Tunnels of Doom

Having depleted my supply of fresh games by mid-week—a feat which required the completion of Bionic Commando, an act I can wholeheartedly recommend you avoid at all costs—I was presented with the choice of either trying Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise again or trying to defeat the desert level in Valkyria Chronicles for the dozenth time. I went with Valkyria Chronicles and it took me another three tries to finally clear the level but I did manage to progress at last, some five months after I first attempted the challenge.

My problem in strategy games, and this includes non-video games like Blood Bowl or Warhammer 40K, is that I think my overall strategies are sound but I lack the calculative ability to plan accordingly for chance. Since almost every game simulates the uncertainty of strategic combat by including some sort of randomized element, I find myself regularly tripped up when the inevitable misfortune that is inherent in these games strikes. Let me give you an example from Valkyria Chronicles: In the briefing before the desert level they indicate that you may want to bring some long-range snipers to help clear the path for your foot soldiers’ approach. There are even two unit spots on an outcropping in the deployment map which are perfect for sniper units. So I dutifully deploy my snipers and start the match. During the round I use a command point to select a sniper and draw a bead on an opposing scout’s head and fire, which should result in a kill. Instead due to random chance the shot misses.

At this point the strategically sound thing would be to return the sniper to a safe position and continue moving the rest of my units according to my original battle plan, but my original plan assumed the death of that scout. Instead of accounting for the possibility that the sniper couldn’t hit the target (which, let’s be honest, was a 250 yard shot indicating he’s playing it pretty fast and loose with the whole “sniper” moniker) I now feel compelled to spend another command point on the sniper, move him onto an exposed bluff edge of his vantage point and try again. Success in these strategy adjustments is largely irrelevant because the net result is typically undesirable—in this case the opposing snipers surrounding the now-dead scout easily retaliate and kill my sniper meaning I had to use a third command point to send someone over to recover the wounded unit, a fourth to call in reinforcements and a fifth to bring the reinforcements into position since they were starting from the base. So in essence a one command point action ended up costing me five to recover from.

Valkyria Chronicles is an excellent strategy game because it doesn’t funnel you into its preferred way of doing things in an unnatural way. Obviously there are certain key strategies that will make individual levels easier to clear than if you run off on your own and load your deployments with half a dozen engineers or whatever. But it compensates for this by making each individual decision significantly more relevant than a handful of key ones as seen in other turn-based strategy games like Final Fantasy Tactics. The benefit of this is that it provides greater freedom for solving the game’s problems your own way; the downside is that you can make a lot of seemingly small mistakes before you realize you’ve gotten yourself in too deep to recover. When matches can take up to an hour or longer even without burying yourself one grain of sand at a time, it can be pretty frustrating to not necessarily know how things are going until you’ve invested a lot of time in a lost cause.

I still find the interminable cut scenes to be far too frequent and lengthy. It would be one thing if the story was rich and nuanced (which I believe it could be, considering the scope of the setting and the number of available characters) but instead the writers/designers chose to focus on a small handful of inexplicably underdeveloped personalities and ramble through a story that is neither intimate and personal to the characters nor broad and epic to the conflict. It’s an odd thing and for a guy who generally finds something compelling in game stories, it’s weird to find myself just wanting to get to the “good stuff.”

The problem with life behind the curve as described a couple of weeks ago is that occasionally events will conspire to leave you with practically nothing to play. In this case the games on my watch list that I’m most willing to spend my few remaining Goozex points on are not being offered at the moment and I’m lacking enough purchasing power to push myself up in the curve (for example, to request slightly newer, higher-priced items). So I purchased my first retail game this year (not counting gifts) and went out and bought Dragon Age: Origins, which is how I spent my gaming weekend.

