Video Game Review: Goat Simulator.

If video games were knights in shining armour, Goat Simulator would be the knight that covered his armor in vinyl Swastikas, defecated in his chain mail and spoke in complete gibberish. To understand the ways and nuances of Goat Simulator is to go completely mad. To praise Goat Simulator is to give up freelance video game blogging entirely.

But maybe I should start at the beginning.

Goat Simulator is a game by Coffee Stain studios, an independent company that created the game solely due to a clamoring fan demand.
Once they added a goat tower, popularised by 4chan's random board that is inhabited by sixteen year old stoners, they just had to produce the game in full.

So the game was released on April 1st and it was a glitchy, bug-riddled mess. The developers then listed all 

bugs which didn't outright crash the game as "features" and even as I'm typing this, Patch 1.1 is being developed and  will include a new playable map featuring a ferris wheel that can be overloaded using car batteries, new achievements, better optimization, additional playable goat characters and local splitscreen multiplayer.

Heh. Lazy me.

The question of "Is it fun, though?" must be answered with a tired yes. It is fun. I know this because I had fun. But once you've had fun, you're done. There's only so many times you can lick a pedestrian with your sticky goat tongue and pull him in front of a speeding car. And push people off buildings. And headbutt explosives.

If this was a serious game, the "points" you rack up throughout your session could be spent on upgrades or cosmetics. But they have literally no use and the numbers just keep on rising infinitely.

For some gamers, it may evoke the spirit of Burnout: Paradise or Thrasher: Skate and Destroy, but unfortunately, Goat Simulator just doesn't have the soul.

It's a good game, has DLC and you should definitely pirate it instead of spending ten pounds on it. The maker of the game actively encourages you to get it from The Pirate Bay.

Because saying Goat Simulator is worth ten pounds with a straight face is like this woman saying to me "You are the father." With a straight face.

Yeah. Didn't think so.

Video Game Review: Fable Anniversary.

A month without updates. I'm sorry. My bad. I've been a very naughty boy and must be punished so take me to your dungeon.
Sexual fetishisms aside, Fable Anniversary is a game by Lionhead Studios, an English company that used to be run by Peter Molyneux before he skedaddled after Fable: The Journey.
In all honesty, it's probably for the best. At the launch of every game, he would often overhype or downright lie about the product. He most famously said of Fable that "plants will grow in real-time, towns are repopulated over the years and every house in the game world could be bought." "Carve your initials into a tree and it'll still be there in years to come." "You can poison a water supply in a town." "You can lock people in their houses and burn them down."

All lies from this dude.

Fable's a great game, but it certainly isn't made better by a shouty salesman. You sold me from the trailer pitch, the feel, the music, the ambience and the characters. So please stop talking, Peter.
During the making of Fable 2 and 3, he said they'd be the best games in the history of the universe. Afterwards, when confronted, he actively explains how much he hates them.

Here's his take on Fable 3. Remember, he owns the company that made it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7vnKQIEUfI

Take off your sales shoes and put on your smart marketer hat, Pete. You generally don't want to be telling the public these sort of things. Even if they are perfectly true in the case of Fable 3. I'd say you had balls if you hadn't defended the product like a newborn before you made enough sales from it to go "Yeahhhhh, actually it's sort of shite."

But let's not talk about Fable 3. If I talk about it for too much I tend to go silent for hours afterwards and stare out of my bedroom window for the rest of the day, watching the rain pour down my bedroom window and wondering what might have been.

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SO ANYWAY, Fable Anniversary takes place in Albion, which is a lot like England, and has lots of mythical creatures including:

-Werewolves (Balverines.)
- Goblins. (Hobbes.)
- Evil Fairies.
- Angry Screaming Ghosts.
- Bandits.
- Trolls.
- The Undead.
- Beetles.
- Wasps.
- A Dragon.
- A Kraken.
- Demon Minions.

And many more different kids of enemies that I've probably forgotten. "Annie" is made up of the original Fable AND Fable: The Lost Chapters, the DLC which sorta completes the game. Only it's remade in Unreal 3, which brought to life Arkham Asylum, City and Origins, Spec Ops: The Line, Gears of War, Bioshock Infinite, Bulletstorm, Mass Effect, Borderlands 1 and 2 and Goat Simulator.

So it looks very pretty and very shiny.

It's a certain combination of bloom, saturation and contrast that gives a strange feeling of nostalgia which really sell Fable for me. And there's plenty of things to look at indeed.

It certainly has many evocative sections and after I finished up after thirty hours of play time, I found that there was an entire section of the map I hadn't even stepped foot in with about five more hours.

The combat is brilliant and Skill, (Shooty), Strength (Stabby), Will (Blasty) all are incredibly fun. I completed the game with only one discipline filled because I kept dipping into magic or stabbing. If you're the sort of person who sticks with one, this game still has a lot to offer.

I also enjoyed the fact that it undersells itself on spells. Fable has more spells than both Fable 2 and Fable 3. Sixteen in all, and all of them different and unique.

Devs just don't make that kind of effort anymore.

You can also decapitate enemies and kick their heads over fences. Beauty.

If I had to nitpick, I wished they'd maybe regrounded a couple of quests into the 21st century rather than keep them in the Xbox era. The only one I didn't complete was a quest to find four blue mushrooms. One was given to me. One was on a trader stand. One was fished up from a lake after some hippies told me to go looking and the final mushroom was in a section of the map that you never need to go back to, held by a person of literally no significance in a group of fie others. Unless you have murder them and take it or "romance" them and receive it as a gift. Why would I do that? What motivation was there?

Just change it so that the mushroom is on a stump somewhere instead of that bullshit. Geez. Unfinished quests niggle me.

All in all though, I have to say that Fable Anniversary is a good investment if you're after an RPG that doesn't abandon you to do your own thing and, whilst it's definitely not on rails, is linear and packed with action sequences.

The second game may remain my favourite, but anyone who says that the original Fable is the best should definitely be listened to. And if you see anybody, on any forum, say that Fable 3 is the best? Well, hopefully I shouldn't have to tell you what you should call his mother.