So, here's what happened next.  Well, this did .  LittleBIGPlanet's worldwide delay scuppered my spending plan.  I was going to buy LBP on October 24 and then Fallout 3 on October 31 however some lines from a holy book put paid to that idea, so I though, "bollocks to it, I'll buy Fable II instead."  And I did, having already downloaded the original Fable from the Xbox Live marketplace for the same price as a mere fourteen extra Portal levels .

Playing Fable II was a bit of an exciting leap into the unknown.  Many people were excited by the game and I simply hadn't a clue.  Sure, I'd played Fable for all of thirty minutes and it was okay, just a little bit...  you know, Xbox.  Fable II, however, has been rather well-hyped by both official sources and word of mouth.  And so Zoe Wannamaker greeted me with her silken tones, causing me to flip open the manual and see who else I recognised.  Just Stephen Fry, but that's pretty cool all the same.  I do like Stephen Fry, but was recently shocked to find that a fellow British person didn't know who he was !  I mean, come on!

So the story plays out that you're a little orphan child with a terribly Cockney sister who soon meets her fate at the hands of Lord Lucien, who's a bit of a nasty piece of work.  Before that though, there's a nice, introductory level where you learn how to communicate with people, accept quests and other basics.  You also get to be nice or nasty for the first time, either by giving a bottle of wine to a recovering alcoholic, or giving to his other half.  Guess which I did.

A few cutscenes later and you're a young man (or woman, depending on your decision at the beginning of the game) and you are guided by the lady Wannamaker through a couple more of the tutorial quests.  You learn a bit of combat, a spell or two and again, get to shape your character by being nasty, nice, eating healthily or poorly (stay away from pies) you learn to pick up experience orbs that fall out of stuff you fight (or eat) and generally make your way steadily up a comfortable learning curve.

Let me introduce the dog at this point.  I, erm, can't find a screenshot so we'll have to live without, but the dog starts off as a rather bog-standard animal that follows you around at the beginning of the game and develops as you do, into a great dog of pure goodness or one of demonic evil.  The dog is a wonderful game mechanic that acts as a hidden treasure, enemy and dig spot (where you have to dig in order to find treasures) detector.  And the dog's loveable.  Cutesy.  He gets scared and needs comforting, he chases a rubber ball and performs various tricks.

The first thing my lovely dog found for me to dig up was, as a matter of fact, a condom.  I thought that a little strange, but looking into it, once you get yourself a spouse or meet up with a hooker, you get to choose whether to engage in protected or unprotected sex, obviously leaving yourself susceptible to those ailments that can arise from unprotected sex, should you choose that route, not least grave of which is pregnancy, gender allowing.

I terrorised a few towns in order to become more evil and I sprouted horns from my head.  Like Oblivion, the game has a great freeform feel to it, but it's more guided.  There are a huge number of quests you can perform that aren't related to the main save-the-world epic quest and you can elect to do those when you fancy, however the process does feel that much more linear than Oblivion.  Your character, for example, cannot jump.  He or she can vault over certain fences, down to ledges and off of cliffs when it's safe, but if there's a troublesome piece of debris, a rock or similar, then you can't vault up onto it or jump over it.  I find that a bizarre oversight and also it bugs me because it means that for the most part, your travelling through the world of Albion is confined largely to the beaten tracks and roads, which occasionally open out into a copse, a beach, a river or the like, but these are, in essence, just large rooms with very defined boundaries.  Sure, Oblivion had boundaries, but they made up the very edges of the maps, not the paths you take; everything within that square was available for you to roam through, in Fable II, it is not.

It would be unkind of me to say that it's Oblivion for dummies, but to me, it did feel a bit like that.  It definitely has a lot more going for it than the imaginary game that Oblivion for Dummies might be in your or my head, but there was something deeply annoying about not being able to go off exploring around the roads, having vast-looking forests impenetrably fenced-off and not being able to try to scale cliffs or mountains.

The game certainly has a sense of humour.  There are so many funny bits in the game that it would be hard to pick out a few, but one of my favourites was the area name Reaver's Rear Passage, after the escape route that Stephen Fry's skill-user character Reaver had installed in his house in the grotty seaside town of Bloodstone, where I met my second husband, Will the Whore.  Comedy value is lent by the voice acting, which comes from a variety of different British regional accents.  In the farm towns you get a West Country accent which is a whopping great big stereotype right there, if you head to the bandit-inhabited town, you'll find that most speak with a Scottish accent and are unnecessarily belligerent.  Again, rather stereotypical.  All the gargoyles that insult you from hard-to-spot points are Scottish as well.  My husband, Will the Whore is a black guy in a serving wench outfit, but thankfully without the tits to carry it off, so...  is that another stereotype?  Hmmm.  I suddenly feel less guilty for Oblivion for Dummies!

