Happy Halloween week everybody! Hope you got your Mario/Luigi costumes all ready and waiting. Despite this being Halloween week, the games just keeps on coming. What have we got this week? We’ve got Star Wars wish fulfillment game number 4,296, rock star wish fulfillment game number 8, life wish fulfillment game number 3, and finally a coup d’état wish fulfillment game number who-knows-how-many-by-now.

Remember. Release dates are quite literally made at the whims of the publisher.  The following are subject to change without any warning.

Releases To Watch For This Week

Fable III (Xbox 360)

Tuesday October 26, 2010

The Fable series has never been content on following the traditional route of an RPG, you can thank Lionhead’s visionary, Peter Molyneux for that. Fable III continues this tradition of non-traditionalism. First of all, calling it an RPG is in itself a bit of a stretch. It does away with so much of the numbers and menus that makes up of most RPGs out there. Fable III aims for a more organic approach to character building. Instead of finding new and more powerful weapons, weapons level up the more you use them and physically change as it levels. The strangest feature in Fable III is probably the Road to Rule feature. It basically shows your progression through the story, but instead of a timeline or anything mundane like that, it’s a literal road with gates representing key story points. You visit this road whenever you completed a key story point to open these gates with people cheering on the sidelines. This road isn’t just a bunch of gates though. It’s littered with treasures and whatnot which can be opened by trading in these crest, which you earn by doing missions and stuff. Those people on the sidelines aren’t just some random NPCs. They represent the people you’ve befriended who will ultimately follow you into the upcoming rebellion against the king of Albion.

Fable III story is separated into 2 parts. The rebellion part and the ruling part. At first you’re recruiting an army of peasants to overthrow the king, who by the way is your brother. Once you do that, you’re crowned as king, or queen, of Albion, and here the game kinda turns into a politician sim. In order to get people to follow you, you had to make certain promises. As king, you have to figure out how to actually make good on your promises. Unfortunately, very little is known as to what actually changes once you are king/queen. Do you still go around and beat up monsters by yourself, or are you stuck in your throne room making decisions and sending out soldiers to do your bidding? Or is it somewhere in the middle? Fable II has proven itself to be pretty popular, and given the amount of changes and improvements to this iteration, including a much more improved co-op mode where you get to play as yourself when you join someone’s game, I’m sure most will take the plunge without really knowing what the second half of the game really entails.

Rock Band 3 (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, DS)

Tuesday October 26, 2010
Perhaps this was inevitable. It probably really was only a matter of time before your fake plastic instruments is replaced by real ones to play these kinds of games. Rock Band 3 will be the first to truly incorporate a real guitar into a music game thanks to Pro Mode. This new mode is undoubtedly the closest thing to actually playing the song. Each instrument, except maybe vocals, has a pro mode where if you can pass it, you can play it in real life. At least that’s Harmonix’s aim anyways. In Pro Mode guitar, you have to use 1 of the 2 available guitars. One has 6 strings where the strum bar normally is, while the neck consists of over a hundred buttons, one for each fret button and string. The other guitar is a full on, plug into an amp, real electric guitar with a special neck that can sense where you’re putting your fingers. The note highway doesn’t show colored bars. It shows the actual notes that you have to play. Being a complete guitar ignoramus that I am, I have no idea what any of it meant.

Huey Lewis and the News

If Pro Mode isn’t enough of a change, the addition of the keyboard opens up the tracklist for new songs that just wouldn’t have made much sense in previous Rock Bands. Songs like “The Power of Love” or “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” would’ve been weird without having a keyboard, but now that we have it, these songs fit right in.

Guitar Hero has done a lot right in terms of features like drop-in, drop-out at any time, changing difficulties in the middle of a setlist, and even having any combinations of instruments for any song. Rock Band 3 will have all of that and even improves on it a little bit, changing difficulty doesn’t restart the song. Along with the ability to import everything from previous Rock Bands, although I have a feeling the 3 excluded songs from the first Rock Band is still unimportable, your Rock Band 2 discs, after import, is about to turn into a coaster.

As for the DS version, it’s basically like the Rock Band Unplugged for the PSP where you play as all the instruments and has to switch between them. Not bad, but given the improvements on the console versions, why would anyone bother with this one?

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, DS)

Tuesday October 26, 2010 (PS3 version comes out on Thursday October 28, 2010)

Jedi’s are awesome. Their swords are made of a laser beam. They can move stuff with their minds. They can make you look for other droids. The list goes on, and it was just plain old sad that Lucasarts thoroughly screwed up Star Wars: The Force Unleashed with shoddy controls and unpolished overall quality. Thank god for sequels. The first Force Unleashed ends in one of two ways, and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II follows what happened in the light ending. Starkiller is back. Sort of. He’s actually a clone of Starkiller that Darth Vader created hoping to create the ultimate Sith Warrior. Unfortunately for Vader, this clone has Starkiller’s memories as well. The best news anyone can hear about this sequel is that they fixed up the controls. If the demo is anything to go by, the controls have definitely been tightened, and most of the glitches and bugs from the first one is nowhere to be found. It also looks even better than the first. Ability-wise, Starkiller has all of his old abilities and then some. One new ability is the lovely Jedi mind trick, which can turn an enemy against their ally or have them jump off the nearest cliff. They’ve also added the Force Fury. When activated, Starkiller’s force powers are set to their maximum levels for a short period of time. The Force Unleashed had a pretty decent story, but the overall experience kept it back from being even decent. Here’s to hoping The Force Unleashed II will be much better than its predecessor.

The Sims 3 (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii)

Tuesday October 26, 2010 (PS3 version comes out on Thursday October 28, 2010)

I don’t understand The Sims. As in I simply don’t understand the appeal of playing out a life of a virtual character in normal everyday setting instead of a futuristic, intergalactic war that will decide the fate of the galaxy setting. Whatever. The Sims 3 is finally coming to the console, and it’s coming with some new features. Challenges are an additional set of mini-quest for your Sims to complete. When completed they net you Challenge Points -- which can be used to buy stuff from the challenge store like clothes, props for your town, and Karmic abilities. Karma is also a new feature wherein you get to either mess around with your Sims or give them an extra helping hand. One of the evil powers of Karma includes the Firestorm. Now you don’t have to wait until your Sims mess up in the kitchen to watch a fire happen. Just let it rain down from the sky. There’s also the Earthquake, Poltergeist, and Epic Fail, wherein a Sim gets extra clumsy and causes all sorts of havoc, among others. The other end of the spectrum includes miracles like Miracle Fix (Everything is instantly fixed), Giant Jackpot (Money suddenly swirls around your Sim), and Divine Intervention (Bring back a Sim as a ghost). It’s a little hard for me to tell if any of this really makes this Sims the best Sims game ever, but it sounds cool to me.