Many Reviews and a special word.

Fable 2- Finally got to play this game. I traded in a PS3 copy of Bioshock which I happened to have and paid an $8 difference. For $8, I loved it. Had I paid the original $60 for this, I would have been pissed off. Let's start by saying that Fable 2 has one of the best first hours in any game, ever. The bleak winter streets which the protagonist and their sister endure is both loaded with a sense of character, beautiful art direction, and a sort of emotional weight. The story actually does pull you in with the death of your sister, the attempt on your life, and the resurrection of the Heros' Guild, which if you remember the end of the 1st game like I do, you will recognize... somewhat. The game sort of falls apart from there. Sure, it is fun but the whole system is very shallow. Sword combat is centered around mashing 1 button or mixing it up by holding 1 button, ranged weapons are kinda fun to use, but in the end break down to pressing Y in different ways over and over again, and while magic is fun to use it kind of destroys everything in the game in one hit towards the end when you have all of your levels charged. Seriously, your character will be fucking everything up by the time you reach the end. This is only helped by the very limited number of levels you can gain in each stat. In the original Fable, you had to plan out your character as you would not get enough experience to level every stat to its maximum level. There were about 4 seperate stats in each area with something like 8 to 10 levels for each stat. You had to construct a character. In Fable 2, every character will essentially be the same by the end of the game, as everyone will by fully leveled in everything. Now, there are some challenging enemies at the end of the game such as the highwaymen, spire guards, spire officers, spire shards (seeing a trend here, aren't ya?), and fucking zombie BERSERKERS!!! Yet, the challenge is meaningless as you can't die. Yep, that's right, you can't die! You don't even go back to the beginning of the area like in Silent Hill Shattered Memories, or even go to a fucking respawn spot like in the original Bioshock for Christ's sake! You just spring up like you just had a quick power nap and you're back to swinging and killing. Where's the fucking challenge!!! I know that old 8 and 16 bit games were ridiculously hard in order to arbitrarily extend their length, and I'm not saying that we have to go back to that era of gaming, but can't we have our challenge back!?
Now, onto the whole morality system in Fable 2; it's fucking stupid. Plain and simple. You can either be cartoonishly evil or a saint with a halo over your head. Unlike in Mass Effect where your moral choices are often more ambiguous and reflect a method of solving a problem, or in Fallout 3 where you are encouraged to try to walk your own path between the two extremes in order to avoid, you know, bounty hunters, Fable 2 asks you whether you would like to slaughter a town for Satan, or protect it's temple for God. Why can't I Mediate the two sides? Why can't I ask them to bid on me? I can just ignore the quest, but if I do that the game kind of looks at me like I'm misssing something important here! A quest that occurs later on in the game has you either saving your children or not saving your children. Why can't I just hire someone else to save them? The moral choice system seems to just be asking you what you want to look like. You can be an angel (Good and pure), a vampire looking thing (Evil and pure), a hellspawn demon (Evil and Corrupt, and might I say the coolest looking one), or a... thing with like yellow eyes I think (Good and Corrupt). You can tell they didn't put much thought into that last one. The moral system just affects your character cosmetically, and frankly, being evil and having your path cleared of Molyneix's (or however the hell you spell his name) fucktarded citizens of Albion who the player is supposed to really "connect with" is better than being good and having them swarm and block your path because they all "love" you so much. The last choice of the game is so stupid that my brain actually hurts thinking about it. I'm going to spoil it, so if you care skip far ahead. You are given the choice between resurrecting all the people who died at the Spire, resurrecting your family (who cares) and your dog (yays!), and getting a million dollars which really isn't all that much in the game. About enough to buy Castle Fairfax and fuck off! You need the dog to do the remaining missions in the game; without him the game pretty much ends unless you really just want to hang around and watch the fucktarded citizens crowd you. I would never resurrect the people who died in the Spire because I fear that the resurrected citizens would crowd my path even more! I would never pick the money because I can easily make it by not playing the game for a few weeks (yes, you benefit by not playing Fable 2; take that anyway you wish). So the only good choice seems obvious. There's the problem there; only one of the "moral" choices provides any sort of benefit for the player. In other "moral choice" based games the player will receive some sort of benefit either way, in Fable 2 only one choice really benefits the gameplay while the other 2 only serve the stupid fucking morality system!
In conclusion, a shit load of hype does not make this game worth $60. Certainly I am happy with my $8 purchase, but with shallow gameplay, surprisingly low replay value for an RPG, and some rather poor design choices I say that Fable 2 is a visually arresting failure not unlike Pirates of the Caribbean 3.