My first problem with Dragon Age is that there are six different background stories to choose from and I couldn’t decide which one I wanted to pursue from the terse descriptions of each on the character creation page. So I made six different characters and decided I would try all of them. When all was said and done I went with the first character I made anyway (City Elf Rogue) but my progress has allowed me to begin to view that as a partially regrettable choice as I keep thinking back to the other characters I left behind as I forge ahead. My intention, taken for what it’s worth given my time availability these days, is to play enough of this game to earn all available achievements so in theory I will have to work through the game at least once more and probably put some time in on a third character as well (at least leveling to 20). That’s plenty of opportunity to try some other characters but I do worry that I may not have the motivation for continued play that I had with Bethesda’s recent epics and may instead end up with Mass Effect syndrome.

Granted none of that is a problem with the game, it’s actually of a player issue and even then you can hardly fault a game for being too interesting. Which isn’t to say Dragon Age is perfect, but the problems it has are relatively few and minor at that. Graphically the game is strangely unimpressive. It lacks some of the striking visuals of Mass Effect but then again it also doesn’t have as many of the glitches that game suffered from; more to the point the look of everything is sort of drab and uninteresting. It’s one thing to be the wild-hair-and-unlikely-clothing of most Japanese style RPGs but the other end of the spectrum seems to be this sort of sepia-toned blah that too many western RPGs think is “gritty” or whatever. My position is that if you’re going to have hyper-realistic graphics that ooze banality to give a sense of environmental oppression you need to fix stuff like articulation in the hand models and beards that clip through breastplates. I’m just saying, I had no qualms with the visuals in World of Warcraft because while imperfect they were stylish and frequently beautiful.

The other thing that stands out to me about Dragon Age is the fact that it has gone back to the Baldur’s Gate/KotOR style of dialog tree where your character doesn’t speak the actual lines and you select exactly what you want to say from the textual options presented. I think I preferred Mass Effect’s “gist wheel” system that allowed conversations to flow more smoothly, especially since all of Bioware’s games are about 75% conversation. There’s something oddly disconnected about having what amounts to a one-way conversation with someone despite them reacting to your telepathic interjections. Still, it’s one of those concessions to interaction you have to tolerate when you’re into games as a broader entertainment medium.

What I really appreciate about Dragon’s Age is that it feels very much like the kind of Saturday afternoon Dungeons and Dragons sessions from Jr. High, perfectly capturing that kind of classic fantasy setting where everything is just as you expect it to be and the “innovative twists” that set it apart are a sprinkling of semi-adolescent grit: Extra blood, political intrigue, adult themes. It’s hardly amazing, but for whatever reason it hits the spot.

My other project has been New Super Mario Bros. for the DS, which I played a couple of years ago when it was more contemporary. The recent buzz/fuss about the Wii version of NSMB included a lot of what I thought was revisionist history where people were saying they disliked the DS version for being soulless or other such digs that I presumed would have been leveled at the game during its launch window if there were any honesty involved (which I don’t expect much of really when it comes to gaming press types). So I had to re-visit the game to see if—even in hindsight—the critiques were valid. On second playthrough I guess I can kind of see what they’re saying: It certainly isn’t on the same level as SMB3 or Super Mario World, but it isn’t soulless or unenjoyable by any stretch and in fact I’d say it’s biggest flaw isn’t in the parts that really matter like level design (somewhat spotty in the difficulty curve but overall fun) or the mechanics (the few minor additions and improvements are welcome and even add to the fun) but in the relatively minor element of new power-ups. The super mushroom is fun but ultimately kind of useless since it can fairly readily be wasted if you encounter a pipe or passage that you can’t fit in just after you pull it from your inventory. The mini-mushroom is similar: It’s actually detrimental to use it since it’s really a tool and not a power-up (like a power-down I guess?). I also dislike how the game makes value judgments on which power-ups are preferable in terms of which it puts into your inventory slot: I’d almost always prefer a fire flower over a blue turtle shell, but I don’t have a choice.

With my completion of Fable II this past week I officially caught up with the glut of Xbox titles I had acquired from Goozex mid-summer before my Xbox broke. Granted, not all of those games ended up being completed (notably Kane & Lynch which I found to be tedious) but in any case I’m now kind of in a semi-looking phase where I do have a few games I could play so I’m not dying for something new but nothing that is on my plate presently really has me excited so if something better came along, it wouldn’t be unwelcome.

