I somehow managed to finish Fable 3 twice. This usually never happens because I have other games to play or other things to do, or because the first long linear part of any RPG that’s worth replaying is almost always a tremendous slog to get through. I didn’t manage to finish Knights of the Old Republic twice. I didn’t manage it with Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines. I didn’t even really manage it with Deus Ex because I got distracted when I reached Area 51 for the second time. This time, I didn’t really have anything more interesting to do with my time than a second playthrough of a game I’d already completed, and I overcame the initial linearity problem with the help of EER, since co-op makes everything more interesting.

The game is a lot shorter if you don’t worry too much about all the collectibles. Fable 3 is a game with objectively too many collectibles. Destroy the 50 talking garden gnomes hidden throughout the world? Sure. Find the 50 silver keys to unlock the ultra-secure chest in the castle garden? Yeah no problem. Find the 4 super-hidden golden keys? Eh… yeah all right, there are only 4 of them and the “puzzles” you have to solve to get them are fun enough. Collect the 30 books hidden throughout the world? Uh… I don’t think so. Find the 30 flowers spread across the three Aurora areas? Oh, sod off. Probably half the duration of my first Fable 3 playthrough was spent just chasing around after those keys and gnomes, and the final rewards turned out to be enormously disappointing anyway.

Fable 3 sort of has three stages. The first stage is the introduction/tutorial and it just goes on and on and on. It’s characterised by a very linear unlocking of the first several areas of the world and by an amazing amount of cutscenes, most of them of course unskippable. It does have an unusual amount of choices in it though, even if they’re not that important in the long run. Once you’re past the intro, and you’ve reached the city of Bowerstone, the second part kicks in where you’re a rebel. Narratively there’s nothing new under the sun, because you’re a rebel throughout most of the intro as well, and you’ve already secured three out of five allies when the linear part ends. Structurally however, you have a lot more freedom to travel around and take on quests in this stage, and it feels more like you’re in control. This section ends with a long interlude in a foreign land, after which you secure the fifth and final ally and immediately return to Bowerstone to kick your evil brother’s ass and take the throne. Then the third stage is you as ruler, preparing the nation to defend itself against a much greater threat than a tyrant king, and once you’ve either won or “won”, there’s an indefinite epilogue where you can keep playing and new quests and content will appear to keep you around for a while.

In second playthrough terms, the stage where you’re the ruler is obviously the most interesting one because it has so many choices and almost all of them have really impressive consequences. Some of them change certain buildings, some change sections of areas, some change whole areas, some may open up entirely new locations for you to explore depending on what you choose, and at least one of them changes an existing area completely, but in drastically different ways depending on your decision.

To make all this possible, unfortunately, all your choices are binary, and almost always easily categorised as Good™ or Evil®. The most you ever get is three options: be nicer than your brother, be the same as your brother, or be even worse than your brother. What I didn’t expect was Lionhead’s willingness to disable puzzles or quests depending on your actions. In my first game, I turned down every proposal to build mines or quarries or lumber mills because I’d promised various people not to exploit their homes and because I didn’t want to turn all the nation’s natural areas into industrial toilets. My second playthrough, however, as the Bitch Queen of Albion, saw me destroy nature and enslave people at every available chance (when I wasn’t taking time out for a massacre of civilians to level up one of my blood-thirsty legendary weapons, to have lots of evil unprotected sex, or to fuss over the colour of my hair).

When I decided to turn the City of Aurora into a mine and force all the Aurorans to work in it, the mine (which hadn’t even existed in my first playthrough) turned out to be one big flit-switch puzzle to open up a secret room. Likewise, the Temple of Evil – which I’d been actively ignoring the first time around – was revealed to feature a 3-quest chain at the end of which another elaborate flit-switch puzzle became accessible.

I’m not saying Fable 3 is the best RPG ever. In fact I wouldn’t call it an RPG at all, even though within its very binary world it certainly has plenty of scope for role-playing. It’s more like an action-adventure game with a simple levelling system. It has plenty of flaws, including potentially show-stopping bugs, and it doesn’t deliver the same emotional punch as I got from the second game in the series, though it does muster a few relatively powerful scenes. What I’m saying is that this game may be unsurpassed in its genre as far as choice and consequence goes. You get a lot of choices, most of them are really big, and most of them have comparatively large and highly visible consequences. If, like me, you get a huge kick out of that sort of thing, you’ll want to get a hold of Fable 3. It’s the game where you have to choose between restoring the city’s orphanage or turning it into a brothel – that very nearly encapsulates the game for me.

If you require substantial challenge in your games, however, definitely stay away. I managed to beat it twice without ever getting knocked out in combat, and I wasn’t even trying.

On the other hand, ME2 still isn’t very much like Deus Ex at all, and its major strengths can be directly attributed to BioWare’s pedigree. It’s down to the macro-level freedom in the game’s structure, its persistent gallery of mostly interesting and memorable characters, and its constantly branching dialogue trees and generally superb acting.