Modern Warfare 2- It's pretty good. Not really worthy of the hype that's been pushed onto it, but few games are. The multiplayer works pretty damn well, but suffers from the same problem that all games on Xbox Live do; the Xbox Live userbase. All online services have their problems, but there is just something particularly irritating about XBL. Maybe it's simply how obnoxious the many 12 year olds are. Is it really so beyond current technological capabilities to develop a matchmaking system which syncs up appropriate age groups as well as skill groups? I would be willing to give Microsoft my age information, Social Security number, anything in order to be able to not have to put up with an obnoxious 11 year old call me a stupid ni**er over the microphone again. JESUS CHRIST THAT'S ANNOYING (I even had to break out the all caps to put that across)! Anyway, the story is rather goofy on the American side, while being unforgivably awesome when we are with the multinational spec ops. In the end, it's a good game with some awesome multiplayer if you can put up with XBL's userbase.

Bioshock 2- Okay, so I'm not actually finished with this, but I have to talk about a few things. 1. I have to agree with most people in saying that this is simply not as good as the original game. Though it has all the right elements, and the character models have been successfully updated, the game is still inferior to Bioshock simply because it borrows far too liberally from its predecessor. The story itself feels like a simple retread of Bioshock and Lamb feels like the Communist fill in for the Objectivist Ryan. It's not bad at all, it is still a great game but it simply doesn't feel as original as the first game did. 2. The option to turn off the Vita-chambers was a really great move! It greatly increases the difficulty of the game and helps it feel less like, oh I don't know, Fable 2! 3. I really don't know if it was a good idea to make the protagonist a Big Daddy. The Big Daddys are supposed to be these insurmountable foes; making the protagonist one must result in either, a. destroying the continuity by making the Big Daddy a weaker specimin or b. making the game a shit ton easier. Thankfully for challenges sake they went with a., but a. still messes with the story continuity. I understand why they did this, but I just don't feel it was a truly great decision.

I feel like I'm starting to get old. Modern games are starting to get far too easy. There are some challenges here and there, don't get me wrong, but I just feel that on the whole I'm beating these things way to fast. Bioshock 2 with the vita-chambers turned off, Mass Effect 1, and Fallout 3 all provided a challenge, but other games such as Fable 2 had me going until near the end of the game without dying once.

Also, I want to say something about what I've seen regarding Mass Effect 2; I don't like it. I really liked the whole beautiful world with darkness seething in its underbelly; it felt real. With Mass Effect 2 it seems that the beautiful part of the world was thrown out so we could make the game more EXTREME! The chick with the tattoos? Really, she is scummy looking and seems to embody everything that is wrong with video game representations of women. "How do we portray a character that is mentally damaged and anti-social?" "Well, we could load her up with tattoos to make her seem hardcore, shave her head because it makes the prison she was held in look extreme and harsh, have her dress in strips because that's like so awesome, and make her uber powerful and uncontrollable!" Christ just kill me now. I understand that they wanted to make the second chapter darker, but the first chapter was fucking dark enough! Especially the "Council dies" ending! Also, honestly how could Cerberus be more of a God damn threat to the universe than the Reavers?! Ooooo, they can make colonies dissappear without a trace; one Reaper could blow an entire planet to oblivion and level an entire fleet on its own! Please inform me how there could conceivably be greater threat to the universe than the Reapers? This is something that I've wanted to write about for a long time, but I have just neglected to write it. Now, granted I haven't played it yet, these are just my problems and concerns based on what I've seen so far. I've just checked the wiki, and apparently Garrus and Tali come back (two of my favorite characters WHOOT!), also it seems that 2 Reapers are the main villains. I guess that puts to rest my villain concerns, but it still raises a few WTF's in regards to what Bioware was saying about the Reapers being a lesser threat compared to the threat that will be unfurled in Mass Effect 2. Aidios Mio! Guess I'll just have to wait to play.

Update: I meant Collectors when I said Cerberus. My bad.
Update: I just saw Legion, and I have to admit that his presence may make up for the general annoyance I feel from Jack. He seriously kicks ass!
Update: I sent Bioshock 2 back without finishing it. That tells you how much it failed to pull me in. The game is just becoming repetitive. I don't feel it mixes up the gameplay, and I saw Rapture enough in the original game. At this point I'd rather just move on to Mass Effect 2.