[S2E13] Episode 033 - Fable The Lost Chapters

The podcast hosts discuss their video game backlogs and recent purchases. They mention games like Quantum Break, World of Warcraft, and Fable. They also talk about modding games like Skyrim and Final Fantasy VIII. One of the hosts shares their experience playing Vampire Survivors, a bullet hell game with different characters and levels. They find it fun and addictive. The hosts express their opinions on World of Warcraft Classic and the changes made to the game over the years. They mention the high cost of the game's monthly subscription. 3...2...1...Dark Lord Welcome back to 321 Backlog, the podcast where two co-presidents of the Tommy Tallarico Fan Club are on a mission to count down their video game backlogs. I'm James and I'm joined by my, we'll call him friend, Alec. Worst enemy. Keep your friends close and your worst enemies closer. That's why we live hundreds of miles away. Oh man, what a day. You have a great day? I had like 17 service calls today. I actually had like 5, but... You're actually... I did a bunch of escorts. You're on a service call right now. Did you say you did a bunch of escorts today? Yeah. Okay. We live different lives. It's my new, it's my new day job. Banging escorts. Yes. And some people do make a job out of that. Especially escorts. Not a bad gig. Hey, we're using Craig, not Alistair. Oh no. Is that going to be an issue? It should be fine. I noticed that my face wasn't super purple today. We need to focus. We don't need to focus at all. What are we doing today? Boy, oh boy. Boy, oh boy. Before we get into that, because I know it's going to be probably one of our best discussions ever, let's get into our two new segments. What have we been doing first? I keep forgetting the order in which we do these. I think we're doing the backlog builders first. All right. Let's build some backlogs, dude. Yeah, man. Have you added anything to your suite backlog since last we spoke? In addition to the game we're playing next, which I'm refraining from naming. Not necessarily next, but it's in the pipeline. We have to nail down some guests and stuff. I did buy a game that I had heard about and had been curious about through blah, blah, blah, whatever. Anyway, it was Quantum Break. No. No, it's this action RPG narrative storytelling kind of game, but also has a live action component. I haven't dug too deep, and I'm hoping when I bought it, it was the game I was thinking of, but there was this game where you would play through the story, but it also had little short movies or shows that came with it. It was a show, yeah. Yeah. You kind of consumed them in tandem, and they were supposed to go hand in hand, the game and the show. Yeah. The actor of that kind of looks like Doogie Howser if he was on too many steroids or something. It's really weird. The blonde guy? Yeah. He was in X-Men. I've seen him in a couple other things. He was in Warehouse 13, back in the day. Awesome show if you've never seen it. I've never heard of it. I've never even heard of it. Yes, it's got Littlefinger from Game of Thrones in there. I hate that guy's face. Cool. Yeah. He has a good bad guy face. He does. He looks like a scumbag. Somebody once asked me if I could punch any character from anything in the face, who would it be, and my answer was Littlefinger. Lordy actor. Lord of Baelish. The cover of that game does kind of look like a 007 game, so I'm not wrong. Yeah. Quantum Beak. Quantum Beak. I think it does have a supernatural element to the story, so I'm curious on that one. That one might be in our future for the show, but I went ahead and grabbed that. I saw it. I think it was on sale, and I went ahead and just pulled the trigger. And that's actually it. It was a pretty slow purchase week. I was trying to not go crazy. Same. So I did buy the game that we're going to be discussing in the future, which is Redacted. I also got... It went on sale. Square Enix had a big sale. I think I might have mentioned it a while ago. I was modding a couple of PC games, and now that's kind of got me in the spirit of modding. So I bought Final Fantasy VIII, the remastered version on PC, which is like the 19th time I purchased that game. Love it. But I guess the good mods are on that version of it, and I owned previously the non-remastered version. But unlike a lot of companies, usually they will give you a copy of the remastered edition when it comes out, since you already own the game, but Square Enix don't play that shit. So I had to buy that. I will start trickling mods into it. There's like graphical mods, like difficulty mods, just a lot of stuff that makes the game look next-gen when it's not. Forgive me. I acquired Skyrim, and I'm going to try modding that, because I just want to see how far that game got pushed. I have a nice new monitor that's very pretty. It's got a 4K TV out there. Skyrim doesn't even run 1080p. It only runs 1080p natively. So there's all these mods for 4K resolutions and all this stuff. I just want to see it. I just want to experience it, and that game... I want to see a game that originally was like 7 gigabytes file size and see how far people have pushed it visually. Right. Yeah, I never really got into the Skyrim stuff. If we ever wanted to do an episode on that, we should have my brother on, because he loved all of Elder Scrolls. Yeah, I'd be down with him. It never got its hooks into me. I played Skyrim when it came out. I bought it on... Did I buy it on PC and Xbox 360? Probably. Probably. I know I had a copy of it on PC, but now they have the Anniversary Edition as well as the fucking Special Edition, I think it's called. Right. Yep, that