Grant Brünner: Bassguy

Some game series are extremely dependent on continuity. The events of game one make up a lot of what happens in game two. Other series go out of their way to be noob-friendly with recaps and limited continuity. Unfortunately, some series take place over decades and multiple generations of hardware. This leads to many woes for me, and I would assume it is woeful for at least some of you.

My question is: Where do you jump in? Do you go back and try to find the game on eBay/Amazon/GOG or do you start playing the most recent edition and then decide if its worth going back and playing the earlier games?

My example is Fable. I have Fable II sitting on my desk here, and I haven’t played it because I have never played the first Fable. Should I just play it and see if it’s worth downloading the original via XBL, or put off playing the game I already have and drop $15 on the original right now? I’m conflicted, and so I want to hear what you all think.

Thoughts?

General Info

Gender: Female

Alignment: Paragon

Class: Adept

Background: Spacer

Military History: War Hero

Mass Effect 1

Romance: Liara

Killed: Kaiden, The Council

Saved: Ashley, Wrex, Rachni Queen

Reporters Punched: 0

Human Councilor: Anderson

Mass Effect 2

Saved: The Whole Crew, The Heretic Geth

Killed: The Collector World, Morinth, 0.3 Million Batarians

Loyal: The Whole Crew

Disloyal: None

Reporters Punched: 0

Romance: Remained Loyal to Liara, Flirted like hell with Kelly.

Thanks to Sony’s little whoopsie, I got two free games for my PS3: LittleBigPlanet and inFAMOUS.

I downloaded LittleBigPlanet from PSN, and I went to launch it. The first thing I see is a screen yelling at me to download a game patch. “But,” I said to no one in particular, “I just downloaded this game less than one minute ago. Why aren’t you already patched?” Good question. So good, in fact, that I still have yet to find an answer to it. If you know why, I’d be happy to hear the details.

I sat through the patching process, and then I was able to start my game. Let me just say that if any developers want to win me over right off the bat, add some tongue-in-cheek narration to your game. It’s a good formula. “More like this” as the kids say.

The gameplay is comprised of basic platforming and puzzle solving with a metric ton of hand-holding for people new to the concept. It has a solid underpinning, but it focuses heavily on collection. That bums me out a little bit. I’m not really a fan of the “Gotta catch ‘em all” style of gameplay. I just cannot bring myself to care about collecting virtual stickers. Maybe I’m just becoming an old man, but a little bit of story couldn’t hurt the sackboy.

It’s an incredibly charming piece of art. It is nice to look at, but I just don’t see myself spending much time with it. I have other games that I paid actual money for that I don’t have time to play. I guess LBP will have to sit on the back burner for a while.