It’s pretty dumb. Just click on the dude to make him jump over the bad thing and you win. It was thrown together using jQuery. It’s not nearly as awesome as what the other guys have been working on, but it’s something.

See you tomorrow!

Pasty is doing some coding. Ran and Idan are tossing around some design ideas. Sullivan is drawing lots of pretty pictures. Chuck is setting up some source control for us. I arrived a bit late, so I’m still trying to snag myself a worthwhile role. I figured I might as well document things.

The theme for the Global Game Jam is “Deception” but we’re going with “Escape” because we don’t let anybody tell us how to jam. I’ll post more as progress is made.

He had a caustic shotgun that turned bandits to slime in no time flat.  He had a shocking machine gun that depleted shields and dealt heavy damage at an ungodly rate.  His SMG did 4x fire damage and was great for settings those hard-to-see critters ablaze.  His new shocking sniper rifle was adequate and thoroughly useful.

I’d just put two points in a skill that regenerated health for him after every kill.  His class mod increased the magazine size for every weapon for everyone in the game by over a quarter.  He was a nice guy but he didn’t take no shit from no skags.  He will be missed.

Yes, I saved the game and no, I didn’t interrupt it.  I was playing with someone else at the time and that character (Brock) is intact, while mine is pushing up daisies.  And to make matters worse, WordPress is being a total bitchass about the formatting of this post. Reported the bug on the Gearbox forums.

Before I get to the negative part of this post, let me just be clear that I think Natal is amazing from a technological standpoint. Are you fucking kidding me? A device that can read my movements and facial expressions and recognize inanimate objects and then feed all of that information to software that will actually DO things? That’s awesome! Johnny Chung Lee is one of the minds behind Natal, and I respect his work a great deal. I think it’s great that we have talented people like him doing research on how humans can effectively interact with computers. I just don’t think that research translates as well into games as a lot of people think it should.

Natal has been compared to the Wii more than once. This might be where my problems start. “Natal will revolutionize gaming the same way/more than the Wii has,” they say. Really? That sounds awesome. You know where my Wii is? It has been sitting, unused, under my Xbox 360 for about a year. Do you know why it is sitting there and not being used? Because I don’t like to move around frequently. The novelty of flailing my limbs to make my virtual avatar do cool things took a long time to wear off, but it did wear off. Now Microsoft wants to introduce something that will require me to move even more and to potentially be even more coordinated to accomplish tasks? Fuck you guys.

After watching a bunch of the corporate promotional BS marketing videos, I realized something else. Developers working with Natal claim that one of the biggest barriers to creating an immersive experience is the controller that the player holds in their hand. However, I have seen many cases in Natal demos where people are moving as if they are interacting with an object, but without holding anything. The only example that comes to mind immediately was the racing game. A girl held her hands out and moved them as if she were steering a car, then pulled into the pit and her dad got up to change her tires. All of the actions in this particular part of the demo seemed, to me at least, like the complete opposite of an immersive experience. Using your body as a controller doesn’t always make sense. Why would you use technology that removes all tactile interaction with your software to introduce software that impersonates tactile interaction with virtual objects? It don’t make no sense to me.

Then there’s Peter Molyneux. Boy, do I hate that guy. Now that I think of it, 80% of my negativity regarding Natal can probably be attributed to his support of it. He contends that Natal will create all of these incredible character interaction experiences, and he demonstrates this with Milo. Milo is a shitty character that I don’t want to interact with. Sure, it’s cool to have the capability to interact with AI that can read your expressions and respond to speech. What happens when games start implementing that for large numbers of characters? I’ll take Fallout 3 as an example. That game was fantastic. There were tons of characters to interact with, but it was all done through predefined text conversations. If I were forced to actually talk to those people, I would have gone insane. What happens when the outcome of a conversation you have with a character is determined by your facial expressions and general disposition? Am I the only one that doesn’t feel like acting for my game console? On top of that, I seriously doubt that any AI in a game is going to be able to hang in a real conversation. We’ll hit a sort of Uncanny Valley scenario where the game characters act like they can have a real conversation with us, but ultimately disappoint us due to their limited grasp of vocabulary and syntax.