Mass Effect 2 is much more third-person shooter than Mass Effect 1 was, but it’s still significantly more RPG than Deus Ex ever was. Ironically, the opportunities I see for improvement in Mass Effect 3 would all bring it even closer to Deus Ex. I would make the weapon mods more about choice than upgrades by making some of the mods mutually exclusive. I would open the level design up a bit in the major missions (short, linear, shooty missions are good for the side missions, but I missed Noveria’s more open layout in ME2). I would remove the alignment tracker completely so the choice between Paragon and Renegade becomes purely stylistic. Actually, let me go a bit more into that.

I think the persuasion options are a problem. The basic Paragon/Renegade dichotomy is fun, and choosing whether to be a boy scout or a cynical bastard is much more interesting than choosing whether to be Good Or Evil™. With the additions of special actions that let you interrupt the dialogue at certain points by doing something drastic (and consistently awesome), BioWare has forced themselves to implement a lot of really memorable moments. The problem is that they’re still rewarding you for sticking to one type of choice, since you have to almost always be Paragon in order to earn Paragon points that unlock optimal solutions to the more difficult problems later in the game.

I don’t want to stick to one side. Sometimes, the most awesome solution seems to be the Paragon option, sometimes the Renegade options seems more awesome. By rewarding me for always picking either type, they’re not only eliminating a vital part of the freedom they’ve worked so hard to give their players, they’re also making me choose the least awesome option in many situations. And the really stupid aspect of all this is that the reward for sticking to either side actually makes the choices later in the game less interesting. This was exactly the same problem Dragon Age had with its persuasion skill: once your character is good enough, you can immediately defuse the slightest hint of conflict in the game.

In ME2, enough Paragon or Renegade points will allow you to totally pacify the confrontations between certain crew members – it’s the optimal option, so you will feel punished and nerfed if you haven’t unlocked it in time, but at the same time it actually removes the otherwise interesting need to choose sides.

I had a different problem with the implementation of the special actions in that for me, there was never a choice. I knew those actions would always be interesting and rewarding, so every time it flared up a prompt, I would press it. I had no guarantee that skipping eg. a Renegade action would instead allow me to pick a Paragon action afterwards, and I didn’t want to miss a cool special action, so there was never a reason for me not to pull off a special action. From my point of view, it would’ve been a massive improvement if special actions generally came in pairs: then it would be a stylistic choice of whether to go with the Paragon action or the Renegade action at any point.

But that’s the only major annoyance I had with Mass Effect 2. I wouldn’t hesitate to name this my favourite BioWare game so far, though I must admit I’ve never played Shattered Steel (it wouldn’t run on my PC back then) or Sonic Chronicles. I loved ME2′s structure, with the really exciting premise of preparing a ship and a crew for a suicide mission that may well fail completely if you don’t do a good enough job of it. I loved the numerous improvements to the character system and the combat system. I loved the idea of replacing BioWare’s by now stereotypical McGuffins with team members to be found and recruited. Hell, I even loved the two new hacking minigames – they were quick and easy enough not to get in the way, they were pretty decently contextualised, and they were above all infinitely better than ME1′s Simon Says minigame (I played the Xbox 360 version).

At this point, I just want more. I’m super excited to see what BioWare will come up with for Mass Effect 3, but why stop there? If a series like Final Fantasy can reach the 13th goddamn installation, I see no reason why Mass Effect shouldn’t go on forever. I am, as they say, BioWare’s bitch.

I don’t mind that it’s basically impossible to die in combat in Assassin’s Creed 2.

It has been put forth that AC2 is very easy – too easy, even. That’s not quite accurate in my experience, I have died several times from making a poorly aimed jump across a very deep chasm, and I have had to restart many timed jumping puzzles over and over again as I repeatedly failed to complete them within the allotted time limit.

It’s just that you are pretty much immortal in a sword fight. It takes an incredible amount of hits to bring your health down to empty, and the final point of health just seems to last forever. Even then, you can carry enough medicine with you to single-handedly retcon the Black Plague out of history. The only way to lose a fight in this game is to leave the game running while you get the groceries.

But I don’t mind.

My main motivation in Assassin’s Creed 2 is the aesthetic rewards. Being almost untouchable in a fight would normally render stealth completely unnecessary – why would you even try to sneak up on a guard when you can happily alert him and his 5 friends in the room next door and then drop them in a straight-up fight without breaking a sweat? Well, you’d sneak up on him because the backstab animation is incredibly satisfying.

I acknowledge that it’s not enough for everyone, and I do think the lack of challenge in Assassin’s Creed is a bit of a design flaw. At least give us some difficulty options so Quinns can enjoy it too. But the promise of cool-looking moves turns out to be all the motivation I need. As I break cover and slowly walk up behind a heavily armed guard in a library at exactly the moment when his two friends turn their backs, I may not have to worry about loading a checkpoint several fights and jumping puzzles back if I’m seen, and yet I still sit at the edge of my couch, tense, tongue hanging slightly out of my mouth, because if I’m not spotted, I can execute two of those guards with a single keypress and a really satisfying schnikt sound.

