Do you remember Fable 1? I do, I played it a great deal. As a matter of fact myself and my roommates played it like some kind of religion. If you were waiting for it like we were then you, like us, were totally let down. What was promised was a realistic RPG of intense proportions. What we ended up getting was a really great action RPG game that was an enormous amount of fun. It was like you were promised a Mustang on your sixteenth birthday and instead they gave you three motorcycles for you and two of your best friends to ride around on. How mad could you actually be in the end?

There were three options in skills. You could either be the warrior, the archer, or the mage. No levels to speak of you just used the skills you wanted to and they got better while the rest got worse. On top of that you could either be good, evil, or..... well boring and uninteresting really. The middle ground really didn't mean anything and got you nothing for it so boring was right out and either saint or nun eating daemon was in. Being evil caused horns, pale look, scars, and the evil glowy eye thing. Being good made a halo show up, white aura, and butter files or some nonsense. Being super good meant you were heroic to the point that common people would fall in love at sight. Being super evil meant your infamous and people would also fall in love you at first sight (or run away). Environment effects made your character change in neat ways as well. If you spend time out doors a good deal you get a tan. You spend all day swinging a sword and you get huge. You get into a lot of fights (and lose) you get scars. The reverse was also true.

So I started playing the game first and I picked good guy/warrior. I started beating the ever loving crap out of the bad guys and people loved me for it. I fought long and hard into the game and eventually beat it to adoration of all. Just after that my roommate started playing as an evil archer and quickly discovered that it was pretty easy compared to what I had done. The reason? He maxed out the spell I now call "Force Blast" to throw enemies away from him so he could continue to fill them with pointy sticks. By the time my third roommate played a mostly good mage (mostly because he just couldn't help himself sometimes blowing up a whole town after saving it) we realized that magic broke the game over it's knee. Still in the end we all had a massive great time playing the game. With that said I took this "fantastically real RPG" as some life lessons.

Everything I need to know in life I learned from Fable:

• You can go anywhere and do anything, so long as a path leads to it and someone told you that you could.
• You can have the same number of wives equal to the number of houses that you own in different towns.
• Sometimes the world is covered in thick green snow and you just need to pretend it didn't happen.
• Magic is for winners.
• Revenge is a dish best served ten skill ups later.
  
• You can fall in love with guys even when you are one, but you can't ever marry them.
• With enough fame and choclate you can start a bar fight.
• Horns just mean you are misunderstood.
  
• You can have sex but you arn't allowed to look.
• Don't worry about growing old because you will never get weaker than you are right now.
• Go ahead and beat your wife, but don't let anyone else fall in love with you because she just won't put up with that.
  
• Sometimes buying a house means killing whomever lives there now and just pretending.
• Doors grow back, sometimes while you watch.
• Quest givers that scream and run are target practice.
• Don't kill merchants until you buy things; they really CAN take it with them.
• When faced with a choice, always kill your sister. 
• The dumber you look, the cooler you are.

Seabass