Let me back up before I get into the post-Fable realm and talk a bit about Fable II. I can summarize the game thusly: It offers you plenty of opportunity to engage in a wide variety of largely uninteresting role-playing activities. Fable II is a big game that feels very small, and by that I mean the way the game is divided up into various regions set apart by loading screens and existing in no kind of cohesive whole (i.e. there is no world map per se nor would it matter a lick if there were). As a result each region feels like a self-contained mini-sandbox in which there are a lot of things to do but once you start classifying your available activities you realize they boil down to four fairly simple categories and each activity is just a riff on one of them. The categories are: Fight Stuff, Social Interactions, Tracking and Numbers Fiddling.

The Fight Stuff part is where most of the questing lies and you also encounter random enemies as you travel around the various regions. The game’s combat isn’t bad necessarily but it isn’t good either and I found that for the most part you can win nearly every battle by spamming on your most powerful attack, be it ranged (Skill), melee (Strength) or magic (Will). Since specialization is wholly unnecessary I would flip back and forth depending on which weapon or spell I had acquired most recently and once you can afford the level 5 Inferno spell there is little reason to use anything else especially if you combine it with a low-level time spell first to allow the Inferno a chance to charge without taking too much damage. The variety and finesse of the combat system is cool in theory but in execution it seems like it’s appeal lies principally in the effectiveness of the game engine’s animation system and, well, let’s just say that animation shouldn’t be Lionhead Studios’ top bullet point on the resume.

But you will have to fight a lot to make it through the main story so the best I can say is that it’s never frustrating, just a little tedious so you more or less learn to ignore it as you go through. On the other hand the second category of Social Interactions is frequently frustrating especially without a strategy guide since the in-game cues are almost universally—and perhaps intentionally—vague to the point of near uselessness. Trying to figure out what people want from you so you can get what you want out of them is time-consuming and irritating and almost never yields enough reward to be worth the effort. In the end the bizarre AI logic of NPC interactions simply becomes too much to deal with especially if you decide to change your demeanor halfway through the game or you take a series of inconsistent actions for a short time for whatever reason. I found that as I tried to pull myself off my initial Saintly path I would perform some evil deed in the presence of others and end up with characters who had big loving hearts floating over their heads screaming and running in terror from me, blending sound bytes that suggested they wanted to flee from me and yet marry me at the same time. But again, none of it really matters except as a novelty.

The third thing you can do is Tracking, by which I mean wandering around either following the ubiquitous Glowing Trail which leads you exactly to your next destination as determined by the AI (making the games relatively low number of fetch quests dead simple but also completely pointless) or you can head off the GT track and look for “other stuff.” The other stuff is usually treasure but there is also an easter egg hunt using Gargoyles that you can engage in if you wish. I can’t really say one way or the other whether this stuff is really fun since my own inclination to engage in this type of trivial game-hours padding is directly proportional to my enjoyment of the game’s other merits (for example I did a lot of orb hunting in Crackdown and flag hunting in Assassin’s Creed because I liked those games but I certainly didn’t find all the jumps in Burnout Paradise and I didn’t bother with the collectibles in The Darkness). If hunting stuff down is your thing, you’ll enjoy this. For me, I found the simple act of walking around to be too awkward to have much patience for it: Fable II’s camera is sloppy and the run controls make you a clumsy, ill-controlled train wreck so I found myself following the GT whenever I needed to physically traverse an area and using fast travel as much as I possibly could.

The final aspect is Numbers Fiddling which means doing various mini-games in order to increase your stats. This is the shopping stuff, the job system, gambling mini-games and real estate manipulation. Some of it is okay: The gambling mini-games are reasonably fun for a short time and a couple of the jobs are interesting for a minute or two but of course Fable II wants you to do all of it to excess and it wears its welcome out quickly. What’s especially annoying is that a lot of these systems are tied into the other game elements in small but significant ways such as trading being largely dependent on your social standing with the merchants only, again, it’s not always completely clear why an NPC is having a particular sale or opening up a given option. It generally easiest to try to get everyone to like you but then again you can also make everyone fear you and get similar or in some cases preferable results. When it’s all said and done it hardly matters since you can get more money than you’ll actually need pretty quickly and the only real reason to engage in furthering your financial or experience needs is just to speed up the rest of the game or earn a few achievements.