is it. That was a joke, too. And it landed. So yeah, there's three versions of it out there, and you have to pay for each one of them. Gotcha. Cool. All right. Sorry, that was lengthy. That was good. We're going to mod the shit out of these games, make them look real crispy. Real crispy. Well, do you want to get into our main topic today? What have you been playing, Alec? Oh, that's right. I'm so sorry. That's why I'm here. I want to know what you've been playing. Rewind. I have been playing World of Warcraft because I'm being dragged through the mud, kicking and screaming, going back into a game that I wrote off about seven, eight years ago. Yeah, same. And it has been a slog. It's a rough game. I don't know if I elaborated. It's a World of Warcraft classic. And right now they're going through the Season of Discovery, or better named, which I think you guys had called it, Season of Despair. It is a horrible leveling experience. The mechanic that they're pushing for this season, I'm not a fan of. It doesn't make any sense to me on why it's even a thing. I tend to like, for the most part, on average, I'd say most of the time, I like improvements or changes that these game companies make with games like World of Warcraft, where there's slow progression from like, oh, hey, we started with this one game, and we can now make graphical improvements and then mechanical improvements, and we can make the game experience better, blah, blah, blah. Most of those changes I tend to like. Yeah. I know, wow, back in the day, as some of these changes were happening, some of the comments that I would hear online were like, you know, this is making it just too easy to play, or it plays itself, or like there's no challenge. It was just, you know, a lot of people didn't like some of the improvements. I really enjoyed where it went. Yeah. What we would consider now in 2024, the retail. Wow. I still think it's good, you know. I think it's decent. It's expensive, which is why I usually don't play it, because it's just a continuously, their whole monthly subscription model. I don't play it enough to really want to do that. Right. Anyway, that whole thing, I know you've got some similarities, so you might touch on that a little bit. And the game that we're playing, or that we're discussing farther in the episode, Fable. I went ahead and put some time into that. What have you been playing, sir? Same game, same. Yeah, I think I've definitely put more time into the season of derogatory statements, but it's fun. They need to make adjustments, and very soon, or I'm not going to continue playing it for long, I can tell you that. Which I know you're thrilled to hear for so many reasons. Fable as well. And then I've also been playing Vampire Survivors. I don't think you've ever played that game. I haven't. It's like a bullet hell, correct? It is, yeah. It's a bullet hell, I guess. But it's unique. You don't have to shoot in it the way you do in a lot of bullet hell games. The game automatically shoots for you. It's fun. The best thing is there's a bunch of different characters in it. There's one that I unlocked earlier. There's the base characters, and they have a guy that throws axes, or a guy that uses bibles that spin around him, and they damage enemies like a force field. But every so often, the force field goes away. Then you would try to get something to make the force field last longer, or make it so there's a shorter cooldown on it, so that way you're not taking damage. But then there's just weird stuff. There's a witch who's very fast, but there's constantly cats that you can't kill that are trying to attack her. And that's part of her ability. It's very weird, but it adds a ton of replayability, and then there's different levels, and the different levels have different objectives within them, different ways to unlock new characters. So there's a ton of replayability with it, and it's fun. I think you would enjoy it a lot. And it can't last more than 30 minutes per game. Each level runs a maximum of 30 minutes, and there's a good chance you're going to not make it to that. But it's not in a frustrating way. You see it coming, so you know that you're going to pass away. But it's fun. I've been playing that a lot. It's just a nice game to pass time, and I know a lot of people are addicted to it. And they still constantly put out content. And it's very cheap. I think it's like a $5 game. You can't beat that. Oh, wow. Yeah, I'll have to go to try. Yeah. You got it. Five bucks. Yep. I feel like those really, really cheap games like that, I don't know if it's on discount or that's just normal price. Normal price, man. Some of those games that are like a very simple mechanic, what I've noticed, for me at least, is like I either love it or it's just boring. And it's never consistent. So I found ones that are like, oh, this is really, really fun. Simple mechanic. I think I mentioned it a couple times on here, a game called Mini Motorways. Yeah. I mentioned it in the last episode. You know, it's a super simple mechanic, and it's kind of fun. It's fairly fun. I've played it a ton. I can't think of any off the top of my head that were like, you know, just, oh, not for me. Oh, Rogue Tower. It's like a tower defense game, right? Simple mechanics, put the guns down, things come through a path, whatever. I've played games that are like it, and this one just wasn't for me, and it was like $10 or something. So, yeah. It's definitely not like the super cheap indie games usually, but this game, it's just fun. I don't know. You just got to try it, and you will. I'm going to make you try it one day. I will. But that's not what we're