That’s good to know. I was trying to be civil but then after I hit the submit button I felt badly about having been rude (in ways that I wasn’t aware of until I hit the submit button). N.B.: This will probably happen again.

On wishing you were dead: It is easy to take your site too seriously, because it oozes with attitude and because its reviews at least superficially appear to be pretentious. And also, some of us really want to see good writing about games and so we arrive charged up about that. If you are really just casually letting things hang out, and maybe sometimes saying awesome things and sometimes producing noise, then it would be silly for a person to be outraged by your reviews. But I think it’s easy for many people to assume at a glance that you are, instead, working very hard to say something Important (and maybe also that you think you’re too cool to do it in simple, straightforward sentences!). And then it’s easy to skip the step of verifying this–because verifying it would require reading lots and lots of mostly unedited text that at least superficially appears both stupid and dense. And in so skipping, it’s easy to land in a comments thread, where, according to my casual sampling, there’s often somebody reverently saying how your review was, in fact, the Best and Most Important Writing of some kind or another. Assuming you are being honest with me here, then (I claim) Action Button is, among other things, a strong piece of accidental trolling.

Completely independently of that: I was trying to prompt you to say something about why you might advise a game designer to remove all nonessential information from a game’s presentation, while apparently removing little nonessential information from your own writing. Could you do that? Notwithstanding that this has no direct relation to Fable II.

one thing i have noticed is that all of the people who claim to “hate” my writing cite “too long” as the number one reason for said hatred.

i’m not trying to keep “busy people” away, really, not so much as i am trying to make sure that only people who enjoy reading in general manage to get through to the end.

because, see, if one of the bad-attitude-having people put off by the sheer length of these pieces (i’ve seriously seen some people on some forums wish i were DEAD because my articles are “too long”) ever managed to finish the entire article and then concoct an actual reasonable list of things they hated about it, i’d probably end up feeling bad.

and for the most part — i think i’ve been over this before — i don’t edit this stuff, no. i just let it all hang out. i have a review template in google documents and i just slam sentences in there from time to time, never really sitting down and giving reviews my full attention. i just slam sentences in, list a few cryptic notes at the bottom so i have some idea of what points i want to cover, and . . . . . . . a couple weeks pass, and we have a review. or we don’t.

Do you ever cut anything you’ve written, Tim? I’m not joking–it really seems like your schtick is to go without editing. Is that true?

“Here’s a thought experiment, game designers: think of a numeral that appears in your game. If you hid that numeral from the player, would the player feel completely hopeless and lost? If not, you should hide that number. If so, you should keep that number.”

I claim that if I were to filter the noise from your Fable 2 review, I would find an ordinary IGN or GameSpot review, plus a few bits too weird or good for a normal game review site: For instance, your evident joy at the game’s response to your hour of thumbs-up-gesturing; and your point about innocent NPC’s being too inoffensive to be worth killing; and your list of reasons why a real dog might wake its owner (“the company of the shadow of a moth” is lovely). Why do you write like this? Are you really trying to keep busy people–that is, most adults–out of your audience?

Sorry that I don’t yet know how to properly quote a comment, but this is the exact reason that a Game Crazy employee gave me for how awesome he thought Fable II was. He was sharing it because he was confused as to why I was trading the game in after completing it. The main quest is kinda short, after all, and I have no urge to play through it again. My point, though, is that this stupid achievement only requires the repetitious gesturing that Tim describes in the review, while the actual orgy is invisible. It’s like punching a prostitute in GTA San Andreas and finding out she’s packing heat. It’s a bromide in Lunar Silver Star Complete.

For me, Fable II was fun in the way that Animal Crossing was fun: it made me want to hoard things. I liked turning on the game to see how much money I pulled in since the last time I played. I liked buying properties so I could see how much they would boost my five-minute income. I liked gathering a crowd and playing the lute to see all the little renown points roll in. These things don’t make for a fun action-RPG, though. The menus are slow and clunky, the character control is deliberate and weird (faster, Link-like steps in games just seem to feel better), the dog is nothing more than an earthbound Navi-fairy, and the particle effects look as though they were animated in stop-motion.

Also, the sequence where you work on the Spire reminded me uncomfortably of Dragon Quest V. It’s also the only place where being a nice guy actually required meaningful sacrifice. Meaningful to the guy holding the controller, anyway.

But hey, it’s better than X HARVEST Y RESCUE

That’s not really the point of the review, though, which is that if you’re going to make so much of the game transparently goofy, it’s no use trying to be so subtle about it.

I played the hell out of Fable II and enjoyed being a good character. I was addressing Peter Molyneux’s quote in this article, wondering why so few people choose to play the evil route, and that’s because evil characters have nothing to do except kill people. I don’t enjoy playing evil characters in D&D like that, and I don’t enjoy playing evil characters in video games like that.