Fable 2 and Far Cry 2 were both released this week and, of the year’s releases, these two are amongst the top three games that I was looking forward to playing. Having them both at the same time is fantastically confusing. I started off the evening continuing my Fable 2 game because I wasn’t happy with the wife I took last night and wanted to pull a mulligan and marry a better one in a different town and live together with her in a nicer house. So I did that. This one doesn’t seem as keen on pointing out that she recently bought a spoon that had “infinite food but it seems that the spoon purchase didn’t actually come with the [highly touted] infinite food [supply]” — which is to say that the new wife isn’t a complete raving idiot. We also had a child. I named her Baby. Then I realized Baby isn’t really a good girl name so I named her Babyette. She liked it. Well, she didn’t like it, but then I gave her a really expensive toy and then she liked it. Then I bought out a small Produce business and it gave me a measly 25 gold per day which, if my estimates are correct, will get out of the red in approximately 201 in-game days.

A solid purchase.

Oh, and then I went and did a story quest. I also realized that, in the middle of this quest, that I didn’t really leave enough money on my person to fund the daily allowances that I had set for my two families. So then I went back to working on my Blacksmith job — which is an endlessly entertaining minigame where the player is forced to click the A button in the right spot while a little indicator moves back and forth in a 180 degree semicircle until the player does so. It should’t sound fun, because it isn’t, and it shouldn’t sound enjoyable, but it somehow is. This is Fable 2.

Oh, and the combat and character progression is absolutely fantastic (much like the first game).

I haven’t gotten as much time with Far Cry 2 but it looks to be as rad as I was hoping. The tutorial runs about thirty-to-forty five minutes long and is far from being exciting, which can easily taint the impressions of anyone, but sticking with the game past that yields a superb open-world game that manages to make unscripted missions/encounters both challenging and rewarding. he first faction mission I got had me getting an objective, then had my friend call me and say I should visit her first (or I could go straight to the mission). I choose to go to my friend and she gave me some additional details that I could use to help her out, so I ended up starting the mission at some diplomat’s house who I DIPLOMACY’D with my machete until he called in and gave bad coordinates (to my ambush site). Then I hauled tail over to the ambush site, did my thing, and I saved and quit for the night before what I assume is the last leg of the mission where I need to go meet up with my friend for some joint assault.

I got Far Cry 2 for the 360, though, amidst its multiplatform (PC/360/PS3) release because I’m lazy and didn’t feel like dealing with computer troubles for a game that looked like it was designed with consoles in mind. From the looks of the internet rage regarding the game’s terrible PC compatability and performance for some people, this was a solid choice.

I’m not sure how I feel about the constant in-game reminder that my character has malaria. It’s not the most entertaining mechanic to be driving along trying to dodge a very angry pair of Africans with machine guns and all of the sudden having to pop some, uh, anti-Malaria pills while driving and end up crashing into a tree. Then having a gun jam because you were stupid enough to randomly pick up a broken-as-hell gun from a dead African. Then die.