Forum Overview :: Reviews

Fable: The Lost Chapters (PC) by Creexul :( 10/08/2005, 9:01pm PDT In Fable, you go on adventures of being good or evil. That is the entire point of the game, to use the "become good or evil" engine, as seen in all the banner ads where THE OPTIONS ARE YOUR CHOICES FOR YOU TO CHOOSE. So then you become good or evil and then the game just sort of ends by itself. :( Actually, that's not at all what the game is about. Maybe in a much more boring and pointless game, like Black and White, would you fiddle around with good or evil decisions, and then quit. In this, it's an actual game where you are a kid with a mysterious past involving your village being destroyed by bandits, a "Hero" in caps like that rescues you to take you to the Heroes' Guild to train you and raise you to be a hero in a huge opening portion that teaches you everything about the game and each control. In the Xbox version, the controls fit very well with the controller, so after the early tutorials and practice you can run around kicking ass no problem. There's even a deeply involved context sensitive button system depending on your location, people in your vicinity, if a woman fell in love with you (WHICH HAPPENS A LOT TO ME HEH REALLY FOR REAL NOW PEOPLE), if you need to use a health potion, if you can steal something nearby, if there is something you can dig up from the ground. These controls and context features transferred just fine to the PC, doubling the bindable keys (which were just up down left right on the control pad in the Xbox) to 1 through 9 on your keyboard, which you can set to food, potions, or expressions such as dancing or flirting or whatever. LOOK I'M A MUTHAFUCKIN P I M P Instead of just running around deciding if you're going to be good or evil, the game is about being issued quests by the guild, so you can go out into the world and become famous. There are a ton of things you can do the game, either within the story or side quests or just goofing off in towns and finding coin golf games to play in the bar or getting married to women. It's sort of like a modern Legend of Zelda but infused with non-Japanese open endedness (or in the post GTA3 era, "emergence" PSH WHATEVER). And while the whole "good or evil" system can be decided by decisions in quests or cutscenes or whatever, it also goes throughout the entire game depending on if you run around killing enemies that are attacking the many naturally occurring traders and encampements throughout the game, or if you run around committing crimes, stealing shit, or murdering people you run across. Your character isn't just limited to your good or evil decisions, but some other crazy meters such as the attractiveness and scariness meters, which are modified by the many kinds of clothing and full outfits you can try to wear, tattoos you can get, and haircuts and facial hair. Apparently attractiveness not only affects how quickly the women (or even some men) in the game fall in love with you (which by the end is just about everyone you run past) but the prices you get from the shops. The game also keeps track of how much you attack with a melee weapon or a bow or using magic, and gives you experience any time you use one of those three skills, and puts them into three seperate experience pools along with your bigger general experience pool. This of course helps you specialize in whatever you want, or balance them out. At some point though you will find yourself using something more than the other, and it'll be your choice to focus what that will be. When you go back to the guild in between quests or whenever you choose to teleport back home, you can put your experience points into strength which affects melee damage and health, skill which affects trading and speed (and other bow shit), or will (which is what they are deciding to call magic in this game, psh perhaps?) which you can use to get spells. When you buy a skill it starts by spending your specialized experience from the pool and when that runs out it takes experience from your general experience pool. So as you go out doing quests and screwing around in the world, you actually are making your character unique as you see fit. Which is I guess how they were hyping this game. It surprised me that it was not only more than that, but the game is actually pretty fun, and the writing is good too. This is the only game I can think of where the bard is not only not annoying but a nice way to kill some time as you pay him to make little poems about you or some of your quests. The Lost Chapters mentioned in the title are some extra quests and games and features, along with an extra couple hours of storyline after the original end of the game, added to the Xbox version. I rented the Xbox version originally and never got around to finishing it because our shitty Xbox (which we got from someone else who was just giving it away) fucks up all the time reading discs. There is nothing quite as traumatic as seeing a game crash while autosaving your game. But beside that, since I never finished the game, picking this up for the PC was more worthwhile, especially seeing as how, for an RPG, Fable is actually pretty short. My game clock ran up to 17 hours by the end, which probably doesn't count half the times I died or reloaded old saves, so that's probably a few more hours, plus the time it takes you to get used to the game on the first play. I'd say it's really more around 25 to 30 hours. That's all I got right now. TO BE CONTINUED :(

Fable: The Lost Chapters (PC) by Creexul :( 10/08/2005, 9:01pm PDT     Re: Fable: The Lost Chapters (PC) by Mr. Kool 10/08/2005, 10:04pm PDT         Verdict: positive! NT by Creexul :( 10/09/2005, 12:16am PDT