If it sounds like I hated Fable II, it’s partially because in a lot of ways I should have hated it. Aside from the base problems listed above the main story arc is cliched and fairly drab plus it suffers from limp characterizations of the principal NPCs and has one of the worst ending sequences of any game since BioShock. Actually, BioShock has a downright revolutionary and brilliant ending compared to the eyebrow-raising dud that Fable II fizzles into. Which all adds up to an awful lot of negativity about the game. Somehow, in spite of itself, Fable II does manage to remain just interesting enough to be playable. The first 30-45 minutes of the game are wonderful, a cheeky sense of humor runs throughout which somehow works to match the tone to the game’s breezy gameplay mechanics and while each individual activity can be broken down into a larger recurring category individually there is an awful lot to try and plenty of options to play around with. I could never go so far as to recommend the game but if you liked the idea of Oblivion but found it too stiff and serious and felt it was so wide open as to feel rudderless you might find that Fable II is more your speed. For everyone else I’d probably say stay away—but, if you’re determined to play it, don’t be surprised if you find yourself shaking your head a lot and saying “ooookay…” but also not putting the controller down. I know exactly where you’re coming from.

Having finished Fable II I was left more or less with Bionic Commando as the only Xbox game left in my stash that was yet (mostly) unplayed. So I decided to pop it in and give it a go. Up front I need to make clear that this game in no way should be considered good. The flaws aren’t always immediately obvious, though. You can certainly pinpoint the game’s corny dialogue and sort of labored storyline but—hey—this is a video game, after all. As much as I’d like to say it was the exception, we all know it’s really the rule. Beyond that though it’s hard to tell what Bionic Commando is really doing wrong. The controls aren’t great, relying on contextual actions more so than dedicated mappings but they are responsive and precise which is an improvement from some other Capcom games this generation (I’m looking at you, Dead Rising). The level design isn’t bad although it does get repetitive once you start returning to Generic Post-Apocalyptic Street Scene or Generic Craggy Canyon for the second or third time. The combat doesn’t completely suck despite the enemy AI being lackluster and the enemy varieties being ridiculously limited. No, for the most part the game is what I’d classify as moderately above average in every sense that games usually get measured.

What’s really the most off about Bionic Commando is the nebulous sense of cohesion and—let me try to avoid too much irony here—purpose. In the end there really is no need for this game to be doing so much of what it does. It doesn’t need to have such a convoluted backstory; why not just try to build a narrative from the original NES game’s loose story and re-imagine it in 3D much the way Rearmed re-imagined it again in 2D? There isn’t any purpose to Spencer (the protagonist) to be the reluctant super-hero especially since the overwrought plot depends on him being decidedly not unique in his bionic capabilities. There just isn’t any logical or even gameplay reason to make checkpoints separate from save points or to have six or seven sections where you have to swing from “mines” which are really just balloons over frustratingly non-instant-death water. The contrivance of the pockets of radiation that create the linearity of the levels are unnecessary, the length of the game is far beyond what’s needed. I could go on. The point is they took a half-decent game and made it crummy by trying way too hard to make you think the game is more expansive or deep or clever or interesting than it was ever going to be. The bottom line is that the original NES game was fun because it was simply an enjoyable game: It was a platformer with a singular unique mechanical twist and that’s it. It worked on just that level. Rearmed understood that, I can’t fathom why Grin missed the mark so badly.

Aside from the Xbox games I also dipped back into Kongregate a little for reasons that I’m not completely clear on. I had shied away from the site for a while after I changed jobs because it’s very addicting but not the best thing in the world to be doing when you’re supposed to be earning your paycheck. I’ve mostly kept it to break times and off-hours this time around but I’m prepared to exit the site again if it gets out of hand. The game I spent the most time with was Toss the Turtle, which is a sort of physics toy/maze/puzzle/upgrade thing in which you launch a cartoon turtle out of a cannon and try to see how long you can keep him going. Aside from a loss of momentum which can be combated by maneuvering the turtle toward springy obstacles, using various bits of equipment like rocket packs and nukes, or shooting him with your gun to juggle him upward, you have to contend with various spiky obstacles that halt your progress immediately.