Coordinating sneaky assassinations to clean out an entire area without getting spotted makes me feel sufficiently badass that I don’t just run in guns blazing, and that I feel a strong sense of failure if I’m discovered and attacked by the remaining guards half-way through my stealthy murdering spree.

And that’s why I loved Assassin’s Creed 2 despite its only challenge being the godawful timed jumping puzzles. May they be purged with fire from Assassin’s Creed 3. And do implement a difficulty setting by then too, yeah?

The overall aesthetics are thoroughly in support of the Batman IP, and the main dynamics that stuck with me as I played were the timing-based martial arts melee system, the elimination-based “Predator” stealth sequences, and highly systematic scavenger hunt-style exploration.

The thing that most interested me about the melee system in Arkham Asylum was how it managed to encourage a play style very much in line with the Batman IP. There’s nothing new to timing-based melee, which I have most recently also encountered in Heavenly Sword and Assassin’s Creed – it’s typically tied to a counter-attack move which must be timed to enemy attacks – but in Batman it is so overwhelmingly effective that I ended up always on the defensive, striding casually, fearlessly into a fight, ignoring the enemies until the very last moment when I turned their attacks against them.

To play perfectly in Arkham Asylum, extremely accurate timing and a level-headed overview of the combat situation is necessary. You’ll be fighting crowds of enemies from the word go, and if you can maintain the flow of the combat by using the counter when an enemy attacks and attacking when the enemies hang back, you will work up a combo bonus that awards you special moves: an instant take-down that neutralises an enemy with a terrifyingly painful animation or a throw-move that allows you to knock over a few enemies by hurling one of their friends at them. I personally find it extremely difficult to maintain the flow of combat for extended periods, since attacking at the same time as an enemy instead of countering his attack is likely to earn you an iron bar to the face at the cost of your combo, but if you can manage it, you will be exactly the unstoppable dervish that Batman should be. Even if you play more cautiously as I did, the animations and the pacing of the fights make Batman seem extremely dignified and badass.

Of course, being a fan of stealth games such as Thief or Splinter Cell, my favourite parts of the game were the predator sequences where Batman is pitched against several armed enemies patrolling an open area. Unlike unarmed enemies or enemies armed with melee weapons, criminals with shotguns or assault rifles pose a serious threat to Batman, whose armour is fairly resistant but certainly not impervious to bullets. This forces you to employ stealth and cunning, using Batman’s arsenal of gadgets and the environment to isolate the enemies and neutralise them one by one. In most cases, convenient gargoyles adorn the walls under the high ceilings, perfect for moving unseen through the arena, getting an overview of the enemy patrols, striking swiftly with ruthless precision, and then making a quick escape as your victim’s allies come to investigate.

These gargoyles, though their presence requires a not inconsequential suspension of disbelief, ensure that you have an easy way to plan your next moves, that you will almost always be striking from above as Batman is prone to doing, and with a certain skill upgrade, the gargoyles even allow you to carry out the signature Batman move of hanging enemies upside down by their feet. There’s even an achievement for cutting the rope with a well-aimed batarang to scare the living daylights out of another enemy passing below.

Which ties into the main reason these sequences work so well: it becomes a point in itself to freak out your enemies. Unlike in Splinter Cell or Thief, you want them to know you’re there, partly because it makes them careless, but mostly because it’s hilarious. Once they’ve realised you’re there, taking them out one by one, they go looking for you, scared out of their wits. They’ll fire bursts of bullets in the direction of a noisy boiler, they’ll mutter nervously or call out to you in fear, and they will split up and search for you in dark corners where they’re easier to eliminate stealthily. You’ll be carrying out psychological warfare against the AI, and it makes you feel exactly like Batman should feel: sure you’re outnumbered and outgunned, but that doesn’t matter; you’re just that much better and smarter than your enemies.

Which provides a slightly clumsy segue to the third major dynamic that defines Arkham Asylum for me: The Riddler’s puzzles. Where all my favourite games feature a strong element of exploration, Arkham Asylum is probably the best I’ve played so far at incorporating it into interface and gameplay mechanics and supporting it with the narrative design. Intent on outsmarting Batman once and for all by creating a riddle so fiendish that he cannot solve it, The Riddler has assembled a very comprehensive scavenger hunt around Arkham Island, including many proper riddles to solve, but mostly hiding a ton of objects for you to find. Finding certain objects unlocks challenges for you to play through seperately from the game proper, and most of the actual riddles unlock biographies of Batman characters when solved. Patient interview tapes flesh out the background fiction of the super villains that appear as boss encounters in the game, and a series of cryptic journal entries have been carved into stone slabs around the island and end in a challenge to identify the person who has recorded them.