talking about today. We're not talking about that tonight. No, we're talking about something different, a quest, a coming-of-age tale, a shitty game. Man. So, yeah. Yeah, and it's frustrating because it's a game that we're about to get the fourth installment in the series, hopefully this year. We're talking about Fable today. Yeah, we should have mentioned that. Fable. I played the anniversary version because it was on Game Pass, but it's all the same. I think the only difference is there's some, like, end-game content that's different. So, why don't we go through our standard stuff, and then we'll get into what I'm sure will be an extremely lengthy conversation. Hell, yeah, brother. So you brought this one to the table. Why did you bring this game? I'm glad you asked. I put in there because I'm dumb. That's in the show notes. A friend gave me this game a long time ago, and he said he really enjoyed the game. This was back when it was relevant. It was an Xbox original game. We had 360s at the time that were backwards-compatible with Xbox, if I remember correctly. And he said it was a good game, and he said he thought I would enjoy it because I enjoyed actually in that conversation so that I enjoy these types of games that are like magic and swords and all that stuff, but ones that have some linearity with what I said, because I don't like games that are, like, super, super open. Like, you walk out, like The Witcher and Skyrim, I guess, where you walk out and it's just, like, boom, an entire world. It's too much for me. I like a little linearity. Not a hallway, but I do like, you know, options. So he brought it to me, and I've had it ever since then, and I never played it. So I thought, it's a beloved game. I just ruined somebody's fucking day about it. Yeah. People love this game, and I don't think they have any right to say that. Well, you know, going back to when it came out, 2004. Sure. Yeah, it was released originally towards the fourth quarter of 2004. And it was, for the time, I think it was a decent game from what I'm looking at and comparing it to games that also came out in that time frame. Unique stuff, for sure. Yeah. A brand-new IP, a fun concept, you know, high fantasy, magic, swords, morality playing with, like, good and evil and stuff. Like, it was a pretty comprehensive game. The execution, I think, is what we're going to be harping on the most. But I think it was a really good starting point to get us Fable 2, Fable 3. Yeah. Three and four. Fable 2 and 3, which are out, that were amazing. Those games were great. I've never played them. Vastly different from Fable 1. Don't let this one have you not play two or three. Those were very, very good. I would like to just tap in real quick and list a few games that came out in 2004. Hit me. Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater, generally regarded as the best in the series. Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, that was a huge game per scale. Halo 2, that's, I think, also a lot of people's best in the series. Half-Life 2. Knights of the Old Republic, that game is fabled amongst people. Yeah. Pokemon Fire Red Leaf Green, it was one of the first really good remakes. I don't know. I don't need to keep going, but I just wanted to express how crazy some of the other games that came out that time were. You know, just jumping ahead a little bit. So, the biggest problem I had, so, spoiler, we both... World of Warcraft came out in 2004. All right. We did not, we didn't get too far into this playthrough. We both had some issues with this. The first one for me, the glaring one for me was the camera. I was getting motion sick trying to play. Yeah, it was, I mean, I noticed it, but it wasn't affecting me very much. But I played mostly on handheld, as you may recall. Right. So, and just for anybody that hasn't played, it was in a third-person view. The camera followed behind you as you would in third-person. And as you turned your character around, it would move the camera by itself. But if you wanted to, you could move the camera manually. Yeah. And it would try to do this weird compensate that shook the whole screen weird. And it was just wild and unruly, and it was nauseating. Back to those games you had mentioned before, San Andreas, early Halos and all that, their graphics weren't phenomenal. I feel like they were kind of on par with Fable. The art style of Fable did it no favors at all. It had a very weird art style. Yes. I think Fable, when we get into graphics and art, which again, all of my notes, instead of like number scales, all of them just say it was rough. They focused very heavily on the character models because this game was very much about the characters. Yeah. So, and again, I mentioned this on like some of the times we talk about God of War or Miles Morales, like those games that they go for realism in their graphics. When there are errors or discrepancies, you can tell a lot more easily. So, though it was a little goofy, it was going more, they were trying to go more realistic-esque, and it was just bad. Right. San Andreas, I feel like they were a little bit farther away. Anyway, sorry, go ahead. Yeah. I was going to say the art style kind of reminded me unintentionally of We Happy Few, which is kind of like clown world style. Yeah. Not great. Almost realistic. So, yeah, that was your history with the game. Just real quick. Yeah. Because she's going to listen to this. My wife loves Halo 2 and 3, or she's fabled 2 and 3. I don't think she ever played one. Did she play Halo? No, she doesn't like shooters. Okay, just wondering. She tried playing this for me because I played about two hours