I Can't Think Of Anything To Say, Except... I Think It's Marvellous!

Hello, kids

I've spent the week coming down from a flu and spent this morning dealing with the hell that is account management at Xbox Live. This all means that the quality of this entry is suspect.

I've been replaying Fable II since playing BioShock 2. Fable III is two months away, and I'm plenty excited. Playing Fable II I realized again how utterly enjoyable this game is. Actually, the only bad thing about the game is the utter and complete lack of challenge. You can't die. It's that simple. If your health goes down to zero, instead of dying you just lose whatever experience is floating around (it "bursts" from defeated enemies) and get a scar. Then you jump up and can resume the killing. This would've worked much better if you were restored to a previous point instead of right then and there. That said, there are very few situations where you even come close to "dying", especially once you get the hang of the combat system. It's not quite as easy as Assassin's Creed II in these terms, but then again, few games are.

I'm fairly excited about the stuff we've been promised for Fable III. Also, at this point I'm not worried about Peter Molyneux's over-hyping, since he made good on his promises about Fable II. First off, what I'm really looking forward to is the ability to be the ruler of the land. Just like Lionhead has been saying, this is usually the point where the game would end. I'm happy as long as the game doesn't become Micromanagement Extraordinaire, but what I really want the most is some challenge.

The first to games took place on the continent of Albion but Fable III expands to also including a new continent, Aurora. Hopefully this means a lot more to do in the game. Not that Fable II was lacking, but the more the merrier. There's also a bunch of other kinds of innovation in terms of the user interface and menus. I was in no way unhappy with the existing old-school text menus, but it will be exciting to see new things being tried out.

There's plenty of other stuff coming out before Fable III hits the shelves. First up we've got Halo: Reach. There's not much I can say about Bungie's final crack at Halo. It's probably gonna be awesome. A little after that there's Sid Meier's Civilization V. I'm going to get this game at some point. Whether or not I get it at release depends on how busy I am at the time. The final game to be released between now and Fable III is Gothic 4. This is a game I have to get, and I'm pretty confident it'll be good. What I've seen of the game so far indicates that we're being served a genuine Gothic experience with a new look.

It's shaping up to be an exciting year.