Role playing games have a long and celebrated history. They often elicit strong attachment from their players and can become thoroughly engrossing as players learn to identify with their avatar and develop a personal attachment to this alternate personification of themselves. The problem is that as deep as these games can be they can also be somewhat complicated and forbidding. Not all players want to study statistics, memorize obscure qualitative and quantitative relationships or deal with obsessive and often tedious exploration and documentation of their game world. Last week we had the chance to sit down with Xbox Canada’s Jake Reardon and Jeff MacDermot (pictured below) to go through Fable 2 at it’s launch event in Toronto and try it out first hand.
Fable 2 allows for an RPG style experience yet attempts to streamline it so as to be more accessible to casual players without sacrificing the richness that more dedicated players come to love from the genre. Beyond that the game also attempts to encompass concepts of morality, virtue, economy and sociology to create a rich world which is more the product of the player than the player is a product of it. This is an ambitious game and for better or worse lends itself so much to comparison with other RPG games that it is difficult to talk about it without discussing the rest of the genre. continue…
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Last month Ohmpage was sent an 8GB Zune. This new toy had been out in the US for a while now with lots of talk surrounding the little device but surprisingly little solid information since a lot of the discussion ended up in heated opinionated brawls with false analogies and rampant speculation. Comparisons to the iPod seem unavoidable though rational ones remain oddly rare. The toy is out in Canada this Friday the 13th, finally, and still so few people have any idea of its existence. Many of those who know it exists know little about it. So let’s clear some of that up, shall we? 
