A sine 9

In the immortal words of Spider Jerusalem, ‘I feel a column coming on!’.
I’ve been sitting all night, drinking a bottle of Pinot Noir and reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. On a whim I pulled up Kotaku and had a browse around the recent news, which I found to be ; as always; well written and thought out. It’s only until I read the comments that I began to realise the bizarre and scarily diversive nature of gamers.
First I need a little background; I’m not an average gamer, I play more than most and seldom go a week without purchasing a new title. For all intents and purposes I’m a gaming neophiliac, whoring myself to the shiniest thing of the moment, a fact that I think this is borne out by the posts on this blog. I can explain this easily; I’m staunchly anti-DRM. I think that Apple has done things incredibly wrong with their online store, and have made my feeling as such known. Conversely I own an iPod and would not be without it, and I lust after an iPhone. The thing is I don’t want these things out of practicality, I want them from the lust of them being undiscovered and exciting; something many other things lack.
This is exactly the reason I took the somewhat drastic move of trading my Wii in for (a part of) a PS3. I see the merit of the Wii, I loved Twilight Princess and I got a thrill from seeing my entire family playing Wii sports at Christmas, but after the initial furore the Wii became mundane for me. Perhaps it was the lack of new games or just animal lust for a new console, but it came to the point where the Wii was completely unused unless I’d had a few and a group of my friends were around. This may fly in the face of previous posts, but the human mind is by nature capricious.
The point I’m gunning for is that people say that consumers don’t buy hardware, but games. I truly believe that to be false, as that’s pretty much the entire reason I bought a PS3. I’m writing this post from my living room sofa via my installation of Ubuntu on my PS3 right now. The Illuminati of the gaming world may pontificate upon the crucial factors of introducing new gameplay ideas, but there will always be people who just want to have fun with something unexplored.
It’s true that the Xbox 360 is seeing huge promise as the de-facto gamers machine of choice for this gen, and the Wii is shaping up to be a huge mainstream success; these are facts that I cannot dispute. All I ask is for people to remember that some choose options for different reasons. Has the PS3 been compared to the Dreamcast unfairly? Only the lapse of time can tell, but until then remember that underdogs can bite just as hard.

UPDATE: Before commenting remember I mentioned the bottle of wine at the start of the ramble, also double semicolons are never acceptable.

Has anyone else seen part one of the Fable 2 developer diary on Live? In some respects it’s great, but in others it’s terrible horrible news.
On the upside, it’s a great laugh to see ‘ol PM (I saw him at ECTS one year, you know) with the wank hat firmly pulled down around his ears. The bit where he enthuses about not having control of the dog is especially entertaining; did he not play Black and White?
Sadly the video also gives me the willies about the fate of Fable 2.
I have no trepidation saying that I adored Fable, it was a great RPG and had simplicity. From watching the video I get the feeling that Lionhead is trying to overcomplicate things, yes creating emotional attachment is one thing but in a hack-and-slash game? I’m not sold.
I pray for the day when when I can actually have some sort of empathy for a game character, but taking dates out for a walk and having an annoying AI dog follow me around are not advances in interactive emotion. They’re extraneous rubbish that will detract from what Fable set out before.
What I’m trying to say is that I want Fable 2, not Faux-Medieval Life Simulator 1.