Backlog Beatdown: Ending the Fable with Fable 3

Fable 3 was one of the first games I bought for the Xbox 360, and for the longest time I didn’t play it. I wanted to beat Fable 2 first, and by the time I did (during No Game New Year!) I was all ‘Fabled’ out. I had heard that it wasn’t as good as Fable 2, but I wanted to play it myself before I passed judgement. Here’s what I found out:

I think this game is to RPGs of the 7^th generation of consoles what Final Fantasy Mystic Quest/Legend[1] was to the 4^th. Enjoyable enough, but sorely lacking in a lot of what makes RPGs so compelling to people who play them. Fortunately for me, that’s things like crafting and customising equipment, picking the correct combination of skills and feats for character customisation, and min-maxing stats. None of that is in Fable 3. Here, you always know what you’re supposed to be doing, even if that never varies from fetch quests and getting from point A to point B without getting killed along the way. There’s no point in building a character to a certain archetype either; the Fighter, Rogue and Mage tropes are all there but in Fable it is invariably more efficient to take a balance of all 3. You just… progress. And that’s fine by me.

The game looks beautiful. It goes from gorgeous rural landscapes to gritty industrial sections and still feels like part of the same world. But graphics are rarely the selling point for me. As long as it’s not hideous, I’ll happily play a game that looks reasonably average as long as it’s fun to play.

Let's not forget whose show this was...

Is Fable 3 fun? Yes – but not necessarily because of the gameplay. The combat has been criticised for being too easy and unbalanced, and while I think some of those issues may have been fixed in updates, the combat encounters sprung upon you are rarely welcome. The fun in Fable 3 comes from the story, which is good, and the voice performances of the lead characters which are excellent. The show goes to Steven Fry, who reprises his role as Reaver with exactly the right balance of menace and panache, but the huge list of big names – almost a who’s who of British actors – do a sterling job of bringing the world to life.

 

And then we get to the end of the game…

Peter Molyneux has been criticised for over-promising and under-delivering, and this is no more apparent than in the last few hours of the game. You overthrow the tyrannical ruler of Albion and become the Queen.[2] At this point, your country is under attack from the Darkness and will be attacked within a year, by which time you need to have raised 6,500,000 – it purports to fund an army, and a citizen will die for every gold piece you don’t raise. You have a number of moral choices to make in the form of petitions given to you by the community, including some of the NPCs – do you choose the good option, which almost always costs you money, or the evil option, which potentially saves you money but reduces the moral standing among your people? I chose the good moral choices thinking I could make up the excess later, but here the game presents its real challenge: People are always asking for money, and it’s not easy to make enough of it to defend your kingdom.

The only way that you can potentially have it both ways is to buy every property in the game, rent it out and spend a lot of time faffing about (the game credits you every 5 minutes or so) to raise the money. That was my strategy, but the game mis-represents the time you have to do this. There’s no warning; there’s something like half the year left between the last time you could affect the treasury and the final battle. By this time I’d raised less than 20,000, and when it was over, most of the people in my kingdom were dead.

Always a lot of money - but never enough.

I guess that’s a learning experience that I’ll take into the game next time, if there’ll be a next time. Not that I’m bitter, or anything – it’s more of a practical issue. I bought the game second-hand, and whoever had it before me didn’t look after the disk very well. It’s tanking the motors on my 360 just to run the game, probably not thanking me for it, so unless I really fancy going through the game again and meta-gaming it right up until the end, I’ll probably put the Fable series to bed, having now completed all 3 games.

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[1] Quest if you’re in the US, Legend in the UK.

[2] As I’ve said before, I almost always play female characters in video RPGs.

Backlog Beatdown: Blowing stuff up with Ace Combat: Assault Horizon

How I came to own Ace Combat: Assault Horizon was a bit of a weird one. I first became aware of it watching Angry Joe’s review of it; this was so long ago that I couldn’t remember the score but it I remember thinking at the time it looked pretty good. I hadn’t played a flight sim/combat game for a long, long time – not since the original Air Combat on the Playstation, and since that game was released before analogue controls were standard, it didn’t handle all that well. But I happened to see a copy of it in Dudley Market, remembered the review, and because I fancied something a little different play decided to pick it up and give it a go.

Playing it, I actually found it to be pretty good. You play as a number of Ace Combat fighters – a fighter, a bomber and a helicopter pilot at various stages of the game. While some of these sections are handled better than others – Turret sections are rarely welcome, for example – the game is generally very good, challenging and varied enough so that it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

I had to get rid of the cockpit view as it just got in the way.
How actual pilots cope with it I don't know.

I am aware that this is part of a long-running series and that Assault Horizon was an attempt to give it a more ‘Arcade’-y feel. The chief innovation in this game was the ‘Dogfight’ mode, which you could initiate if you got close enough to your enemy. As I understand it, the idea is that it’s very difficult to deal with enemy planes up close and personal means that quite a lot of the combat is done at a range. Dogfight mode attempts to rectify this; If you get close and press LB+RB, the camera zooms in on the plane you’re following and you have to keep your missile lock on him long enough to fire one. It essentially becomes an on-rails shooter at this point, and gives the game a somewhat cinematic feel, although you quite quickly recognise where it’s used to set up the set pieces in the scenery.