I think Yahtzee said it best when he said that people play games to unwind. When I get home, I want to plop down in my recliner, grab a beer, and play some Grand Theft Auto. With a controller. I don’t want to run around in circles and talk to my TV like some lonely and insane jackass. Actually, now that I mentioned Grand Theft Auto, I may have come up with a decent use for Natal. Maybe it can keep track of my facial expressions and general level of frustration when I crash my helicopter for the 20th time and drop the difficulty a tad to keep me from turning homicidal. That might be nice.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNfQ_B6_xy8

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA7CKlpdIh0

I will readily admit, I jumped into the game without paying any mind to character creation.  Having been a huge Morrowind and Oblivion fan, I should have known that poor stat/skill selection can really gimp your character.  Because of this, I’ve now restarted the game three times – but I think I’ve got it right this time.

The first thing you do is distribute your 40 stat points in the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats – Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck.  Every stat has a minimum of 1, and a maximum of 10.  Most of these stats affect some aspect of your character, and tie into one or more of the skills you choose.  I’d recommend hitting up this fallout wiki for a breakdown of each stat, how it affects your character, and what skills it increases.  You can also find bobble heads in the game that will increase a particular stat by one point, with there being one bobble head for each stat.

After you select your stats, you end up choosing three skills to “tag”.  Tagging a skill gets you a 15 point bonus to that skill, and you have a total of 13 skills to choose from, like sneaking, bartering, different weapon skills, etc.  You can always increase your other skills with your points as you level, so it may be best to choose skills that will help you the most in the early levels, and leave other skills to increase over time.  You can also find books in the game that will increase your skill levels.

I’ve found that early on, you come across a lot of small weapons, like pistols, rifles, etc, and very few heavy weapons or energy weapons.  Because of this, I took the small weapons skill, and raised my agility to 9, which is the stat that increases small weapons.  Higher agility also gives me more action points to use in the combat system, which is always handy. I chose science and repair as my other two skills.  Both of these skills are increased by intelligence, so I also pumped that to 9, which had the added benefit of giving me more skill points every level.

Science lets me hack into computers, which is useful for hacking terminals to get through locked doors, opening safes, etc.  The hacking mini-game is kind of fun, and is a good exercise in the process of elimination to figure out the password to the computers.  As far as I can tell, the science skill doesn’t make it easier to hack the computers, instead, computers might only be able to be hacked if you have a skill of a certain level.

Repair will let you repair your gear, as well as make new stuff.  Your weapons deteriorate as you use them, lowering their damage, and eventually will break and become unusable.  With the repair skill, you can cannibalize one weapon to repair another weapon of the same type, which raises its condition and damage.  I often find myself over-encumbered, so a good way to reduce my load is by repairing weapons and armor.  You can only repair up to your skill level, so the higher your skill the better.

This combination of skills has served me well so far, and I’ve started pumping points into lockpicking and medicine in order to get myself through the locks that can’t be accessed by hacking terminals, as well as healing myself better.  After that, I’ll probably put some points into heavy weapons, as I anticipate coming across them more as I progress further.  I have come across a missile launcher and a flamethrower already, but ammo is pretty scarce.

The final thing in molding your character are Perks. Every level, you get to choose a perk for your character, and new perks are unlocked every two levels based on your stats.  One of the most important perks is one that gives you an extra three skill points per level, and becomes available at level 4.  This has the potential to give you an extra 75 points over the course of the game, which is HUGE.  There are perks for most skills, which will increase that skill by a certain amount for every rank of the perk you have.  There are others to increase your damage, to find more money, find more ammo, etc etc.

So, in between stats, skills and perks, the amount of control  you have over your character is huge.  As the game goes on and you get more skill points, it will likely become less of an issue as to what you’ve taken, but early on I can definitely feel the difference between a poorly designed character and a well designed one.