Though all this may seem somewhat contrived, it lent real purpose to my normal compulsive exploration, internalising it neatly into the game’s fiction and wrapping it in an engaging little meta-narrative with a satisfying resolution at the end. It was also very well supported by the game’s inventory of gadgets, with new secrets becoming accessible as you progress through the story, gaining more gadgets. This did trip me up a bit, as I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to collect certain secrets, only to realise much later that I was missing the necessary item to access it. Once I had realised how it worked, however, it provided a strong incentive for me to get to know the levels well enough to remember where I’d previously discovered inaccessible secrets.

This implementation of the secrets, and the way they were hidden as puzzles throughout the game world, also supports the Batman aesthetic pretty well, though it may not initially seem that way. Of course one might assume that Batman would be too preoccupied with defeating the Joker’s ominous plot to poke around Arkham Island for hours looking for hidden areas, the objective of defeating the Riddler and ensuring his arrest supplies a plausible justification, and the exploration itself forces you to make good use of Batman’s gadgets and detective skills as you search Arkham Asylum’s extremely detailed levels for the Riddler’s puzzles.

All in all it’s probably the most successful use of an existing intellectual property that I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing within the computer game medium, and of course it helps that almost every aspect of the game is extremely well executed. My only complaints are quite personal, and must be levelled at a few entirely predictable and unoriginal boss fights that tripped me up and caused quite a bit of frustration, but they’re almost outweighed by an equal amount of far more interesting and memorable boss fights, and that’s to say nothing of the rest of the game, which is consistently flawless. Since this post is specifically a look at how Rocksteady have managed to do such sterling service to the Batman IP, I haven’t even touched on the game’s surprisingly engaging plot (surprising because outside of the Nolan films, upon which this game is not based, I have little to no interest in Batman) or brilliant acting from everyone involved. On the whole, the narrative design is highly commendable, embedding its background fiction expertly in the level design while using both cutscenes and scripted sequences to relay its plot.

There’s very little wrong with this game, and if you haven’t already, I think you should buy it. It’s out for X-Box 360 and PlayStation 3 now, and it should be out for PC some time this week as far as I know.

I often joke that I have a mild Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I’m not sure how much that’s true, but the fact is that I often take pleasure in extremely repetitive, braindead tasks. The Nameless Mod owes a lot of polish to this fact; for example it’s unlikely that the advanced difficulty options would’ve been so thoroughly implemented without my semi-OCD, and the ogg files in the soundtrack were only ID-tagged because I had so much fun doing it.

Maybe that’s why I enjoy open-world games so much.

If you have experience with open-world games, you’ll know almost all of them base a lot of their gameplay on repetitive, “grindy” tasks. Assassin’s Creed was widely criticised for its repetitive, samish missions (four simple mission types, constantly repeated). STALKER had randomly generated missions likewise falling into four categories and literally endlessly repeated. Grand Theft Auto 4 has (as far as I know) randomly generated police missions as well, that you can trigger by getting into any police car anywhere in the world, and using its built-in computer interface to locate nearby crimes to thwart.

What’s more though, all of these games have some kind of explicit scavenger hunt element to them. Often it’s structured by an overarching optional goal such as an achievement for collecting every hidden item, other times the objects you hunt are their own reward to obtain. STALKER’s randomly appearing artifacts boost your statistics when you equip them, for example, but there is no reward for finding certain amounts of them. GTA4 on the X-Box 360 gives you an achievement for killing all 200 pigeons in its New York City and another achievement for collecting every hidden item.

Why does this appear to be such a prevalent design element in open world games, and are there any realistic alternatives? Is it even a bad thing?

FUEL, which was released last Friday and which I pre-ordered because I was impressed by its 14,400 km² open world and the promise of good rewards for exploration, is probably one of the most explicitly OCD games I’ve ever played. Its critical path is based on achieving “stars” by winning certain “career” races which unlock new regions for you when you gain enough of them. A career race can be completed on three different difficulty settings – Normal, Expert, and Legendary – and each will give you a star such that you can skip some career races if you’re good enough to win other career races on higher difficulty settings.

That’s all good – in itself, it’s no more compulsive than any other game because you don’t have to complete all the career races to progress, the amount of career races in each region so far seems pretty limited (the most I’ve encountered in a region as of yet is 6 races), and they’re all quite distinctive. The true compulsiveness takes the form of optional objectives distributed across each zone.

In addition to a limited amount of career races, each zone has a larger amount of “challenges” which are races with no difficulty options and a greater variety of goals (for example, Helicopter Chase charges you with beating a helicopter to a goal so far away you can’t see it for most of the race, meaning you’ll be trying to follow the chopper until you’re close enough to the end that you can go directly for the finish line). Beating challenges gives you a large amount of “fuel”, the game’s currency. Each region also has an amount of “vista points” (which offer particularly fetching views – at least according to the developers, I would say the quality of these vistas so far has been debatable) and “liveries” (which are collectable paint schemes for the various vehicles you can own).