of this game. Oh, yeah. She got nauseated, and she was like, well, I'll try it. And so she got on, and she's gotten a lot farther than I have. And I was trying to watch her play, and she seemed to like it. Hmm. Yeah. So, like I said, I played on the Xbox. You played on the Steam Deck. So I'm going to try to keep this short, but to me this is an entertaining story. We had friends staying at our house when I decided to play this game. I loaded up on handheld the Fables Lost Chapter, which I believe is just the PC version of Fable with a couple extra things. That game doesn't have native controller support at all. So somebody made a control scheme for the Steam Controller, which is very similar to what's on the Steam Deck. It has two trackpads that are independent, as well as an Xbox-style controller with triggers and joysticks and all that. So I got a control scheme for it called Fable Control for Steam Controller Plebeians. It was horrible because none of the input commands that they tell you to do— this game had rather complicated combat in it. All of the inputs said, like, use left shift or use, you know, like, alt-tab or alt-control or tab to do these things. And then I'm holding an Xbox controller, essentially, and it's telling me to hit shift. Well, what button is shift? So even in the training part, this was extremely difficult. And then there was one thing where you needed to aim with the right analog stick while holding X. I don't have two thumbs. Oh, wow. So, I'm sorry. On one hand. Well, yeah, that's—duh. I don't have two thumbs on each hand. So I was, like, claw-gripping this to try to play this. So, like, this is fucking annoying. I own a copy of this. I own an Xbox 360. I don't want to dig that out and play it because I want to do this handheld. So I was, like, let's emulate it, right? So I got the file on my Steam Deck, the ISO file or whatever, and it doesn't load. And then that's when I learned how complicated the Xbox emulation is. If the file is past a certain size—I think it's six gigabytes— it will not work on the emulator. I don't know why. Oh, wow. So you compress it, but in order to compress it, it's not just zipping the file. You have to use console commands in order to compress it, whether it's in terminal on SteamOS or Linux or on Windows command prompts to be able to compress it. It's very complicated. It very much feels like you're giving yourself a virus on your computer to even do any of this. So I couldn't get it to work on Windows. So luckily, my friend that was staying here works a lot with Linux. Not even a gamer, but he was just like, yeah, we're going to figure this out. So I installed a virtual machine on my computer using Linux so I could actually pull up a fake desktop of Linux on my computer. And then we used that, dropped the file in there, got access to it, did this whole console command like .cmd, whatever, all this shit, converted it, got it compressed, put it on there, and then it was a laggy mess. And I couldn't even play it. It was not emulatable at all. After six hours, I decided, let's just go back to playing it. I'm not even kidding, dude. Let's go back to playing it on the handheld. So that was my experience and the platform used. So to answer your question, I played it on the Steam Deck, using, in the end, just using a control scheme meant for handheld. Wow. With all of its terrible properties. Yeah, because I never touched the Steam Deck version of it. Because we share a library, I had the option to grab it from you at some point. And if I did that, it probably would have messed me up. Luckily, your copy was just native control. Yeah, it was native control. But to that, even down to going into the menu was a mess. It was very, what would be the right description? Bad port. Yeah, bad port. It was not intuitive at all. No, putting stat points in, it was very weird. At first, it felt like I got my stat points put in, but then I realized I didn't. So then when I actually got my stat points for leveling up added in, it felt like I didn't. So it's weird that it felt like I did, but I didn't, and then it felt like I didn't when I did. If anybody's still listening, thank you. I just want to say thanks. Oh, man. It's just so hard. If I had an Xbox and I put it on and played it on Xbox, that would have been the ideal way to play this game, but I still think it would have been shit. It was. Yeah, it was rough, man. So we're going to circle back to gameplay later on, but let's round off the basics that we have left. Sound quality. Yeah, it wasn't great. It was not great. Yeah, it had very, like, yeah, inconsistent. There were some effects that were really loud. The voice acting was strange. All of it was strange. Yeah, the voice acting, again, inconsistent's a word I put on my notes a couple of times, and when it comes to the voice acting specifically, depending on which actor they had, some felt like they were just reading and trying to put on some weird accent, and some were actually performing. Right. It was very theatrical, I thought. Yeah, but it was very, it was, you know, you'd have two people, two characters in a scene together, and one is much higher quality of a voice acting performance. Conversing with somebody who's just, you know, who's going to, like, shake some paper. Sounds like they're recording on an answering machine. Yeah, they're just, like, they just grabbed a piece of paper that moment, and they're just, like, helping with a table read. Right. Like, they're not doing anything. It's a weird dialogue. Yeah. So there was that, and then in some, there was one character, I forget who it was, I think the guy that's, what was it, a school