I was able to earn the 3,000,000 feet achievement after several hundred tries and I thought I’d share how I did it in case you were stuck the way I was: First, you need to upgrade to the tank, the missile and the golden gun. This is not an easy feat in itself but it can be done with a bit of patience. I found it helps to upgrade each step of the way rather than try to save up for the top model since each increment drastically increases your average launch distance to the extent that it boosts your payout per launch exponentially. Once you have the top gear, start by buying a chest bomb (you’ll need to do this for each and every launch; don’t worry $2,000 will start to be meaningless) and then fire the turtle upwards at about a 45° angle. He should soar up past the top of the screen into space about an additional 700 ft before hitting the pinnacle of the arc. Wait for him to come down and bounce twice: The first time he’ll bounce back up over the top of the screen, use this time to set up the cursor an inch or so above the bottom edge and just slightly offset to the right from being vertically aligned with the arrow at the top. On the second bounce he’ll get up toward the top but won’t actually disappear. As he’s on his decent wait for him to get into your crosshairs; the color of the background sky when this happens should be roughly twilight (between 800-900 feet). Then shoot him with the golden gun. This should send him flying back up over the vertical limit by about 1,200 feet. Let him fall and bounce twice again, making sure to only shoot him when his bounce momentum doesn’t carry him out of the screen’s range and repeat until you’ve used all 10 bullets.

It’s unlikely that at this speed you’ll hit any spikes but if you do your chest bomb will save you once. I was able to make it over 2,000,000 feet with a single clip in the golden gun and no chest bomb. The next 1,000,000 feet are a little harder, but at 2 mil you can relax a little: The payout is so high at this point that each time you don’t make it you can just load up on nukes and try again. I’d recommend not bothering to actually use the nukes until you’ve amassed at least two dozen but you’ll be surprised how fast you can pick them up when you’re earning over $100K per launch. To get the last million feet I used my last bullet from the golden gun to send the turtle over the screen and then hit the missile to get his momentum going a little more horizontally. Then I let him bounce maybe four times before I hit the nuke button. The reason is that at this speed you can’t really react quick enough to avoid the spike mines attached to the balloons so you have to more or less just angle your bounces around them. They tend to cluster about 75 feet, 150 feet and again at 700 feet so with four bounces post-nuke you ought to avoid them most of the time. Also if you get lucky and hit an ammo clip return to the two-bounce-shoot pattern until all the bullets are gone again. The biggest pitfall to avoid is waiting too long to drop the nuke: There is a delay between when you press the button and when the nuke effect actually takes place, if your momentum is too low or you have a spiked wall or something in front of you it may not be the quick save like the missile can be. If you want to ensure you don’t get to like 2,950,000 and then splatter on a bed of spikes you can also save the missile: Theoretically you don’t need it since it doesn’t propel you far enough to really make a significant difference in your overall total and may be better used as an emergency bail out. The biggest thing is to let your cash pile build up to a level your comfortable with (I decided on $1,000,000) and make sure to buy as many nukes and a new chest bomb after every unsuccessful run. My second best effort happened on a round I forgot to buy the chest bomb and I made it to 2,460,000+ feet before I found a spike balloon. If I’d remembered to visit the shop I probably could have saved myself 30 minutes.

There are, aside from the usual minor variations and exceptions that prove the rule, two ways for self-sufficient adults to play games: One can either be particularly selective about which new titles to pick up on or near launch day using previews, reviews and any number of buzz-tracking social mechanisms to determine potential enjoyment from an upcoming or newly released game or one can intentionally trail the release curve in order to maintain a steady diet of sub-retail priced software. Budget will play a significant role in either path, but I submit it is impossible to choose the lower-priced path without at some level playing a bit of a waiting game.

