“You are now famous enough to use the kiss my arse expression”
- Fable 2

Heard just now for the first time (yes, I’m late to the party). Any favourites out there?

Apart from the brilliant writing, just got to say how much I’m enjoying the game. It’s a really nice mix of casual hack and slash with some reasonably deep social systems in place, a nicely thought out and interesting economy system. I’m actually finding myself more worried about the house I’ve just bought getting a new tenant after evicting someone I don’t like rather than fussing over silly things like…equipment.

The lack of defensive items in terms of clothing etc though has thrown me a little, not sure what the design decision was based in giving all clothing a purely aesthetic purpose. Guess it comes with the period setting.

Anyway, back to talking to my digital dog friend and killing bandits. Had to share.

Edit: Finished the main quest line. Great experience overall, will be diving straight into second play through and some co-op sooner rather than later.

I’ve been sick for the past week with a cold / throat thing so there hasn’t been a great deal of “work” going on. Spent most of it on the couch powering through some games and 3 series’ of Sopranos. Some thoughts on the games though:

Skate 2
The first installation of this game had me enamoured for months. Having skated for a number of years growing up it captured the feeling of skateboarding, the constant banging your head against a wall over and over to get that one trick right. The career mode was frustrating as hell, something I’d forgotten until I stuck Skate 2 in and started playing, the frustration came rushing back.

It’s small things that irk me about it, challenges that if you bail you’re forced through two dialogue boxes, then a 3 second countdown before you can try it again. Surely a play tester who on their 50th attempt at a “noseslide, gap, tailslide” who bails because a pedestrian walked in front of them would ask “Why do we have this 5 seconds of down time before I can try that again?” Seems strange that with so many eyes on these games that small annoyances like this slip through.

All will be well when I give up on career and just play Free Skate.

Kane & Lynch Dead Men
I avoided picking this up anywhere near release because of the negative press it recieved. I’m not sure it was warranted, I don’t know, I felt as though I’d been lied to though about 2 hours in. Under the obviously false pretense that I had purchased an urban heist action shooter, Kane & Lynch let me down slowly over the very short story line, eventually dumping me in a heap with a terrible ending.

The controls were a little clunky, the cover system was odd (a button for cover works fine, ask Gears of War and Rainbow Six Vegas), A.I for teammates was next to useless but overall in it’s early stages the game was fun. It has a very “european” feel to it, might’ve been why it didn’t sit well with some.

Resident Evil 5 Demo
Disappointment. With a capital D. Zombies on Valium, slow clunky controls, over animated actions, cut scenes dropping vertical sync all over the place, terrible (as always from Japanese games) interface / menus, poser characters that irritated me the second they were on screen. I’m biased against Japanese games, they just don’t sit right with me. Japanese food on the other hand, that’s another story.