or a, your main hub, that main person you talked to almost had, like, a Monty Python-esque, like, performative style. It was, like, not really on the comedy side, but just, like, in how they were presenting. It was natural, yeah. Yeah, it was, I got, like, Monty Python vibes. It almost sounded like the main, who, what's his name? Gene something? Don't know. I can't think of his name. The main guy from Monty Python that everybody knows. I thought it was him doing the voice acting, but it wasn't. Oh, speaking of voice acting, if you go in their Discord channel, I put a spoiler, it's the. The first one. It's the second image, the long, thin one. Oh, my God. I was looking up who the voice actors were, because I wanted to see if there were any familiar names. I don't remember any of them, but one particular person, Peter Dixon, who played Maze, I think was the main person. I was reading the rest of them, and I got a kick out of some of these roles that he performed. So he was Maze, a main character, then he was a skill grader, a toll bandit, a competition fisher, and then it goes down, he was a chicken kicker. Yeah. It was like they had to do a named NPC, a chicken kicker. You said his name very, you just, it rolled out so easily, but his name is Peter, which some people would say means penis, and Dixon, which some people would say means penis. I just wanted to point that out. You know, I'm glad you brought us back to that. Yeah, you're welcome. Just leave it to me for immaturity. Love it. Peter. Peter. Peter has been a chicken kicker. I love it, and that's the episode title. All right, so, oh, you know, we already passed graphics and art, but, again, it was rough. I also put a spoiler in there of just a glaring example of why. Dude, awful. Yeah. That is so bad. Nightmare material. That's going to go on Instagram for sure. Yeah, we got to add it. It's ridiculous, and that was like the girl from the beginning that's like missing a cat or something. I believe so, yeah. Dude, everybody looked like a nightmare. My wife looked at my Steam Deck when I was playing it, and she had a very childish reaction to it. She was just like, that looks weird. I was like, it does. I was like, I think it's intentional. I did see, though, there was a way to add anti-aliasing and all these other things to try to smooth out the game a little bit on the PC version. Right. But, God, every character in it looked like a nightmare. So this game introduced some unique mechanics. Yes. And we discussed ahead of time, we knew it had a morality system, like the good and bad. I said I was going to be a piece of shit, and you said you were going to be a paladin good boy. I was going to be a goody two-shoes. There's a quest early on, like before the tragedy happens, and you talk to a woman who's looking for her husband, and then later on you find her husband behind a building. It didn't animate it this way, but it was supposed to be him having an inappropriate moment with his mistress or something. And the good and bad option was the good option was, oh, you need to go basically tell on him to his wife, or you can just ignore it. So it was a lot of stuff like that, very black-and-white choices. This is another thing, too. It directly told you this is the good choice, this is the bad choice. It took me out of the game a lot, and it's not what I would consider a good choice necessarily, because what was the option was to not say anything, right? And that made you a bad guy, but it also makes you a little fucking snitch. So what I did, I didn't tell the wife, but I did beat the fuck out of the guy. So he learned his lesson. My parents talked to me, actually. They told my dad that I was causing a ruckus around town. You know, I feel like this game was bad, but I think there was a lot of good that came from it. It was introducing mechanics that hadn't really been explored yet. So for that, I've got to give it major props, because I think that this morality system, along with the combat that they were trying to go for, I think it got us to better games later on, though, again, that execution in this one was just lacking. Because they continued with morality in the other ones, and I don't think they were as stark choices as this one was. They actually had harder decisions to make that weren't as awful as a representation that this one gave for good and bad. So that was really the main mechanic, was this morality system. I think that was the groundbreaking one they were going for. The rest of it, it had combat. It had a day and night cycle that was tied to quests. That became very frustrating. Sounds like it would, yeah. And I bring up the day and night cycle being frustrating, because the first city you come to, one of the early quests, you have the option through this game to obtain, because I think you can have multiple wives. You can get married and I believe have children and start families, but you can have more than one. And there was a quest that was introducing this concept, but you were talking to this girl's father. You have yet to meet the girl, but he keeps saying, oh, she's going to like somebody that has this hairstyle. So then you have to go take a little card that has a hairstyle on it to the barber shop, get yourself done up, and then you go back to the guy and say, well, actually, hold on. What if you add a mustache to that? And then you go back to the barber. But the day and night cycle would fuck me up, because every ten minutes it was cycling between day and night and all the shops would close. Yeah. All the shops would close. Yeah. You're just trying to get a mustache. I know. And the moon and sun are fucking you