240: Wizards and Weight Watchers

[bjj hero]

Yes, the game does in fact punish you for taking the easy healing items, depressingly enough. It also gives you corruption points for jacking up rent and sleeping too much (so as to get more rent.) Basically, it punishes you for taking the quick and easy method implying that the good and pure approach is the hard approach (also indirectly posing the question of how hard the player is prepared to work.) I'm sure you can sympathise with this; since you didn't use steroids to obtain your physique you had to work all the harder for it. Keeping this in mind, it's really not too hard to work the sliders at all.

I found it odd that sleeping in was seen as bad but leaving the game off for a few days then loading your charecter and hearing the cash register ring earning thousands was fine. There was never any need to fleece your tenants as if you left your game for a day you'd be loaded when you came back.

Oh, and I was never pushing the realism of Eastenders, just mentioning how rough the cast look. About all I watch on TV is MMA, Heroes, the news and Newsnight. Unfortunately my partner loves the soaps, makes for a good excuse to browse the internet.

Gotta get my Paxman fix somewhere.

 

[TheDoctor455]

Huh... funny... none of my Fable: Lost Chapters characters got fat... though they did all end up looking the same (accounting for the bullshit alignment give-aways). I guess its because I rarely, if ever had my characters eat or drink anything other than health and mana potions... which come to think of it... makes seem a bit strange that if Fable was supposed to be a "life simulator"... then how the hell did my characters survive... huh...

 

[starlight2098]

I found it odd that sleeping in was seen as bad but leaving the game off for a few days then loading your charecter and hearing the cash register ring earning thousands was fine. There was never any need to fleece your tenants as if you left your game for a day you'd be loaded when you came back.

Oh, and I was never pushing the realism of Eastenders, just mentioning how rough the cast look. About all I watch on TV is MMA, Heroes, the news and Newsnight. Unfortunately my partner loves the soaps, makes for a good excuse to browse the internet.

Gotta get my Paxman fix somewhere.

Ah, but then, leaving the game off for a few days is SLOoooWW whereas hitting the 'sleep for 7 days' is very fast. Naturally, the impatient are impure. Like a badly poured Guinness... or something.

Soaps as an excuse to get some internet time in? Never considered that angle before. It's a good one.

 

[kawaiiamethist]

You think you're in pain, try doing it in real life ^^0 I've been on weight watchers for 3 months now have only lost 7kg. I'm down to 80.8 and need to be 63. The healthy eating part is easy, it's killing myself at the gym that's wearing me down - takes away from game and art stuff >.>

 

[Skarlette]

Susan, you say to the world all the little things that go through my head as I play games, and damn if I don't feel much better for thinking them!

 

[NoTroll]

Fat people can't be heroic. Ever.

 

[plugav]

I didn't play Fable 2 (I've since forgiven Lionhead for not porting it to the PC), so the main thought this article sparked was: what if someone went a step further and included the issue of body image in the game itself?

What if I played an obese wizard who was as competent as any fantasy hero, but got frequently taunted about his weight? Or if one of my character's companions had problems not with demons and curses, but with an eating disorder? (And for some reason, I thought about Dragon Age 2's Merrill, her low self-esteem, thinness and an obsession with mirrors.)

Then I also remembered Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher books, and Triss Merigold, who had her looks restored with magic after receiving disfiguring wounds in a great battle, but swore she would never wear a revealing v-neck again. A small but significant character detail. Yeah, that sure made it into the game [http://gfx.gaminator.tv/data/screen/969/36/872-2.jpg], didn't it?

 

[poleboy]

Hey, it's just realism. You can't swing a two-handed sword around (with any efficiency) if you have the body of a super model, that's just physics. You need to have upper body strength, and to carry that you need lower body strength too. A warrior should be beefy, if not fat, even if it's a woman. And to get beefy, you need pie.

 

[Rik Adder]

I rarely post to threads (love reading them though!) at all, but felt compelled to say that the folks who designed and implemented the purity/corruption, etc., systems involving food were operating in a very tongue in cheek manner - Trust me when I say that no actual preachiness was intended; far from it! Just having a good time playing with the various standards of our time... All in fun and can confirm that meat eaters and vegetarians and vegans were also represented - Irreverence is really the common theme here - Honestly!

 

[Rik Adder]

...Great article, by the way...