samutzCom

So I’m going to write a bit about games.

So today I packed up my Wii and PS2 in to their original boxes, not because I’m moving, not because I’m shipping them, and not because I’m selling them, but because I just don’t play them anymore. Read the rest of this entry »

I made a wallpaper thing. Used this tutorial as a starter.

I know. It needs work. I have better ideas that I might try out later.

I want to watch Chuck without the gimmicky bullshit please.

Thanks.

Pros:

• You can play with your friends.
• Gold and experience you gain as a guest will be transfered to your real hero.

Cons:

• The guest is stuck using a pre-made generic hero, with the same abilities as the host. Lionhead could have done better. I can understand them doing this for the local co-op since there’s only one hero (one save file), but if they can send the hosts’s hero data to the guest online, then they should be able to send the guest’s hero data to the host to allow both unique heroes.
• The camera tries to keep both heroes on screen, but fails horribly. Again, this make sense for local co-op since you only have one screen to use, but not for online co-op.
• Game freezes when one player pauses. I had to sit and wait while the host played with his dyes and clothing in the pause screen. You can’t even see what the other player is doing in the pause menu. You just see a “<Player Name> has paused the game.” message.
• Loading screens seem to last much longer than in single player.
• If you’re not playing with someone online, but see their orb in the game, you can hear them chatting over XBL, even when they’re chatting with someone else that’s not on your friends list. This could be a pro because its easy to quickly communicate with them, “hey, wanna join me?”, but it’s a con beause it’s annoying having to hear them talk to someone else while you’re trying to play on your own.
• The guest can’t just kill anyone at any time. Only the host can turn safety off. So yes, you can kill your friend’s wife, but only if they allow it by turning the safety off.

So basically, they took the Local Co-op, which is crap, then copy and pasted it for Online Co-op, so it’s still crap.

New patch out today, but I have no idea what this one does. Co-op was already available from the patch I downloaded last Thursday.

Joystiq says that there are rumors that this patch makes you corrupt if you cheated:

“Although unconfirmed, we’ve heard various sources say that those who cheated at Pub Games start the game with full corruption, rendering you quite hideous in appearance.”

At the moment, I don’t believe this to be true, because you don’t start the game with your Pub Game earnings. You have to merge your patron with your new character after the childhood intro. Also, my character is still 100% Pure and Good after applying the patch. I’ve had him standing around Bowerstone Market (unpaused) for the past half an hour while I look for info on the web, and nothing has changed on him.

Update: Went back in to Pub Games, cheated up 50k, went back to Fable II. Still nothing changed.

This ends my coverage of pre-release Fable II info.

The game is out now and everyone can finally play it for themselves. Enjoy the game!

I’ve already started posting info on various achievements at Achievement Hunter. If I didn’t post on one, it’s either an obvious/easy one to get or I haven’t gotten it yet.

Edit: As if it wasn’t bad enough that the Rooster Teeth sites go down every Monday from people waiting for the latest RvB, but it seems they also chose tonight to update the site to the new version they’ve been working on, further increasing downtime and slowness.

Cheating in the Past

The glitch was an accident. It would not have been patched if they wanted it to be there. LH didn’t know about the glitch, so they couldn’t have been tracking it.

Your gold count is stored on your 360, not on XBL’s or LH’s servers. This is proven because I’ve been playing Pub Games without the patched version. The 360 does not let you play a game on XBL unless it’s got the latest patch for that game. If you select not to patch it, you are forced to play it without being logged in. So while you are playing and earning gold on your unpatched, untracked, and disconnected version of Pub Games, no data is being sent back to MS or LH.

A lot of people have been suggesting that there will be a patch on release day for Fable II or later that will know that you cheated. Again, I don’t believe there’s anything in your save file that says your cheated. So Fable II couldn’t know.

Cheating in the Future

I thought for sure that the release disc would include something so that you could only transfer gold and items from the patched version of Pub Games, and if you had the original, unpatched version it would make you update it first. But they didn’t. They could still release a patch that does this, but you can remove your patches whenever you wanted to cheat.

The only way they could stop you from cheating now is:

1. The Pub Games you download from XBLA could already be patched, if you didn’t have the original unpatched one already.
2. MS could remove the ability to remove patches/updates from your harddrive (which could happen with the NXE, I suppose).
3. Later Fable II discs come pre-patched to not allow gold from the unpatched Pub Games.

If anyone has any other ideas of how things could go wrong, let me know (post a comment). I might be overlooking something, but the more and more people ask about it, the more thought I’ve put in to it, and I am certain that MS and LH won’t know you cheated.

Setsuna pointed out that the chest I found earlier is actually where you go to redeem the prizes you get from the Fable II: A Hero’s Tale website. I checked it out this morning and was able to redeem all the prizes by playing the mini-story again and choosing different paths. However, the prizes don’t seem to appear in the game instantly. I had to reboot the 360 before they would appear. It may be that you only have to restart the game. You also have to be logged into XBox.com for it to send you the items. Otherwise the website returns a “Page Cannot Be Found” error.

Thanks Setsuna.