For each region, the main world map displays how many challenges, vista points, and liveries you’ve located and completed/collected. When you first enter a region, it’ll be mostly unexplored, meaning you can only see points of interest near the region’s race camp. Points of interest will appear on your map when you drive near them in free form mode. Alternatively you can make them all appear by catching – ie. crashing into – a particular roaming doppler truck which is added to your map when you complete a certain career race. There are three doppler trucks in each region: one for challenges, one for vistas, and one for liveries. Finally, each region has a certain amount of “mavericks”: special vehicles that can’t be purchased for fuel but only obtained by catching them – these mavericks are also added to your map by completing career races.

As if those are not enough collectibles, the game also has barrels of fuel distributed generously throughout each zone. When you ram a barrel, you gain 100 fuel – not a lot, but it adds up – and if you’re lucky enough to find an arrangement of three stacked barrels, you’ll get 400 fuel. I don’t know whether fuel barrels are randomly placed – your map screen doesn’t show how many of them you’ve found, but there are achievements for collecting your first oil drum, your 100th oil drum, and your 500th oil drum. There are similar achievements for owning 10 vehicles, 40 vehicles, all 74 vehicles, finding 10 vista points, 50 vista points, all 95 vista points, winning 30 challenges, 100 challenges, all 190 challenges, collecting 50 liveries, 100 liveries, all 148 liveries, obtaining 24 pieces of driver gear, 48 pieces of driver gear, or all 72 pieces of driver gear.

There’s also an achievement for completing everything. It’s called Completion obsession syndrome. Clearly they know.

FUEL is far from the only game to rely on simple scavenger hunts to encourage the player to make full use of the game world. Assassin’s Creed has those hidden flags everywhere. Far Cry 2 has the hidden diamond suitcases. Prince of Persia has light seeds. Fable 2 has gargoyle heads and silver keys. Grand Theft Auto 4 has the pigeons.

It’s a super effective way of exploiting your open world. No matter how much actual content you cram in there, parts of your world will always have unused areas that the player has no reason to explore. If you don’t reward the player for poking around in places where the critical path doesn’t explicitly take him or her, you can’t expect a lot of players to deviate from that path, and you might as well make a linear game. A scavenger hunt is the most economical way to reward such exploration: all you need is one art asset for the player to hunt, and a mechanism to let the player know how many of them have been collected. A further reward for collecting everything to make the whole task seem slightly less like the huge waste of time that it really is certainly helps too, be it external to the game (eg. achievements) or internal (eg. Fable 2′s special artifacts).

I believe I just stated that you can’t produce enough content to fill out an open world, but of course that’s not entirely true. World of Warcraft has very little wasted space, partly because their gameplay genre lets them just fill any empty areas with constantly respawning mobs, and partly because they’ve produced a frankly ludicrous amount of content for their game, not a square meter of it wasted thanks to their enormous player base which guarantees that everything is experienced by somebody. I also hear that Saints Row 2 is a possible exception to the rule, in that no matter where you go and what you do in its world, it will always throw something new and interesting (and often daft) at you. I have yet to play this game to confirm whether it really does have unique content everywhere, but if it does, that’s highly impressive.

Despite my self-confessed semi-OCD, I don’t very often achieve full completion in these games. I’ll often spend far more time hunting the objects in question than I really enjoy – I’ll keep looking for them hours after I’ve stopped having fun, but I never persevere long enough to find everything, simply because my sense of “games should be fun and this is no longer fun” kicks in and overrides my collector’s compulsion. Fable 2 is the only game where I’ve come really close to collecting everything, having destroyed all 50 gargoyles and found all but 2 silver keys, but that was largely because Fable 2 offered actual in-game rewards for collecting everything, and because after all, there were only 50 of each and the world wasn’t that big.

I’m not sure how I feel about scavenger hunts as a means to encourage exploration. I don’t outright disapprove, but I can’t say I’m very impressed by it either. I would prefer simply using a variety of rewards such as small experience point bonuses, rare ammunition types, expendable inventory items, or even incidental story information, like for example Deus Ex or BioShock did. The important part is that you don’t know how many objects are left to find, which rewards you for experiencing as much of the game world as possible without driving you to spend more time exploring than you’ll actually enjoy.

The Looking Glass school of game design once again provides the best solution.

So I’ve played Gears of War 2 in co-op with Casper (as it really should be played). As far as I can tell, we made it almost through act 4 out of 5, and I loved it. It’s the same solidly entertaining core gameplay as the first game, but with many many welcome additions. Its vehicle sections are far better executed and more fun than its predecessor’s, the parts where you have to split up are much better at making you assist each other, and the plot is not only slightly deeper, the background story is actually in the game.

To get any idea about Gears of War 1‘s story, you had to read the manual. The sequel actually features exposition! Groundbreaking. In the junction between story and gameplay, Gears 2 has some outright extraordinary setpieces and scripted sequences. Especially one of the boss fights is completely ludicrous but so awesome – Gears 1 seems low-key and modest in comparison, even that game’s train sequence has absolutely nothing on Gears 2.

