October 22, 2004
Fable
I recently finished playing Fable. Well, twice, actually. Fable is a recently-released RPG for Xbox. You start out as a young boy in a village shortly before bandits come in and raze your town to the ground. You're saved at the last minute and go off to Hero school. You can be good to people ... or less good. The first time through, I was evil incarnate. I would rack up experience by killing traveling traders. Then I played it through again as a good guy. When you're good, butterflies fly around you. Freaky.
The game is a lot of fun, but it wasn't quite as great as I had expected it to be from all the rave reviews. For one thing, the choice between good and evil didn't actually change that much -- some of the dialogue changed, but overall, the path of the game was exactly the same. Also, it took me about 15 hours to get through the game. Fun, but not really that long.
It's hard not to compare it with Knights of the Old Republic, the other RPG I played on Xbox. Some of the appeal of KOTOR is undeniably that playing in the Star Wars universe is pretty damned cool, but I really think that it was a much more complex game. Good vs. evil made much more of a difference to the story line and abilities, and my first time through took about 45 hours to play.
Still -- it was definitely worth getting Fable. Even if Meredith eventually learned to hate the sound of magic lightning (think: Force lightning) that my character was so fond of.
Posted by Mike at October 22, 2004 11:12 PM