It's true, I was minding my own business when I randomly woke up at 6am (I had only been asleep for 3 hours) and then a picture hanging in the hallway slipped and turned the hallway light on. Ok, so not ghosts, but still annoying =p

Anyway, right after writing my last blog I started glancing through my favorites and spotted the old link to my zetaboards forum. I created a forum there back when they first came out, just because I like to keep an eye on ym competition. When I looked at it, i realized how easy it would be to compete with their badly priced services so i was finally motivated to finish PycoForums.

The year of PycoForums

Apparenty this is a good year for me, since I'm now planning for PycoForums, Game Plague and GameGame to all make great progress this year. For PF, I want to have every important feature working without issue, including all the standard features you would find in forums like IPB, SMF, phpbb, etc. I just rewrote the permissions system, which was an important stepping stone for working on features that involve permissions (aka, everything).

Actually though, I'm a lot closer to completion than I thought. I mostly just need to finish a couple existing but unreleased systems (email verification, polls, admin control panel) and polish up the existing ones (theres still no close topic button >_>). I've already got a better shoutbox than zetaboards does =D Polish is the main thing, I need to redo some of the html and get some nice looking themes.

As for games, I'm writing this blog as i wait for todays minecraft update. Plus I pre-ordered Pokemon Black and beat the main story of Fable 2 on tuesday=]

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Now to try a tiny bit of game reviewing, this isn't a real review though because it focuses on the negative stuff =p

Fable 2 was a bit of a dissapointment, I've never played 1 or 3. They have such a big focus on the decision aspect, but it didn't impress me. The evil/good choices are pretty much: Evil=good for you, bad the world. Good=annoying/bad for you, good for the world. So they basically punish you for being good, which seems a bit weird in a game about heroes. Yes I know they don't mean hero=somebody who does good. But still, for a game that is meant to be 50% good 50% bad, it felt more like 90% bad 5% neutral 5% good.

As for the effects of the decisions, from the very beginning they point out that you are making changes in the world. But I couldn't tell you what the changes really were, because I can't imagine how boring it must be to have to replay through the entire game just to see them. Theres no challenge, since the only punishment for "death" is a couple seconds wait and becoming slightly ugly. Plus I would have to delete my save, because they only put 1 file per live account.

Despite the dissapointments though, Fable 2 was ok enough. Theres enough variety in achievements that I kept playing a couple hours each night, with my goal of getting 3 achievements a day. Though I was getting really bored of combat by the time I recruited the 3rd hero. The ending of the main story was an extreme let down, both in terms of the non-existant boss fight (a true boss fight wasn't needed, but what they did was just meh) and the wish choices. The money option was just stupid and the other 2 options should have been combined in one. And for the family choice, it should have included rose and probably even my parents (I think they are dead, I dunno if the game ever said).

It was also stupid how they wait until the very last second and then just kill off your dog and spouse. it's obvious they just wanted to give a 3rd choice to the wish so that both of the good choices would have punishments. But once again, I will never see the difference between those 2 choices because I'm not playing through those tedious quests again. If you can't tell, I chose the family option. I wasn't sure if I could get the dog back otherwise and I need its treasure finding powers =p

So tl;dr, fable 2 choices take some fun out of the game.