Fable 2 (Xbox 360)

Peter Molyneux, as you may well know, likes to make big promises. Big, extravagant, bold promises that he inevitably can’t keep. He managed to bite his tongue, more or less, for Fable 2, but there was still the inference that it was going to be great.

And… well… that depends on your definition of the word “great”. By the Peter Molyneux Standard of Greatness, a game should do everything short of making you breakfast or giving you a blowjob (M-rated games only). And Fable 2 is nowhere near that. But taken as a standard action RPG (complete with Legend of Zelda-esque “find the three heroes to defeat the bad guy” plot), Fable 2 is great.

It’s been a long time since I played Fable the original, but Fable 2 seems to be just a refinement of the original. The morality is still black and white (except there’s a new meter for purity/corruption in addition to good/evil), so you’re either hated and feared or loved and adored. Interaction with NPCs is also binary: tap left on the d-pad to do something that will annoy people, right on the d-pad to do something that they will enjoy. There are a bunch of expressions you can perform, but honestly everyone only wanted to see me dance and fart.

You’re supposedly able to affect the economies of the cities you visit by either a. taking jobs and buying things, or b. committing crimes. I couldn’t figure out whether anything I was doing actually affected things. You can buy pretty much every building in the game, which leads to some game-breaking problems: keep buying up property and you get rent money, which you accumulate (to an extent) even while not playing. So, pretty soon you can afford the best weapons in the game. Which you have to buy, because the Digital Armaments Storage Act of 1999 mandates that treasure chests only have potions or money in them, instead of something, you know, useful.

Combat is a mixed bag. Your experience goes up primarily depending on what kind of attacks you use (melee, ranged, or magic). Melee combat is mostly button-mashing with the occasional “charge up attacks to break an enemy’s blocking”. I played through the game focusing on ranged combat, which was more fun: you can learn abilities to target enemies more efficiently, and can often take out enemies at a distance before they get to you. (There are also more varieties of weapons now: in addition to crossbows, you get guns.) Magic can be frustrating to use: rather than having an MP meter, you hold down the magic button to charge up your spells. The longer you wait, the higher the level (assuming you’ve earned the upgrades), and the larger effects and more powerful the spell. Which is great until you get assaulted by a half-dozen enemies that cut you to pieces before you can unleash your spell.

Oh yeah, another kind of stupid thing: there’s no penalty for death. You get a permanent scar on your body and lose some experience, but that’s it. Basically, unless you’re obsessive about your character’s appearance, you can play the entire game without buying a single healing item.

Overall, Fable 2 is a pretty good game. It’s an enjoyable action RPG, but I can’t say that I’ve been overwhelmed by Peter Molyneux’s genius.

4 out of 5

Mirror’s Edge (Xbox 360)

Mirror’s Edge, or as I like to call it, Dystopian Future Anime Parkour Challenge ‘08, is a game in which you, in first-person perspective, run around along rooftops and in buildings trying to avoid falling to death or getting swiss cheesed by guys with guns. It was hyped as an innovative, exciting, breakneck experience.

See, this is the problem with game trailers: they lie. If you believe the hype, you’ll be blasting along rooftops and seamlessly knocking out enemies with flying kicks for the whole game. The reality is, the exciting free-running portions of the game make up about 10% of your whole gameplay experience. The other 90% of the time, you’ll either be trying to scrutinize which tiny ledge you’ll need to jump up to next, trying to jump to that ledge over and over and missing, or trying to take out enemies who have guns with just your bare hands.

The gist of it is, this game is really damn frustrating. You’ll be hearing the splat noise that you make when you fall to your death dozens of times each level, as the gameplay is trial and error. Combat should have either been removed or made better, because as it stands you either have to knock an enemy out and take their gun (which falls under the video game ammunition capacity rule: enemies have unlimited ammo, but you’ll run out after ten seconds), or try and run away from them, which works if there’s one enemy, but not typically if there are multiple ones. And then there’s one of my most hated things: being chased by a helicopter with a chaingun. I hated this in Half-Life, and I hate it here. It’s obnoxious because you can’t take five seconds to figure out which way to go before it turns you into a small, formerly-parkour runner-shaped lump of flesh.

One thing I do like about the game is you actually have a physical presence. You cast a shadow and you can see your arms and legs and everything. Too often, you’re represented in FPS games as a floating camera with an invisible bag of weapons. It’s a nice touch, but overall, Mirror’s Edge is ridiculously frustrating and you get a medal if you can finish it without putting a controller through your screen.

