Picking up where I left off before I was so rudely interrupted by hardware failure…

On Saturday I finished off the remaining sidequests in Fable 2, hunted down the remaining gargoyles and silver keys, and then finished the game. The final boss fight was…well, they definitely went for a different approach to it, and saying anything more would be too big a spoiler.

Unfortunately, because of the ending I chose, I lost my dog and my family. So, of course, I immediately went out and married the bustiest whore I could find. A few other post-game quests opened up, so I did them and picked up a few more achievements along the way.

In the end, Fable 2 took me around 26 hours, and was definitely a lot longer and better than the original. It’s not quite game-of-the-year material, but it wasn’t a waste.

After that, I finally got around to starting Fallout 3. I’m only a couple hours into it so far, but it’s pretty impressive so far. A lot of people thought it was a big risk to resurrect an old series from a different gameplay era with a fanatic fanbase and give it to a company with no connection to the original teams, but Bethesda seems to have pulled it off. It retains a lot of the same atmosphere of the originals while updating the gameplay without making it too much of an Oblivion clone.

I’m going with a high-INT character for dialogue options and focusing on energy weapons, and combat has been challenging so far, with a lot of scrimping for ammo. I’ve gone to the nearby town of Megaton and made a bit of cash though, so hopefully I can upgrade my equipment soon.

I haven’t run across too many quests yet, but one of the ones I have is interesting in that I had to choose to either disarm a bomb in the middle of the town, or set it off myself, depending on whether I wanted to help the sheriff or some shady figure in the bar. But then I went and told the sheriff about the shady guy’s request, he ran off to arrest him, got shot in the back while doing so, and then I wasted the shady guy. I’m not sure if that was the ideal outcome, but hey, free guns and ammo off both their bodies!

Unfortunately my gaming box has been hijacked to take over my server roles temporarily, so I may have to shelve it for a little while longer…