NOWGamer: Fable III Hands On Demo

[sfroggy1]

NOWGamer: Fable III Hands On Demo

NOWGamer: Fable III Hands On Demo​

E3 Show Floor Hands-On: All our lives, every fart has been but practice for this moment...

Is it sad to have played through the last Fable game – the stirringly titled Fable II – more than three times. Probably. We say probably on account of being fully aware of our own geeky sadness and penchant for spending far too many hours in front of the box engaged in variously time consuming videogame fantasy worlds. Yes, we never felt we were born for this planet; getting buses to work, making cups of tea or waiting in the dentist’s office just aren’t activities which set our imaginations on fire in quite the same way as, say, sharting in our pants to the delight of the people of Bowestone.​

So it is with a lustful longing for those many, many enjoyable hours we have ahead of us that we come to Fable III for this reporter’s first hands-on. As much as we try to keep an open mind, it’s Fable; we are predisposed to loving it before the loading screen has even finished its display of stoic non-compliance. The loading took forever, but no problem, since the game isn’t remotely finished.

Much has been said about Lionhead’s newest gimmick. A couple of years back some may remember the dog being the big innovation. This year, it’s touch. But this is a hands-on demo on the show floor of E3 2010 and if we didn’t get to try that out we’re not going to say we did for the sake of a few extra words committed to laptop. We didn’t get to experience it, and we’re hoping that this is because it is touch which will form the bedrock of Fable III’s Kinect functionality.

The irony wasn’t wasted on us; we were surrounded by it. Kinect this, Kinect that, sports games, minigames, fuzzy-wuzzy little animals – every show-shmo within shouting range was at it, and there, sat innocuously without the benefit of its own fishtank demo area, was Fable III; a game with potentially the most impressive use of Microsoft’s new device, but with nothing availably to mess with because Lionhead ‘aren’t talking about it right now’. For shame.​

So, to the demo. Two missions were available for hands-on; “One’s kind of cerebral and story-based, the other one is mainly violence” said our booth guide. We chose violence – the amount of noise on the show floor was crazy anyway, so story would have been wasted on us. We started out being guided through some caves by an old pirate-looking guy. Things were very spooky at first. Until all hell broke loose, that is.

Shadowy, erm... shadows with eyes and claws morphed into reality from the actual shadow, with our friend’s torch keeping them at bay at first. Soon, though, they appeared to be come braver and began attacking in their droves. Combat is controlled in a similar manner to Fable II – Y for ranged, X for melee and B for magic – but there were notable differences. Flurries were more easily happened upon simply by holding the melee button down for a few extra milliseconds. Ranged attacks have been powered down in the sense that your hero now takes time to reload between – in the case of this particular gun – each six shot volley.

Magic, which traditionally is powered up by increasingly lengthy depressing of the B button, acts in a similar fashion, but rather than killing or hurting everything within a give circular range, although you can still let fly in that manner, you can now also channel it all into one single enemy for massive damage. The section culminated in our friend being held prisoner by the black shadowy goo and our hero’s inevitable rescue of him from the hands of a typically powerful boss. Too powerful in fact, we fell over and died like a little girl.

Final Summary
As bang-up a job as we expect from anything with Fable in its title. this series is going from strength to strength.​

 

[Evil Pakman]

Re: NOWGamer: Fable III Hands On Demo

nice

 

[sfroggy1]

Re: NOWGamer: Fable III Hands On Demo

nice

indeed

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[sirgage0]

Re: NOWGamer: Fable III Hands On Demo

Nice.