2 out of 5

Guitar Hero: World Tour (Xbox 360)

Running about a year behind Rock Band, the Guitar Hero franchise has now entered the realm of the full-band music game. And, while the game is good, the difference between this and Rock Band 2 is striking. While the Rock Band games take a somewhat more serious approach to the game, with a cleaner, simpler graphical style, Guitar Hero continues in the goofy, cartoonish tradition set forth by its predecessors.

The best thing about this is they’ve toned down the difficulty a bit. Hard on GHWT is actually equivalent to hard on Rock Band now, not Expert. The songs, overall, seem to be charted better than Guitar Hero 3’s sometimes random explosions of notes. And they’ve even made bass interesting by adding open notes (strumming without pressing any of the fret buttons). They’ve also made the guitar duels with scary Viking Zakk Wylde and right-wing has-been Ted Nugent much less annoying than the duels in GH3.

The bad thing is they’ve barely updated the tour mode from previous games. The only difference is rather than picking one song and having an encore at the end of each tier of songs, you instead pick from two to five-song setlists and most (but not all) of them have encores at the end. And that’s it. You either do that or play a setlist you pick. There’s no variation in the setlists once you’ve played through them, no random setlists, no challenges like Rock Band 2 has. Oh yeah, and if you’re an anti-corporate type, you will hate the constant product placement.

As far as the music selection goes, they’ve mercifully reduced the number of crappy metal songs in favor of more classic rock, modern rock and some indie. It’s unfortunate that a lot of the songs overlap with Rock Band 2, but I guess it’s hard to help that when you’re developing your games simultaneously.

Overall, there’s nothing bad about GHWT – it’s actually a quite good, if somewhat basic, music rhythm game – but when you compare it to the brilliance that is Rock Band 2, it comes up short.

4 out of 5

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (Xbox 360)

There is a long tradition of mediocre-to-bad Star Wars games, and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed happily carries that tradition on. In this one, there’s a twist: you play as the bad guy. Specifically, Darth Vader’s “secret apprentice”, as played by Battlestar Galactica’s lovely Sam Witwer. Set in that fun twenty years between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, you rampage around alien worlds and hunt down Jedi that escaped the Emperor’s purge.

And, while this game certainly looks good, it plays like crap. Force powers are all mapped to individual buttons, which is good, but trying to use them is a crapshoot. Throwing objects/people around requires manipulation of the thumbsticks, and often that results in it flying off in a direction you didn’t intend. Platforming sections are also awkward, and if you fight an enemy near a ledge you have a 50/50 shot of getting thrown off a ledge and dying.

Then there’s the fact that the game itself is buggy as hell. There is no lack of large metal doors that block your progress, so you have to throw stuff at them to bash them open. Which, aside from being a pointless attempt to make the game longer by stopping your progress, often requires you to bash them over and over in the hopes that this time, it’ll actually open the door the extra inch you need to slip through. Why you can’t just cut the doors with your lightsaber, I don’t know.

Overall there’s no point to playing this game. It’s just another crappy Star Wars cash-in, with a ridiculous plot and dull, uninspired gameplay. Skip it.

2 out of 5

The Political Machine 2008 (PC)

I am, if nothing else, a political junkie, especially when it comes to elections. I love elections. Results, statistics, polls, all that stuff makes me happy. Yes, I’m a freak. So I couldn’t resist picking up this budget title in which you run a campaign for president. And, ehh… It’s not very good.

Basically what you do is all the typical campaign trappings: travel the country, fundraise, make speeches, and produce ads. The problem is the strategy here is not very deep, and the computer AI is not very intelligent. The easiest way to win the election is to build up “political capital” points (gained from building a certain type of campaign office) and win endorsements from interest groups; it’s a lot easier to gain name recognition and support this way than to, you know, campaign. The AI helps you along because it tends to focus exclusively on winning one state – when you’re playing against a Republican, said Republican has a keen interest in the state of Kansas.

There’s also not a lot of realism in the electoral map. I realize it wouldn’t be exciting to have every campaign be about Ohio and Florida, but it’s kind of ridiculous when you can have Barack Obama winning Wyoming and yet losing Minnesota. Fundraising is pretty much equivalent to the size and wealth of a state – there’s no reason to fundraise in any state that’s not California or New York. Overall, the game only bears a passing resemblance to an actual 21st century election in the United States.

The Political Machine 2008 is a fun diversion if you’re into politics, but not much more.

2 out of 5