There is a certain strategic element to this, as you have to pick your spots carefully. The Dogfight mode is designed to make the fights with the more skilled pilots less of a slug-fest – and if your objective is timed, using it takes up time you don’t have. It’s therefore wise not to do it with everything, and try to take some of the smaller planes out with your regular missiles. Recognising when to do Dogfight Mode and when not to is the key to beating the harder levels.

The helicopter missions have been criticised for being rubbish but I actually quite liked the change of pace. This also had a certain strategic element to it. Your missions were rarely timed but it was good to plan your approach, as taking on too many targets at once would rarely end well. It also made flying through terrain a challenge, as the enemy missiles would get you easily if you fly too high. Then again I really enjoyed Desert Strike when I was a kid…

The Bomber missions serve mainly as another change of pace; glorified turret sections and skilled piloting segments would probably not be too much fun by themselves but it balances nicely into the whole single-player campaign.

As for the campaign itself, I don’t play many modern military games, but if I did, I expect they would look a lot like this. An antagonist – not American, who knew – is using a new type of super-destructive missile and it is your job to stop it. The story segments are reasonably-well voice-acted, apart from the lead character who’s a bit of an everyman. The character you remember is Gutz, your wingman, simply because his absolute refusal to take anything seriously makes him the most memorable character.

Now that I’ve finished the campaign, I think I’m done with Assault Horizon. It would be nice to be able to play it in multiplayer but no one’s playing it right now. I might come back and play a harder difficulty if I feel so inclined, but the game was as long as it needed to be and it’s time to move on.

Backlog Beatdown: Bringing the Chaos to Blood Bowl

Yesterday I beat Blood Bowl for the first time after about three years of owning the game. I made it a game I ran alongside playing through another game, as it is best enjoyed in small bursts and the fact that it is saved on my hard drive meant that it was a quick dirty game I could just play without having to be arsed to change the disc.

I can only assume this screenshot was taken from a
version I don't have, because at no point did the
game EVER look this good...

 

So I tried covering Blood Bowl for a while during No Game New Year, and I felt the need to make a note of who scored what etc so that the narrative developed in the blog. There were two main problems with this approach:

1.      It was a lot more busy-work than fun, and

2.      I chose Humans.

Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with Humans, you understand, but I always missed playing the Chaos team.

So for this playthrough, I chose a Chaos team and named them Children of the Gor. It was supposed to be Children of the Gore, but I ran out of space before I did the ‘e’, and since Gor relates to Beastmen anyway it wasn’t a huge loss. Their tactics, unsurprisingly, consist of the following two steps:

·        Find something,

·        Kill it.

Or to put it another way, rely on your blocks to utterly destroy the opposing team. A very unsubtle way of playing Blood Bowl, but one that worked very well after a while with the right combination of upgrades. It tends to work best against Humans, Goblins, Dark Elves and Orcs, funnily enough. Against Wood Elves and Skaven it would either work or it wouldn’t, and it tended to depend on whether I could take enough of them out the game before they scored too many points. With Dwarves the tactic itself didn’t work well, but as long as you can keep them to one side of the pitch or the other you could usually find a gap and take the win. Lizardmen were a pain in the bum because they had the combination of small fast skinks and Saurus warriors who were easily a match for most of my Beastmen.

For the first time, however, I actually planned how my team was going to develop. In any game with a Dice mechanic, there is one rule you should never forget: If you can get screwed by the dice, you will get screwed by the dice. So I chose to take the upgrades that would present the dice with as few opportunities as possible to screw me. Beastmen come with Horns by default (+1 Strength with a Blitz action,) so wherever possible I gave them Block, Tackle and if I rolled it Dodge. Once they had an outside possibility of remaining upright for more than a couple of turns, I then proceeded to look at Damage Output. Chaos can always take a Strength and Mutation upgrades so I chose Mighty Blow and Claw if I could; that did a lot to take at least some of the opposing players out of the game. The only exception to the plan was when my level-up roll allowed me to take a stat increase; it is almost always worth doing this.

Let's have some better commentary next time, eh?
If I hear that quip about Margoth Doomgrin one more time...

I took the team right the way through the 15 competitions in the campaign mode, winning all but 2 of them and having them on top of the rankings. It was a nice feeling to finally win the Blood Bowl after all this time!

Now I know what you’re thinking: “But Blood Bowl’s crap! All the reviews say so.” Well, yeah. But do you know what? I love it. It’s one of the few games I own on the 360 that I’ve always been happy to come back to whenever I feel like it. Yes, by the standards of most of the games of that period, it is absolutely appalling – no variety in the gameplay, very little customisation and the multiplayer is non-existent. But I’ve always enjoyed the game. I’ll hang on to it because there are still some achievement points for me to get, (none that relate to multiplayer for obvious reasons,) and it’ll be there ready to come back to when I want to.