So, now that you’ve distrubted your stats, tagged your skills, and maybe planned out those first few perks, it is time to leave the vault and head out into the wasteland. Stay tuned for Part 2 of my review, where I’ll talk about what awaits you once the vault door closes behind you.

I absolutely loved the first game. I thought that it was one of the most unique RPGs I had played. My only complaints were that it was too short and a little too linear. That didn’t stop me from playing it several times. I thought the character development systems that they used were great. Your character’s appearance would change depending on the decisions you made and NPCs would react to you differently based on how you looked or what deeds you were most famous for. You could buy up property and use it to make money from rent or to stash your collections of wives. There was a lot to do and I enjoyed it.

Fable 2 seems very close to being the same game, but in a bigger world. I don’t mind that at all. There are now more factors that determine your character’s appearance. In addition to good/evil we now have thin/fat, corrupt/pure, and young/old. I really want to make a character that just sits in the starting town and does nothing but eat pies. And then maybe occassionally breaks into people’s houses to steal money and then buy more pies.

The collection of melee weapons at your disposal remain unchanged, though now the choice of weapon seems to have more of an impact on your character’s fighting style. Ranged weapons now include guns. The magic system is pretty different. There is no more mana bar; instead, you charge your spells to make them more powerful. Each spell also has a surround mode and a targetted mode. Right now the only spell I have is Time Control. I can use it in surround mode and slow down time, or I can target a specific enemy and use it to sort of teleport to them (similar to the Assassin’s Rush spell in the first game.) So while I’m in combat, I can just tap the B button anytime I want and I’ll cast my Time Control spell at level 1 and slow down time. If I spend my experience points on another level of that spell, then I can still tap the button at any time to cast it at level 1. If I want to cast it at level 2, I need to hold down the button to charge the spell up. The new system makes using magic simpler than the previous game, so I might actually buy more than one spell this time.

In Fable 2 you get a dog. The dog is awesome. Mine doesn’t seem interested in helping me when I’m in a fight. I’m guessing I need to train him to attack my enemies. What he is really good at, though, is finding treasure. Not only will he sniff out chests, but he can also find items that are buried and show me where to dig.

He has found some pretty epic treasure for me so far. I was really excited the first time I heard him bark and saw him pawing at the ground. “Buried treasure!” I exclaimed as I ran to my faithful canine companion with shovel in hand. I dug up the soil in the spot he indicated and I found…

…

A condom! Fable 2 seems to be all about the sexing. There are condoms for sale all over the place, and apparently they’re also buried across the land of Albion as well. Another new addition to Fable 2 is the ability to have children. As a female character you can become pregnant yourself, or as a male you can have a child with your wife. I’m not sure whether or not you have to be married to make a baby. I would be more interested in finding out if the game didn’t also mention STDs.

Players now have the option to buy just about every building they see. You can buy a house and put it up for rent, or you can buy a shop and take a cut of the profits. The nicest thing about this system is that you accumulate money from owned properties even when your Xbox is turned off. There are also jobs you can take to earn extra money such as blacksmithing, bartending, and woodcutting.

I haven’t seen much of the story yet, but it seems quite similar to the first game. Young hero, bad people, terrible tragedy, train to be a badass, etc.

Cooperative play was a feature that had my mouth watering. I haven’t been able to try it yet (locally or over Xbox Live) but after reading about it in the manual, I am less excited. When joining somebody else’s game you are not able to play as your hero! You can only play as a henchman with a predetermined appearance. Experience and gold that the hanchman earns can be transferred to that player’s hero, but the amount of XP and gold that a henchman is able to earn is determined by the person who is controlling the hero.

So that’s all I’ve got for now. I will probably post more as I spend more time playing the game. If I get into it as much as I did with Fable, then I don’t think I’ll be playing anything else for a few weeks.

For all of you who were still thinking about picking up the game, the Tiny Gods won’t be there to guide you.  Sorry!  At least now Bear has something to cry about.