xbox360 and Fable 3

The day my husband bought Fallout: New Vegas a few weeks ago, we discovered that our poor Halo 3 special edition console was dead.  And the last time we sent it in to Microsoft,  it took nearly two months to get it back again.  So welcome to our new sexy black xbox with fabulous wifi!

The only downside to the new console was that I couldn’t remember whatever BS email I created for my gamertag back when you were required to have a Microsoft-related email service.  So I lost my 7k or so achievement points.  But I did get to make a new more pertinent tag: screencraZe43.

We also lost all the saved games on the hard drive (like all my Mass Effect 1 & 2 decisions).  But then again, I’ll get to re-play my favorite xBox games and get achievements again–so I’ll feel like it’s less pointless.  And in the case of the Mass Effect series, I’m sure I’ll have some down-time in the next year or so to get ready for number 3 (coming sometime in late 2011, or so we’ve been told).

I’m registered on xbox360achievements.org if you’d like to follow my current/future gaming conquests.  It’s a nice little website, even if the interface is somewhat…difficult at times.  I still haven’t figured out how to join groups.  But that could be because my account is still a probie.

In any event: Fable 3 is a fairly good sequel, but it definitely breaks some of the expectations established by the first two parts.  Being completely good or completely evil and then kicking the bad guy’s asses is not good enough to save the world (and being good takes quite a bit more work.  Which I suppose makes sense, but was very frustrating).  Also, your morality does not affect your avatar the way it did in both of the others (until the final battle, that is), which I kind of missed.  Your weapon skills, however, do affect your avatar a bit more than before, and upgrading them affects your weapons themselves rather nicely.

The chickens are back, of course, but the kicking-related game is gone (as far as I can tell–I haven’t bothered completing the quest to investigate the chicken races), and the pub games are gone (I’m not yet sure if I’m happy about this or not), but they have some great new puzzles to figure out to get Gold Keys (on top of the 50 silver keys, you can find 4 gold ones to unlock doors hiding ‘cool’ items).

Overall, I’ve enjoyed it.  I would say that I wished I had waited for a used copy, except that it was nice to be able to placate my husband with something decent when Fallout: New Vegas started glitching like a madman (which he hasn’t touched in almost a week he’s so mad).  I can’t wait to see what Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw has to say about it.  Whenever he gets to play it.