Expressions are a large part of the game's mechanics, though.  You can either press recommended buttons on the D-pad to trigger an expression, or go into your expression wheel and pick one.  Expressions range vastly.  They include thumbs up and thumbs down, to evil laughs, farting, belching, playing sock puppets, dancing, threatening, growling, pointing and laughing, blowing kisses, chat-up lines, and many more besides.  Some quests get you to use the appropriate expression in response to certain situations, they also allow you to fall in love, gain popularity, gain notoriety and make people afraid of you, convince shopkeepers to give you discounts, persuade people to give you gifts and so on, so they're rather fun and versatile to use.  It's always good fun to experiment with Albion's inhabitants, see who does appreciate the smell of your farts and who is disgusted by it.  On occasion, you use expressions in cutscenes to decide which path to take, but these are generally limited to up for yes and down for no. 

There were a few glitches in the game that did impinge on my enjoyment.  Minor glitches such as a bit of collision issues with slopes.  You slide down a slope you shouldn't be at and it'll return your hero to the top of the slope again.  Graphically, some things will pop through other objects and it's not terribly unusual to see a tree branch sticking out through a wall.  I still to this day don't understand how such a simple and consistent bug can be so prevalent when realism and the ability to suspend disbelief is the staple of gaming.  Quite a major issue in my eyes is that, in a game where you are building up fame and affecting people's opinion of you, the non-player characters (NPCs) take a very inconsistent approach to the things they say about you.  My first husband, for example, would come up and tell me how much he loves me, then, literally in the next breath, would tell me that I'm a hideous murderer.  And this happened everywhere I went; people would shower me with compliments and declarations of love, punctuated with berrations, screams and cowering.  Seriously, that was crap and really screwed up the realism of the game; you could virtually imagine the programming behind such behaviour and I found it to be really disappointing.

Combat, for me, was a let down.  You have one button for spells, one button for ranged weapons and one button for melee weapons.  To me, this really limited the expression you had in combat.  To me, it was a bit too simple.  I wanted combos, I wanted special moves, different spells available quickly, but all I got was one button.  Sure, you get to expand on that and with melee, for instance, you hit X to slash, hold X down to block, hold X down and point the left stick in a direction to charge a flourish move or hit X just when you're being attacked to counter attack, but that's it.  The magic system left me similarly disenchanted.  You learn your higher level spells and you have to wait for them to charge up!  In a combat situation that's just terrible!  But it makes sense since there is no mana pool to exhaust, you just have to wait. There's no modification of the spells either, you get what you're given and probably just stick to certain ones anyway.  I was big on inferno, shock and raise dead.  I tried the time control thing, but to make any use of it, you had to charge it up for too long.

Fable II looks good, but is slightly unpolished in the way that it really doesn't look terribly different from Fable, it just has those nice little reflective surfaces, lighting effects and details that the next-gen consoles provide so well.  But it is pretty and colourful and engaging, having that slightly cartoony feel to it that Fable had to begin with.  I've no real complaints about the graphics other than they look a bit sub-par for a 360.  More along the lines of a PS2 game with a few next gen filters on it, but perfectly adequate all the same.

I seem to be complaining an awful lot about this game's downfalls, which detracts rather from the fact that there is always something to do in it.  I've not been bored once.  You can always find something different to faff around with, some children to scare, bandits to kill, go for a run with your dog, play some games in the pub, buy more property, have another shag with Will the Whore, quest after quest after quest, always buying new weapons, clothes, food, potions and the like, and it feels as though it would never come to an end, much like this bloody review...

Fable II is a truly enjoyable game.  It has its faults, sure enough and I've not yet tried the multiplayer, but the single player campaign was superb and I'm very much enjoying going back to it and not even particularly engaging in other quests, but going around, accumulating money and investing in properties while stalking through the map and killing highwaymen, beetles and hobbes, improving my spells and what not.  I'll probably be playing for a long old time yet and it's still quite pretty and varied, so yeah, I can quite happily give this game

86%
Bloody good.