After being subjected to many evangelical rants about how great Oblivion is I finally cracked and bought it a few months ago. For a game that was meant to be like a thousand angels dancing on your triple-core CPU it turned out to be a monotonous and thoroughly dispiriting gaming experience. I’ve just traded it in for Fable II and have, so far, come up with the following five reasons why Fable II will fill the world with joy and why Oblivion should go and hide until we forget it ever existed.

1. In Fable you can just start the game. Oblivion has a lengthy character customisation section at the start where you have to wade your way through scores of variables before you can go anywhere near the game proper. Fable II, on the other hand asks you if you want to play a male or female character. And that’s it. There’s still the potential for developing your character in Fable II but it comes through the choices your character makes during the game rather than being front-loaded.

2. The scenery in Oblivion looks like a Time Team re-enactment and, possibly because of the excessive character customisation, the people all look like Crimewatch photofits. It may also be something to do with the odd lighting in Oblivion which makes everything look pale and shiny but in combintation it makes the whole game feel completely souless. Fable II manages to have people who look like people and buildings that look real.

An Oblivion House: You can practically hear Tony Robinson’s voiceover

3. Fable is funny. Not always fall off your chair hilarious, granted, but it consistently raises a smile. There’s also an impressive dedication to detail, with even small incidental bits having had the same effort put into them. Oblivion is not funny. In fact I don’t think it even manages to be fun.

4. Oblivion penalises you in that old-school arcade you-lose-a-fight-you-lost-a-life way which makes very little sense in modern gaming where you don’t have to keep putting coins into the slot. Fable has sensibly realised that there’s no need for that. You get beaten up, you fall down, you get back up again.

5. The voice-acting in Fable is great. In terms of big names Oblivion has bit of Patrick Stewart and Fable II has a lot of Zoe Wanamaker. A fight (a thesp-off?) between those two would be a difficult one to call, although it would be great to see. In terms of the wider voice-acting, though, Fable is far better. There’s much more of it, the accents are convincing and the characters are interesting and believable – they have personalities rather than dialogue trees.

This list barely scratches the surface. There are other vital advantages that Fable II has over Oblivion that I haven’t even begun to cover. You have a dog in Fable, for example, and you can spend your time doing something other than obsessively micromanaging your tranch of statistics. However you cut it the evidence is clear, though: Oblivion loses.

This weekend I was at a Jonathan Coulton gig. You probably know him because he wrote the excellent Still Alive from the end of the equally excellent Portal. You may also know him from his non-Valve life in which he has written songs, among other things, about being extremely passive-aggressive, the future and (on several occasions) monkeys. Possibly you’ve never hear of him before reading this, in which case you I may have just improved your life by 5% or so.

Since you ask, the gig was fantastic – great music, a good venue and the highest proportion of Penny Arcade t-shirt wearers of any gig I’ve been to. I can’t say if the quality of the gig is directly proportional to the preponderance of PA tat, but there is certainly the potential for a science project in there. The audience also had a minor geek-out when he played Still Alive, with just the phrase ‘Aperture Science’ warranting a cheer.

It set me thinking about excellent songs in games. I came up with a top three and then realised that all three came from point and click adventures. Here, then, is my slightly more wide-ranging but still very biased top three:

1. Grim Fandango – Rusty Anchor

I’m sure this is something that will be covered at length on Game Fatale, but Grim Fandango is one of the best games ever made. It’s funny, it’s stylish and the entire score is great. One of the frustrating things about point and click adventures, though, is the point at which you get completely stuck and are reduced to the ‘Use Everything With Everything’ tactical approach. My number one music spot goes to one of the few occasions that this doesn’t glean the response “I don’t think he’d like that” or “I can’t use these things together”. Ask Glottis about the Rusty Anchor, something he knows absolutely nothing about, and he sings you this fantastic ditty. The facts that firstly he sounds like Tom Waits and secondly it doesn’t further the plot in any way make it even better.

2. Portal – Still Alive

If you like your robot overlord’s chat to be by parts menacing and baking-themed then Portal is the game for you. There aren’t many examples of bad guys in games breaking into song and explaining their reasoning – aside from this I can only think of Conroy Bumpus in Sam and Max Hit the Road. It should be done more often, though.

3. Vib Ribbon – Demo songs

In case you missed it, Vib Ribbon was a kind of low-fi contemporary of Dance Dance Revolution. You pressed the appropriate combination of buttons to make a scratchy line drawing of a rabbit clear an obstacle course and evolve. One of the points of the game was that you could stick in any of your own music and play through the landscape the game created from these (with, in my experience, insanely difficult results). The songs that came with the game have been genetically modified to be training levels. As such they are an odd set of songs to like, but they’re good tunes and I’m a sucker for a bit of J-Pop.

Looking at it it strikes me that it’s an odd top three. Are any of your favourites not on the list? I’m guessing “Yes” as I’ve undoubtedly left out some classic in-game music, like Final Fantasy VIII’s super-weepy Eyes on Me which missed the cut. Here’s hoping that its fans will be too busy sobbing into their keyboards to do too much about that, though.

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