Obviously I fall firmly into the tail of the curve camp, using Goozex close to exclusively for new titles and supplementing occasionally with rentals or, rarely, a new game either as a gift or an uncommon purchase. As seen in the $60 a Month series, I have occasionally had the resources to spend extra money on games and that includes newer releases from time to time. But at heart I’ve always been more of the kind of person who plays quickly through as many titles as I can and that means I have had to make peace with sometimes missing out on the gaming zeitgeist. But it occurs to me that all you really miss out on by staggering your release time-frame backward six to twelve months is that sense of being “in” with other gamers who are all clamoring about the latest and greatest. BioShock is just as good now as it was two years ago and, conveniently, it sells new for at least 75% less than it did then but you won’t be party to the wave of exuberant glee that rippled through the subculture with it’s “Would You Kindly” mania.

Don’t let me try to suggest that this is an easy state to maintain. If you care at all about gamer culture (as I do) then you find it hard to resist the siren call of the holiday release season and it’s slew of tempting, tasty titles. My Goozex requests queue looks like a laughably improbable list of the here-and-now: Borderlands, Uncharted 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Demon’s Souls, Brutal Legend, FIFA Soccer 10, Dragon’s Age: Origins, Assassin’s Creed II. Collecting all these games in the next few months would cost me hundreds of dollars or thousands of Goozex points (I have neither). However, I have a back log of games from earlier in the year or even before that which I can acquire for a small amount of cash or trade: Saints Row 2, Call of Duty: World at War, Velvet Assassin, Prototype, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Overlord II. By the time I finish those, the crop that are sitting unfilled on my wishlist will probably be played out by the early adopters and ready to move on to their next thing, giving me access to my next in line.

The other effect of this is that I end up weeding out games I thought might be interesting but don’t hold lasting appeal to me outside the context of their launch hype. Street Fighter IV was once on my list but has since been dropped, for example. It can be had for dirt cheap now, but aside from the nostalgic push it had in my mind when SF4 was buzzing on every forum, there isn’t enough desire left to bother. The ancillary benefit is that I avoid $60 mistakes.

The idea of $60 mistakes came up this week as I was finishing Halo 3: ODST. I borrowed the game from a friend on Monday and played through it over the course of the week in short, maybe 1-2 hour chunks each night. I finished it Friday night which means all told the game was maybe 10 hours but I’d peg it more at about six. I’m not suggesting it was a bad game; on the contrary I liked it better I think than the trilogy-concluding Master Chief game from two years ago. But considering I had no inclination to a) play it again or b) engage in the online component, I have to say that if I’d spent $60 on launch day the way I did with both Halo 2 and Halo 3, I’d have been pretty bummed right about now.

I know some people get up in arms about the brevity of some single-player campaigns these days and I’ve even grumbled on occasion about certain games that were either obviously rushed or were incomplete but in truth I like that there are games out there like Uncharted and Halo 3: ODST that provide a few hours of entertainment and don’t demand more than I care to put into them. As I said I prefer to play a lot of different games a little bit as opposed to probing every nook and cranny of a few so games that are get-in-get-out are actually kind of welcome. I’d rather a game leave me wanting more than artificially pad its time-to-completion with repetitive sections.

Which is part of what I appreciated about ODST. At no point did it feel padded or repetitive, it had a story to tell and it told it using a nice blend of familiar mechanics and fresh adjustments. As usual, it was a Halo game that felt a bit like I wasn’t being let in on all the nuances of the story and only part of the problem seemed to come from the lack of subtitles on the in-game chatter. There is a weird disconnect with what I perceive to be competence on Bungie’s part to write a good story and a persistent difficulty in telling that story effectively in the context of gameplay. I mean, I got the gist, but I never really cared that much. Fortunately Bungie also makes a good shooter from a strict game perspective and there were plenty of enjoyable set pieces and fun times.