up. Yeah, you could actually, on the map, if you bring up the menu and go to the map, all the markers that it would show you, like, yeah, this is a town, a barber, enemy location, bandits, and then you'd have a marker for your wife. So you can always go find your wife. It's like the iPhone tracking, find my wife. The stuff in this game was a little bit too on the nose for me, how it's like, this is a good choice, this is a bad choice. This woman is interested in this hairstyle. I wanted to also show you, this is the progression of each good boy, bad boy scenario. I don't want to look like any of these guys, to be honest with you. Are you looking at this picture? I am, yeah. Yeah, they look, I think if I had to pick what I look like, I would say maybe the bad version, three bad stages in, before you start getting weird veins on your forehead. Right. Before your mouth starts bleeding, or before you become a straight-up devil. You don't like the equal one on the top one? I don't even know. I don't know. I don't even know how to describe that guy, dude. He's just a holy, yeah, it's just, the graphics of this game, the art style is just so weird, man. And again, it's so on the nose. If you choose the bad route, you grow horns out of your forehead and your eyes turn red. Because you didn't tell, this all stems from not telling a guy's wife that he's cheating on her. Yeah. Those are the types of morality choices you're making, and then eventually you become the devil himself because you did not snitch. Yeah, I don't know if you got a dog in this one, but in later games you get a canine companion that would also change with you as you progressed. Like the dog would grow wings or turn shadowy and stuff. And I believe, and we didn't get far enough in this one to find out, but I know in later games, if you went super evil and went into a big town, people would run from you and be scared of you. As long as they don't talk to me, I'm into that. Yeah, and that would change your interactions. And I believe if you were all good, you would get discounts at vendors and stuff. So it had mechanical benefits and things, social parameters that would change depending on which way you were leaning. Yeah. So you're saying that going into a town with wings and horns coming out of your forehead with bloody eyes and a mouth is probably not a good look if you're trying to get a discount at a shoe store? Yes, 100%. Okay. I'm going to change my look in real life then. So, and again, I think it was a good starting point. That's going to get us to some of these other ones. Definitely a starting point. Let's see here. How did you like the combat? So I already talked to you a little bit about the control blunders. Yeah, yeah. I think that it was complex combat, even without the issues that I experienced, while also being just way too simple. You should have done no bow, just magic for ranged and sword for melee, and then not done the bow and then expanded on that more. So that way it would be, you know, less diverse but better. I agree. Okay. The bow, even if you had native controls, was a weird way to control it. It was like auto aim to a certain degree until you actually like drew back the bow. It was very, very strange. Yeah. And again, I think we've said this for other games. I forget which one it was, probably Metal Gear Solid. It was still early to where there wasn't really a standard. You know, every game now, if you've got a combat mechanic with a bow, you don't really have to think about it. They all function basically the same. Yeah, like God of War had everything that we just mentioned in it. I mean, again, it's a much newer game, but, like, geez. Right. There's like standards now to where back in 2004 they were kind of having to figure it out still. Yeah. So they were like, what works? We'll just put it here. And, you know, 20 years later it's not really functioning. Yeah, this is an old game. I need to give it a little bit more credit for that. But, again, we did pull up games that have the same release year. And holy shit, dude, Fable's pretty slimy. Yeah, yeah. The Magic was one of those really loud sound bites for me. Oh, yeah. Every time I – it was just – it was so loud. I think I had Lightning or something first. Same, yeah. It was – I had to turn the whole TV down. It was just – it was too loud and it was too frequent. I remember when I would watch my wife play, I think two or three similar issue, not really with the sound, but this next one I'm going to describe, you kind of just get stuck spamming one thing over and over again. I'd watch her, you know, go through one of these areas, hit a bunch of enemies, and it's just spam, Lightning, Lightning, Lightning, Lightning, Lightning, over and over and over again. And that was it. Yeah. It was very – I think you mentioned it was a very simple combat mechanic, and I don't think it's really changed much when it comes to the newer games for the combat. Interesting. I just don't – I don't know how sound quality stuff like that gets past production at all. Like, the Lightning is way louder than anything else in the game. Some of the characters' voices are super loud. It was just – yeah, I don't know. If you're playing a game, I get it if it's in a movie or something, you're probably holding the volume control and you can turn it up and down depending on it, but I don't understand how that makes it into a game because you're holding a controller, so you can't just constantly turn it up and down. I don't know. We would have been still on CRTs with embedded speakers that were lower quality. Maybe it kind of – Oh, yeah. Maybe it, you know, filtered out some of the