Fable II: Bartending

My personal favorite job in Fable II is Bartending. It’s very easy to do because, unlike Woodcutting or Blacksmithing, the bar always fills in one direction (Left-to-right/clockwise) and it always turns green at the same point. Basically, bartending is just filling pints of beer all the way full, but not overflowing. If you don’t fill it enough, you earn less gold and you break the chain. Every three pints filled adds one point to your multiplier, and you can get a multiplier of up to 15. A5-star bartender earns a base of 75 gold per pint, so at a 15x multiplier, every pint is worth 1125 gold. A pint takes about 3 seconds to fill and send down the counter, so once you’ve gotten a chain of 45 pints of beer, you start raking in 22,500 gold per-minute. That’s alot. After about five minutes of bartending with a 15x multiplier, you’ll have earned enough gold to buy any building in the town of Bowerstone (The castle excluded, of course).

Fable II

The other day, my older brother brought home a game he’d borrowed from a friend. I didn’t place much interest in it at first, but after my brother played for a while we discovered a co-op mode. I was given a crash course in the controls of the game and soon found myself blasting enemies with powerful spells (that look quite awesome I might add). My brother turned in early that night, but I stayed up literally through the night, creating my own file and playing through the storyline. Though the battle system is amazing in its own right, there is much more to Fable II that makes it one of the coolest Role-Playing games I have played. Not only can you customize your character’s skill set to be a sword-bearing warrior, a sharp-eyed marksman, a powerful spell-caster, or any combination of the three, you can do a number of jobs, from chopping wood to assassinating given targets, you can own a house, tavern, shop, and virtually every building in the game. You can execute a number of expressions that will affect people’s opinion of you, choose to eat pies and cheeses and become fat or fruits and veggies to stay thin, walk the holy path of Good or take the lower road of Evil. You can buy a wide array of weaponry, clothing, furniture, potions, jewels, and gifts. You can start a family (or a few families, if you wish) who love and adore you and give you gifts, or you can just use them for personal gain.

Rock Band 2

I know I’m way behind the curve here, but I finally got myself a copy of Rock Band 2. I played it all night long to unlock “One Step Closer,”

then played for the rest of the week working on unlocking all the songs and finishing my solo career. I have finally *finished* the career in the since that I have beaten the “Rolling Stones Rock Immortal” setlist, but I do not yet have the 900 stars required for the Endless Setlist 2 (I have 707 so far, and I just need to keep completing setlists). All in all, I give RB:2 a 9.5/10 because it has great gameplay and great replay value. I was a little dissapointed that I cannot transfer the songs from my original Rock Band disc to Rock Band 2 without a way to connect my X-box to the internet and $5 worth of Microsoft Points or whatever it’s called… Also, the “Impossible Challenges” are not-so-impossible. The songs that make up the marathons are about as difficult as GH3’s “Raining Blood,” “Cliffs of Dover,” and the last half of “One.” I never failed any of them on Expert Guitar. Yeah, the setlist was most certainly difficult, especially as one has to play six songs in a row, and the fingers do turn to jelly about halfway through the sixth song. However, taken one or two at a time with a short break in between, the songs on the Impossible Challenges are relatively easy to beat. When I saw the words “Impossible Challenges” I was thinking along the lines of “Through the Fire and the Flames” and I must say I was a little dissapointed. Rock Band has never been as difficult on the Guitar as the Guitar Hero games, understandably, but I was still hoping for a little more of a challenge. I do have a challenge, however, in getting 5 stars on some of these songs, and it will most definately take me a while. I will continue to work on that, and once that gets boring, I’ll see about getting an internet connection for my X-Box so I can download more selections to play. I am looking forward to getting the Who’s album, as “Who Are You” is one of my top 10 favorite rock songs of all time–OH! and kudos to Harmonix for re-doing “Carry On Wayward Son.” I LOVE this song and I love the re-vamped chart for the guitar. The awesomeness factor of this one song almos makes up for the non-challenging Impossible Challenges. Some of my other favorites from the RB:2 selection are “In the Middle” by Jimmy Eat World, “Alive” by Pearl Jam, “White Wedding” by Billy Idol (I’d never really been into this song very much, I’d just heard it a few times on the radio and liked it), and, of course, “One Step Closer.” Harmonix definately beat Activision in their choice of a Linkin Park song, because “What I’ve Done” (On GH: World Tour) is waaaay too easy, even though it is a great song. “One Step Closer” is a bit more challenging, so one can enjoy the music and the note chart as well.