Since I finished ODST Friday night I had to find something from my archive to fill the rest of the weekend and I settled back into Fable II. I’m not sure why I keep drifting away from that game and coming back but I think it has something to do with a degree of analysis paralysis that plagued me a bit in other games like Oblivion and Grand Theft Auto where, when presented with a lot of options, I end up dithering around trying to get my bearings for so long that I end up feeling like I’ve played the game for hours and made zero progress. Some games combat this by at least offering a sense of achievement if not necessarily forward movement: Oblivion did this well. GTA and Fable on the other hand feel like they end up at a point where I say, “Enough, I’m just going to try to tear through the story missions because I’m getting too wrapped up in treasure hunts and side-missions.” At least with Fable II it allows you the option to just press on for the most part where other games—GTA IV especially—hounded me so much with background noise that eventually I gave up entirely.

I find it also helps me at least to sometimes go and grab an achievement guide or a walkthrough online not to make the play easier but to give me an ordered list of steps I need to take to accomplish certain tasks. For example in Fable I wanted to ultimately do the marriage action but as with almost everything in Fable II it’s a very fiddly process and rather than stumble through it for several nights in a row (remember I’m only playing an hour or two at the most per night these days) I was thankful to have step-by-step instructions to get me to where I wanted to be. Presented like that it’s actually pretty straightforward but sussing it out yourself isn’t intuitive.

I do notice about Fable II that, like it’s predecessor and like many, many games with morality systems, being Good is kind of a pain in the neck. It requires more patience, more finesse in combat most of the time, more ridiculous side-questing and more of the sort of upkeep tasks to keep everyone happy. Players who chose in these systems to go Evil almost universally get more devastating combat options, less concern about NPC happiness which translates into fewer annoying fetch quests and the like and the only price you pay is a sense that the game is preaching at you a bit. There is a point in Fable II where you’re taken out of the normal flow of the game for a time and you’re forced to take some actions that increase your corruption level. It occurred to me as I played it that my parallel narrative—the one that runs in my head alongside any game with the remotest amount of depth—could very easily accommodate this moment as a sort of breaking point: The once noble hero, loved and respected throughout the land, had a Bad Experience from which he returned changed. He’d now seen and done things—dark things—and his mind was splintered. His ultimate quest still burned in his soul, but his methodology shifted.

Whether by sharp turn of design or nefarious punishment (depending on your perspective) Fable II doesn’t allow you to do what Fallout and other PC-style games do and make arbitrary saves which you can stack up. Your choices are more or less permanent in the game and I’m so used to being a goody two shoes or at worst a noble thief that I’m reluctant to push into the wicked side of the scale on my first (and likely only) playthrough. On the other hand, the story that is represented by the opportunity does compel me and honestly I’m having a hard time really truly having fun as it stands. Maybe going Evil will turn the experience around for me a little. I can even see how it will happen: Following the return from the harrowing trial the next step in the Hero’s journey is to visit a prototypical wretched hive of scum and villainy. Where once he might have found the place repugnant and in need of salvation, he’s surprised to find that the disaffection he’s been feeling since he came back ebbs here in this place where ladies of the night coo from darkened alley and ruffians gamble idly in the filthy streets. He doesn’t mean to stay long, just take care of his business. In a moment of weakness he gives in to the temptation of an alluring harlot and finds himself robbed. A potent blend of righteous anger, guilty self-loathing and shameful vengeance leaves the whore dead on the end of his blade. Where once he might have looked at the scene as if disconnected from his body and run to the temple for pleading penance he instead stares coolly down at the stiffening corpse and feels a strange sense of peace. He decides to linger.

Ahem. Anyway.

I also played a little bit of Left 4 Dead in between ODST and Fable II which doesn’t bear a lot of mention but I did want to point out that there was a title update waiting when I launched the game for the first time in several months and found that the most noticeable change after the patch was installed ended up being that the in-game achievement tracking mechanism was broken and it no longer recognizes my previously unlocked achievements. It does somehow remember the counts for the cumulative ones and of course the achievements themselves are unlocked in my profile, but the utility of Valve’s in-game progress tracking is undercut with what I have to presume is some sort of bug. I’m largely over L4D at this point anyway, mostly just waiting for the sequel to drop. I was going to do some achievement hunting but this freaky bug makes me wonder if achievements are even working now.