ick. Those 5-watt speakers pumping sound, yeah. Yeah, it could be. Let's see here. I don't think I really have much else. I think we mentioned we didn't really get too far into it, so we could talk about the story a little bit from what we've read or anything. I read a little bit about the story. It gets pretty convoluted. That's very surprising. So I would say, why don't we just talk about the intro? Because, I mean, from childhood to when you go out on your own, I think is probably what we both experienced. Yeah, okay. So just to set the stage, and this isn't really going to be spoilers because it's not very far into the game. We're not going to play it anyway because you know it sucks. If you're listening to this, you've already played it and you have built it up in your head as a great game, and it's not. So you start out, you're a little jit running around your town. You're a very generic town. Oakvale? Oakvale. Dude, what a name, too. It just says generic. It's a fantasy name. And you're trying to come up with three coins to be able to purchase your sister a birthday gift that she's going to enjoy for the rest of her life. And then you do these tasks that are just menial, just not even well-placed tutorial type of stuff. You know, sometimes they incorporate these tasks, and it's like a semi-tutorial. No, this is just the small introduction to the morality system and then running around and talking to people. Your sister is loud and annoying, and then you get the first decision where there's a guy schmoozing around with the wrong lady, and you have the choice to tell his wife or let him do his thing or beat him up, I guess. I was surprised that wasn't an option. I felt like something that would, like, if you're going to be a devil eventually, I think beating a guy up would be more on the evil side. Right. You get these three coins, and this guy's like, it's your lucky day. I'm going to sell you. It was candy? Yeah, I think it was a box of chocolates or something. Fucking weird, man. I don't know. I wouldn't buy candy from a stranger for my younger sister. One of the other, again, I think you nailed it right on the head. The first bit in Oakville was really a tutorial for the morality system and how black and white it was going to be. One of the other ones was you were asked to watch over a merchant's crates, and the morality test was do you watch them and that's it, or do you get influenced by another kid coming saying that you guys should, like, root through them and steal stuff? I don't remember. I don't think I was posed with that dilemma. I don't specifically remember what I did, but that wasn't one of the options for me that I recall. Yeah, I think it was in Oakville or it was in the greater school area. I can't remember which one. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was in Oakville. But anyway, and there was a third one. I don't remember what it was. Yeah, I don't remember either. But I hate when it's just like a guy and he's like, I have what you want, exactly. What if I don't want to buy my sister candy for her birthday? What if I want to buy her a knife because it seems more appropriate given the direction of this game? Well, you mentioned earlier liking, to a degree, linear story, and this was very linear. Yeah, I don't want that. Maybe that's what Dan heard when I said I liked the degree of linearity in games, and he was like, well, guess what, buddy? I got you a hallway. I got the game for you, bro. Yeah, you're going to need three gold. This guy has three gold. You know, like there's three tasks in front of you, one gold apiece. This guy is selling the next quest item for three gold exactly, no opportunities to get more money. Progress is not always progress. To the thing you talked about with the sleazebag smooching on somebody else and you beating them up, in that being, I don't think it had an impact on the morality or the fact that you got tattled on was part of it. But later on, after you leave and go out on your own, there's a guy berating a homeless person. Nothing wrong with that. In between two towns. And it kind of flips it. So you've got, it's like, okay, the guy that doesn't like the homeless guy being there is really, really mean and rude about it. And the homeless guy is like just trying to be a nice old jolly fellow or whatever. But then the good option becomes beating up the other guy to get him to go away. Or was it beating him up or was it like you had emotes and I think you had a fart on him or something. That's fucking weird. Yeah, I completely forgot about this. Because in tandem with the morality, there's also like a social aspect to the game. Depending on how much NPCs like you, it can affect how they interact with you later on. Just like real life. Or shopkeepers getting discounts or being gouged, whatever it is. But you can do emotes where you like smile or hug or fart. Yeah, there's stuff like that. And I think that was one of them. You had to like make him go away by farting on him, I think. I'm getting a couple of them mixed up because a lot of them just felt the same. I didn't see that part at all. You obviously got a little bit further than I was willing to go with this game. All your play time was in set up. I played this game, I spent a lot more time with this game than you did, but you just are so much better at it. You got further than me. I did fart on the girl. I missed the initial love interest or something, girl that you meet. But yeah, she was trying to show me something and I hit the wrong button on my Plebeian Steam controller and I farted on her and she was just like, why would you do that? Because that's the kind of guy