My only real complaint, delivered in as spoiler-free a manner as possible, is that the worm-level is way too fond of killing you instantly when you make a wrong step. Honestly I thought we were past the teach-by-death phase by now.

So it’s still not an intellectual game, but it gets several thumbs up from me. It excels at everything that its predecessor does well, and then it fixes almost every complaint I had about the first game. It even has a couple of really well executed character development cutscenes. It’s not out yet, but if you liked the first one, make sure you get this when it’s released (on Friday). And for the love of God, play it in co-op.

I’ve been sick all weekend, which provided a solid excuse to stay in-doors and play Fable 2 pretty much non-stop. I should go to bed now because I feel genuinely terrible, but I’m compelled to write about this game because it’s probably been my best game experience this year. I must tell you about it while it’s still fresh in my memory, and while there will be small spoilers, I will tell you nothing I didn’t know myself before playing the game, so I’m certain it won’t ruin the experience for you.

Fable 2 has reminded me that I actually really liked Fable 1. Somehow, my esteem for the game had suffered greatly over time, as I forgot surprisingly quickly what made it such a good game. Getting started on the sequel, I began to recall that Fable 1 was actually one of my favourite games soon after I’d finished it. And then Fable 2 proceeded to exceed my fondest memory of its predecessor.

There are three things Fable 2 does unbelievably, blindingly well. It drives home its emotional highlights like few other games, it allows you to change the game world in impressive and very visible ways, and it establishes a truly compelling and unique world full of contradictions and charm.

There are other things Fable 2 does less well. Character interaction outside the main storyline is all iconic and very generalized, meaning the human relationships you can form with any non-hostile NPC in the game are superficial and uninteresting compared to the relationship you form with your dog. The combat system can feel rather repetitive (some would say “button-mashing”), though it becomes more nuanced as you get more options later on. And the game has more but less significant weaknesses. But none of this matters.

Fable 2 nearly made me cry on several occasions. For a game with such a childish and naïve aesthetic, it’s surprisingly fond of showing you devastating things and putting you in tragic situations. Just like the first game, the moral scale Fable 2 is based around is very black and white, but Fable 2 frequently manages to play against your expectations, setting up an antagonist with reasonably believable motivations, putting a genuine (and infuriating) bad guy on your side towards the end, and always insisting that true heroism requires sacrifice.

The greatest of these sacrifices is 10 years of your life spent on a single quest of integral importance to the main storyline. This tremendous ellipsis is handled elegantly and conveys an adequate sense of desperation and despair, but it also serves a very important purpose to the storyline: It allows the consequences of your preceding choices to really impact the world.

You return to towns completely changed by your actions, temples having risen to power or crumbled into insignificance due to your decisions, bandit camps replaced by idyllic forest cottages, farms grown prosperous after you defeated the bandits plaguing them. And yet in spite of these big changes, the game still remembers the little things you’ve done, which chests you’ve opened and treasures you’ve retrieved from the bottom of a lake.

And it’s a world you want to change and impact because it has atmosphere, it has story, and it has heart and wit. It’s a quirky world full of humour ranging from the elegantly self-referential to the unashamedly tasteless, and yet it’s a dangerous world of ancient terrors and untold tragedy. Some of the true tragedies of Fable 2 are delivered like a jack-hammer to the face while others are left as subtle marks upon the world for you to find and puzzle out for yourself.

It’s also a world with many secrets to discover, hidden treasures and ancient relics left for you by heroes long gone. The old demon doors that occupied each region of Fable 1′s world make a reappearance, and in the surreal landscapes that they guard, I sense that Lionhead’s level designers have found a chance to genuinely shine – in some instances I was even reminded of Psychonauts’s dreamscapes, straight out of a Dalí painting.

There are two more things I want to mention before I go to bed. One is the dog, the other is the real estate. The dog is nearly indescribable. It may not be the revolutionary new gameplay element that Molyneux made it out to be in early presentations, but it’s probably one of the best NPC’s I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting in a game. Due to the simple fact that dogs are far easier to accurately simulate than human beings, this dog actually acts like what it’s supposed to be, rather than a transparent imitation. And the blind devotion that dogs are known to show towards their owners certainly plays a part in endearing you to your faithful companion.

But while the dog channels your empathy and anchors you in the world, the real estate features give you ownership of that world – literally. Very nearly every building in the game can be bought, from the lowliest gypsy caravan to the grandest mansion or Castle Fairfax itself. You can start by buying some stalls in the marketplace, and soon you’ll have enough gold to buy a smithy or an inn or buy up homes and rent them out.

You can raise or lower the rent above or below the default, which impacts not only your profits but the way the citizens regard you as well. High prices in your shops will make people like you less. And even more impressively, purchasing certain unique properties will unlock side missions that grant significant rewards. Even after the main story is completed, the collection of real estate, hidden rewards, and achievements compel me to explore, collect, and purchase everything.

