee either of those options will be better than the fail that was Fable III.

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A little more bad-assery would be okay.

Last night, after much anticipation, I started playing World of Warcraft’s new Cataclysm expansion. I am in love.

Obviously, as a lover of werewolves I had to create a Worgen character. (I’ve had a placeholder name saved on my server of choice for months now. So you can see just how excited I’ve been.) For the most part, I was not disappointed.

The Worgen starting area is stellar. Unlike the other race starting areas, you really get a sense of story and character progression from the get-go. I don’t want to spoil too much, so I won’t go into a lot of detail. I will say that the new system that phases the world into a new orientation at certain key points is pretty spectacular. (i.e. When you complete certain quests it triggers the next part of the story and your character is seamlessly moved into another updated area.) Some of the transitions are particularly slick and really make things more interesting. For example, I turned in a quest inside of a cellar and when I came back out, the town I was in had built barricades against the coming onslaught.

I also really dug the cut scenes that have been scattered throughout my gaming time. There is one in particular that I love, but I won’t ruin it for those who haven’t played yet.

At this point I’m still in the starting area. (I’m under the weather and just couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer than a few hours.) Still, in that brief time the story managed to pull me in. The actual theme of the area is very cool and the quests seem pretty natural and relevant to the matter at hand. There were a few I found a bit baffling because they used mechanics I hadn’t experienced in the game before (vehicles and the like), but they were still pretty easy to figure out and complete. The nice thing is that this mixes the quests up a bit beyond “go kill and/or gather XX amount of things” and also prepares you for similar quests that will occur at higher levels. Think of it as a really fun tutorial.

The leveling system is also really smooth. I blasted my way up to level seven in a pretty short amount of time without having to do any overly tedious tasks. I’m playing a warrior class (which is new to me), and unfortunately I did get my ass beat once. I think the issue was that the enemy respawns were set for a larger volume of players, but since I started playing a week after the release, most of those folks had already moved on from the starting zone. There were a few times I had to “run away” ala Monty Python.

Now for what would be considered the bad news to all of this: I really don’t love the female Worgen design. As has been the case with most of the WoW races, the developers tried too hard to make the females “pretty”. Standing side by side with a male Worgen, you see just how gypped we get. We lack awesome glowing eyes, overly large fangs and pretty much any real sense of menace. We’re supposed to be cursed, furry, battling machines. A little more parity between the sexes would have suited that just fine.

The character creator for the Worgen also presents some issues. The male Worgen definitely have the cooler, beefier options, while the females are again left with softer looks. I also don’t like that when you select the face/fur shading for your Worgen, it automatically selects a face for your human counterpart. The two shading selections I really liked left me with an old lady face on my human. I also would have liked to be able to change the Worgen hair colour independently of the fur colour.

The only other issue I’ve really had to this point was a glitch with the “/laugh” command. Instead of laughing, my character starting making chicken-taunting noises. I also ran through everything on the “/silly” command (which makes your character tell jokes). Some of the jokes were pretty lame, but I did bust up when my character piped up with “at least we don’t sparkle”. That just about made my gaming experience right there.

All in all, I think the Worgen are a great addition to WoW and I’m looking forward to digging deeper into Cataclysm. Or, based on the way the world looks now, falling into it.

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You can read my new Dragon Age: Origins review via my guest post at ThinkLeet.com:

Behold! Dragon Age: Origins

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Fail.

Some may recall a blog I posted a little while back about girls and gaming. You might also recall that I mentioned that female gamers seem to be fewer in number, and are sometimes treated as oddities by their male counterparts. To upset the balance further, a company called GameCrush has decided to try and make things even more polarized by offering a service where you can PAY to play games with sexy girls. Because, you know, no sexy girls would want to play games with you unless they’re paid to do so.

From IGN.com’s article:

On GameCrush, guys are Players and girls are PlayDates. Players pay to play and PlayDates get paid to play. Guys can browse PlayDate profiles (there are currently around 1,200), view photos, and even chat with girls for free. Publicityhazard’s turn ons include vibrating controllers, for instance, and is turned off by three red lights. Once you find a gal you fancy you send her a game invite and if she accepts you get six to ten minutes of one-on-one gaming time. PlayDates have the ability to block any guy they want for any reason. When the service launches tomorrow it will only support the Xbox 360 and a few casual games hosted on the GameCrush website, but there are plans to add PlayStation 3, Wii, and World of Warcraft support as soon as possible.

How sad is that? As the subhead on TechRadar’s article reads:

Buying girls’ attention? Isn’t there a word for that?

I also have a few more words for it: eww, eww and eww with a side of eww for dipping.

Of course we all know this service will turn a profit. Then again, so does prostitution and stripping. (The chicks joining this service are just trying to pay their way through college too, right?)

According to IGN, GameCrush’s payment system was calculated to be about the price of buying a girl a drink at a bar ($8.25). This price translates to about 10 minutes of game play. The girls on this system get to keep about 60 percent of the cash they bring in, and can store it in their virtual g-string. (So I made that last part up, what’re you going to do about it?)

After completing a gaming, er, session…players can rate their “PlayDate” on things like gaming skill, hotness and flirtiness. Those with the highest ratings will receive preferred placement on the site. Remind me again how this system isn’t just a computerized pimp? All it needs is a fuzzy hat and a mean backhand.

I know no one is forcing these girls to join in, but I still find the whole thing extremely creepy and pathetic not only for the girls, but for the guys using this service. Maybe you should get off your lazy butt and go to a strip club or something, at least that way you’d be getting exercise for more than your right hand.

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