I am. I'm a real badass girl. I want to get a sound clip of you saying, and I farted on the girl. And I farted on the girl. And put that on all of our socials. She didn't like it, but I find in real life that women love that shit. So, I don't know. It's crazy to me. Oh, man. That's how you, like they say, all right, never mind. So, we did miss some stuff, but I did want to call this out for the end of it. No, no, no. In our early on stuff that we typically talk about, like who did it, all that stuff. It was on Microsoft. They published it. What I did want to talk about was the critic scores. So, IGN 9.3, this was for the 2004 version, the original release. Metacritic mid-80s. But then the anniversary, which was basically a 10-year later re-release with additional content on newer hardware, blah, blah, blah, all the stuff you get with a re-release or like a whatever, 68. It scored considerably lower on the re-release. I wonder if that's just chalk it up to being a very bad port. Yeah, either a bad port or. It aged very poorly and people are like, oh, that sucks. That's what I think it is. Yeah. I think it was when it first came out, it was like, man, this game is really doing a lot of stuff we haven't seen before, or it's doing things that we have seen in a way that I like. And it just didn't really carry that later on. Because I believe that on the 10-year anniversary, Fable 2 and 3 had already come out. Fable 2 has already been played. So we can play an old game and see if we like it. Right, right, right. Oh, man. So I think that's like all I got from my notes. We're not going to go crazy on the story. It's very high fantasy, very, very complex of a story. We didn't get too far. It was a rough plague. But, yeah. I feel like the last couple of games I've picked have not been very good. So I've got to go back to the drawing board on something. I did okay with Ragnarok, but then it was like Metal Gear Solid, Ori, this bullshit. You didn't get Rise of Adventure in there. Yeah, you wanted to go back to older games, and I understand why. There was a lot of games that you and I both missed out on for one reason or another. And I think there are some games, this one included, part of the reason I think these things score so well is at the time it was amazing. But now that time has passed, there are better things. And it's very difficult to go back to some of these if they were just subpar based on what we're used to now. Yeah. It's crazy because this game is a lot newer. Just to bring it up and take it back a second, Metal Gear Solid is six years older than this game, maybe seven. And that game played so much better. And it was still a pretty complicated game as far as the combat and stuff goes and just the mechanics in general were still very complicated. But this game just didn't hold up. And this was Microsoft Studios, too. I don't know. It's just crazy to me. But Microsoft has never messed up anything. So that's scary. It's because they were wanting to do this on PC and on Mac because they did have a Mac port. Okay. I'm curious how that played. Probably worse. Probably. Yeah. That's the legacy. Oh, man. Well, I think that's going to do it. Yeah, that's it for me, man. Love that game. Don't recommend it to anybody unless you're a really big fan of the series and you just want to see the way that it came about. You can let this one stay in the gutter. Stay on the backlog. I'm going to go ahead and remove it from my computer right now. So I think the only thing we need to really do after this is talk about what our next game is going to be. So actually, it's my turn. My turn. So the next game that I'm bringing is, by Telltale, the Wolf Among Us. Been seeing these. Pretty excited. I think you've kind of already dabbled with some of theirs before. I don't know if it was the Wolf Among Us or any of the other ones. I'm a big fan of the Telltale games in their original entity. Pretty big fan of them. Were they a comic first or were they a combination of stuff? So this was a comic first. The comics was fables. They also did a series of The Walking Dead, which was all original content, but that was also a comic. They had a Borderlands series that was pretty good, and they also had a Game of Thrones one, which I could not bring myself to be into. I think they've also done, like, a Batman one as well, but I didn't care. Holy shit. Well, hey, if this one ends up being a good one, maybe we can dive into some of the other ones. I knew they had the Walking Dead one, which I think you made. The Walking Dead one is a long one. Is it? I think I had learned of those first, but we actually have the Wolf Among Us in our catalog already, so why don't we go ahead and try to actually knock stuff off the backlog. Well, I think that's going to do it. Anything else before we wrap up and plug some random stuff? No, I'm excited to get into it because I feel like it's a game that warrants a game. It's a thing that warrants a lot of discussion. So, yeah, I'm stoked to get into it, and I can't wait. I'm a wrecked. So, yeah, you can find us at linktr.ee. All our stuff is on there. We try to post as much as we can, but, you know, social media is tough sometimes. We do actually have a merch shop. You can find a bunch of random assortments of things that we tossed our logo on, so if you want to show support there. And we even have a promo code for the Energy Drink, Energy Concoction W. So go to w.gg and use the promo code 321BACKLOG. You'll get 10% off, and it'll give us a little bit of support there. So we appreciate everybody listening. We will see you next time. Good night. ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