Following up on my last post, looks like i may have been wrong about ol’ Bobby. As it turns out, he’s not crazy, he’s just pure evil.

My Molyneux Effect article got run on Screenplay today. It’s pretty weird to be published, I’ll be interested to see the comments though.

Activision’s Bobby Kotick has come out today and said that they are looking to make many of their properties playable independent of a console. This has been reported pretty widely, I’ll credit it to Kotaku .

I’m torn about this. On the one hand I fully expect him to come out tomorrow and clarify his statement, because I can only think he means that they will focus on making their properties playable universally over whatever people are using to play games. But this is what Activision already loves them some multi-format releases, and I’ve come to believe that ol’ Bobby is on the wrong side of crazy. So what if it his statement means so something else?

Kotaku points to services to onLive as a possible answer, to which I say /raspberry. I live in Australia where onLive might be feasible in 2122 given our ate of broadband progression. It’s also the only other option I can think of to releasing games dependent on in home hardware. But are Activision nutty enough (continue reading…)

I picked up Fable 2 for the first time in a while yesterday, and after a good fifteen minutes of abusing my 360’s internal clock to make some quick cash, I got to thinking about the way that game handles saves.

Fable 2, for the uninitiated, is all about moral choices. These take a number of forms, some more blatant than others, but all have some kind of real effect on the game world. Or at least this is what the game’s creator Peter Molyneux would have you believe. Regardless of the outcome it’s without question that most all of your choices actually do matter. To emphasize this the game employs a somewhat dubious save system, where by the game auto saves frequently, and silently. I say dubious because there is only one save permitted per character, so like it or lump it you are stuck with the choices you make. The net effect of this is the player must really think about his or her choices – if you decide to jack some fool that fool will remain jacked, there are no do-overs.

Fable 2 was very influential over the course of last year, as has Molyneux been over his entire career. This is exemplified by the increasing number of games being released that allow for the player to make choices that have a lasting effect on not just the gameplay experience (continue reading…)