Just got of the phone with my local Game store. Apparently, somebody broke street date so Rock Band is now available generally. I’ll be picking it up on Thursday, unless I can get into the store earlier (there is no way I’m carrying all those instruments on the train from North Sydney!).
I’m thinking Fable 2 won’t get much of a look-in this weekend 😉
I just discovered that you can get downloadable content for Fable 2 by playing through a A Hero’s Tale, a little flash game on the official website. Guide a hero as he seeks vengeance for the slaying of his family. As you make choices, you will become eligible for some items, which will be delivered to your Xbox Live account.
Despite my earlier skepticism, I encouraged P to pick up Fable 2, as it’s probably the only Western RPG passing near the Xbox 360 any time soon. Even though I had just gotten around to getting a second-hand copy of Assassin’s Creed (more on that later), I sat through the intro and some exploration of the earlier parts of the game.
It looks wildly huge. Yes, it’s more constrained than Oblivion in some ways, but the character interactions are much richer, which is in some ways the Holy Grail of role-playing games (at least in my mind). Character interaction is measured on a number of different dimensions which interact to cause different reactions from NPCs.
For a long time now (several months at least), my Xbox 360 has had difficulty reading discs. Most of the time, it would ignore the game partition and go straight to the DVD-video partition, which meant I would get the ironic message telling me to insert the disc into an Xbox 360 to get it to play. Eventually, if I ejected and re-inserted the disc, it would play.
I’ve just finished watching Fullmetal Alchemist, an anime which was recommended to me in my search for a varied experience with things steampunk. While I didn’t find what I was looking for (while technology is vaguely Industrial Revolution, that’s not the thrust of science), I did come to appreciate FMA as an exploration of abuse of technology, and the importance of human connection.
In brief, FMA is the story of two brothers, Edward and Alphonse Elric, who seek the Philosopher’s Stone, an all-powerful alchemical substance that will allow them to circumvent the Law of Equivalent Exchange and restore their bodies, irreperably damaged when they tried to alchemically resurrect their dead mother.
What follows is an odyssey as they discover that they tread in the footsteps of many others that seek the Philosophers stone, only to be killed before they achieve their objective.