And once I have everything, it’s time to try an evil playthrough. Knowing myself, and realizing how good Fable 2 is at showing you the consequences of your actions, I may not make it. I suck at being evil, and this game does not make it any easier.

Since I bought my 360, I haven’t played any games like that either. Gears of War, Army of Two, Mass Effect, Halo 3, Assassin’s Creed, Grand Theft Auto 4… these are all games I might as well have played on PC. Viking feels like a “return” to a “typical” console action game model… that I’ve never actually experienced. I’m not, however, ruling out that the feeling is based on a set of complete misconceptions about what most console action games are about.

So how about I start talking about the game that I have played instead?

Viking doesn’t really seem to be anything special in most regards, but it does one thing that I’ve never seen done anything near as well before, and if you don’t wish to endure my rambling on about the less interesting features of the game, feel free to skip down to the bold marker. Viking seems similar in structure to the parts of the Zelda games that I have played on my friend Torsten’s Gamecube or Wii, but stylistically, it’s more like God of War, with lots of combat moves and gore all over the place. It’s a fun game though – solidly constructed and with very powerful and easy combat moves.

The story is… adequate, I guess. Norse goddesses Hel (of the underworld) and Freya (of, uh, love) get in a fight and all but destroy the human world Midgaard in the process. Skarin, viking warrior, is killed by Freya’s former champion, now champion of Hel, Drakan, but resurrected by Freya and granted immortality as her champion in the fight against Hel.

As Freya’s champion, Skarin is off to take back Midgaard, one village, farm, quarry, or fortress at a time. Whenever you liberate an area, its ambience changes from dark, rainy, and sinister to bright, sunny, and green. This is what we call positive reinforcement, and it works pretty damn well. Most of the time, all it takes to liberate an area is to wipe out the enemies and free some vikings, but sometimes there are so many enemies you pretty much have to sneak around and take them out with sneak attacks before you can free the captured vikings.

When I say “you have to”, what I actually mean is “I have to because I’m really not very good at the combat, so I get wiped out if I fight more than 5 enemies at a time”. You can actually fight your way through these missions, and that’s highly beneficial for my opinion of the game because forced stealth sequences mix horribly with a checkpoint-based save system. Some of the infiltration missions can get awfully frustrating when you are spotted, killed, and have to start all over several times in a row – notably without having your items replenished because the game isn’t actually loaded, Skarin is just resurrected back at the camp (don’t ask me why you don’t get your spent items back despite the enemies respawning).

The stealth is pretty solid though, supported by the level design and thoughtfully designed patrol paths. Getting spotted is far from always an instant failure, only if you’re unfortunate enough to alert a hornblower to your presence (as I did in the last one – three times). If not, you can usually just dispatch the enemies who saw you and proceed. Furthermore, the sneak attacks at your disposal are not only potent, but also extremely satisfying (a leap forward to instantly close on an enemy and cut him in half).

Which is actually true of all the combat in the game: It’s very satisfying. Gametrailers say most of it was copied quite directly from the God of War games, but they agreed with me that it does work very well, so I find the apparent lack of originality acceptable (good artists borrow, etc.). The basic components of combat are a quick attack, a slow attack, and a block stance. As you spend gold in the arena to learn new moves from the spirits of your ancestors (I guess the living existing costs are pretty high in Asgard?), you can combine these basic attacks into sequences and combos that are especially useful against specific enemies. Killing enemies makes them drop a single red orb that increases your Rage when picked up, and if you take them out with a finishing move, they’ll drop three orbs so you get more Rage. You can spend this Rage to activate your weapon runes that add lightning, fire, or ice to your attacks.

It all works pretty well, especially because the animations are gruesome and carthartic. One particular feature lifted right from God of War is special finishing moves for boss fights, which are basically player-initiated quick-time events. I don’t particularly like quick-time events (in fact, like most sensible people, I really really hate them), but since I actually get to start these ones myself, they’re alright. They’re not optimal, but they’re alright.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of Viking is the structure of the game. I mentioned it was akin to Zelda, at least as much of the Zelda games as I know, which is admittedly not very much. The game is structured into islands, each of which has a number of objectives, some of which (the objectives, not the islands, try to keep up) will only be revealed as you find them or when you talk to particular NPC’s. There’ll always be 2-4 major objectives such as “Liberate the Quarry”, “Liberate the Farm”, “Locate the Dragon Runes”, etc., and to move to the next island, you’ll have to capture a major town.

And this is where the game really shines: When you have to capture a major town. I’ve captured two so far, and the process was quite similar for the two of them: First you sneak into the town to reach a particular objective (blow up the barracks, for example). Then you call in your viking army for an all-out assault. The assault is broken into stages where you pick certain objectives to achieve in order to obtain dragon runes that you can use to make your dragon handle other objectives. For example, you charge the enemy positions with your army, heading for the enemy shaman who is summoning soldiers on a nearby hilltop. Killing him (you have to knock out his totems before you can finish him off) yields two dragon runes that you can then use to call your dragon down on the enemy archers or the enemies guarding the main entrance to the town.

Once you’ve taken out all objectives (in my example: shaman, archers, entrance guards), the battle moves to the next stage inside the town. There will also be one or two boss fights (champions) throughout, each of which will yield another dragon rune. The final stage of the fight is an assault on the enemy portal, where you must summon your shaman (by tapping a button quite rapidly) and then defend her as she converts the portal to your side. It works extremely well thanks to technology that effortlessly renders hundreds of combatants in a scene.

The objectives give you a purpose and make you feel like an integral part of the fight, but at the same time there can be no doubt that you’d be wiped out in all of about 10 seconds without your viking army to help you clear a path to the objectives. The ability to let your dragon handle certain objectives is an inspired way to deepen the meaning of your choices: Without it, your only choice would be which objective to handle first (which is incidentally the type of choice you’re given in the adventure part of the game, when liberating the rest of each island), but the dragon lets you actually pick which of 2-3 objectives to handle yourself, and let your dragon take care of the others. Furthermore, the cutscenes where your dragon nukes your enemies are pretty cool to boot.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the best part of Viking is the big battles, and if the game was nothing but that, my money would’ve been well spent. It’s the best battle system of any action game I’ve ever played, as it makes you feel both extremely important and yet a part of something much bigger. But I’m also quite enjoying the more adventure-like parts of the game (exploring caves and ruins and mountainsides in the search of captured vikings to rescue and recruit), and the stealth is challenging, fun, and rewarding in spite of the occasional frustration.

I was expecting a mediocre game, but Viking has definitely exceeded my expectations.

Still waiting on an historical, realistic viking RPG, though. Surely it should be possible to secure government funding for such a project?

Excuse me… I’m off to write an application for the ministry of culture.

Ahem.

I’m through Braid, though I haven’t yet completed it. The game consists of 5 worlds (numbered from 2-6) with a 12-piece jigsaw puzzle each. Each actual puzzle in the game yields one piece, and when you’ve completed the jigsaw, you’ve solved the world. You can, however, move through the worlds without solving all the puzzles, so while I have made it through the final world, I’m still missing 1 piece in world 5 and 5 pieces in world 6.

Braid is an important game, and a major part of the continuing effort to explore the artistic potential of the game medium. Braid’s major contribution in this context is an effort to merge narrative themes with the gameplay, using gameplay mechanics as metaphors for the existential problems the protagonist, Tim, is facing.

Braid’s narrative also has the amusing little intertextual quirk that it’s based on the old Super Mario Bros. plot. It essentially takes the line “Your princess is in another castle” and reinterprets it completely, turning it into a story of soul mates and a failed relationship.

The thing with Braid’s narrative is that it’s not a plot, it’s a set of vignettes. It’s very artful in that sense, and pretty far from the mainstream: It’s not really interested in telling you a story, it describes a set of powerful moments and then uses its art and its gameplay as an abstraction of this already pretty abstract narrative.

But hey, it works, and it’s a lot of fun. Especially for a puzzle game, because that’s what it is. It may look like a platformer, but it’s not primarily about hitting the jumps right or timing your movement (though it is about that as well), it’s mainly about figuring out how to use the time-bending tools at your disposal to obtain the jigsaw pieces. Enough has been written about how Braid’s challenges seem to expand your mind, and it’s all true. It’s so true that I find myself completely unwilling to use a walkthrough, which is why I’m still 6 pieces short of completing the game. I will eventually, because the puzzles are that good.

I would have liked to describe the fantastic artwork and music in Braid, which looks like a moving painting and sounds like a happy dream, but instead I’ll direct you towards artist David Hellman’s outstanding illustrated Gamasutra article about the creation of Braid’s art. The only thing I could possibly add to that article would be every superlative in my vocabulary, but if you only read the article, maybe all those superlatives won’t be necessary at all.

I’m compelled to finish this article with a warm recommendation: Please purchase Braid. It’s out for X-Box Live Arcade right now, and it’ll be out for PC soon – hopefully very very soon. I have no qualms about making this recommendation, because I simply find it difficult to imagine the sort of player who wouldn’t enjoy Braid.

I was excited about it in the fall, but I’m not all that interested anymore. I think I’ll save my cash for the Metallica-version of Guitar Hero 3. It’ll probably be a half-assed money-grubbin’ PR stunt, but I know all of Metallica’s songs too well not to own this game. I doubt the loss of my purchase will mean much to Harmonix, but the fact that Rock Band has been completely absent from my consciousness may hint that they’ve sold very few copies in Europe. If anybody can find the numbers, I’d appreciate it. I’m simply going by the fact that I don’t know anybody in Europe who has this game, and I know quite a few Guitar Hero enthusiasts.

I do nurture a vain hope that Harmonix and their publishers will take that as a hint: It’s a simultaneous release or no release at all, thankyouverymuch. This ain’t Australia, after all.