The sex lives of medieval knights

Six days away from my cozy family farm, knee-deep in monster guts, a little icon pops up on my screen.

My husband, Ted the Pie Trader, has sent me, his wayward hero-of-all-Albion wife, a message. Putting away my long sword, I pause to read it. Was something wrong with the farm? Was the town being pillaged by bandits? No. The message read: Husband wants sex.

Welcome to the new, more realistic Albion. Taking place 600-some years after the events of the first Fable installment, Fable II is set in a world that seems to be at the dawn of a steam-punk era.

Goggles, striped pants and clockwork pistols are all the rage. Women and men alike prance about in enormous hats and brass-buckle shoes. Dashing pirates in well-embroidered coats terrorize the coasts. It would seem 600 years has given time to make Albion a sexier place.

But fashions and weapons tech are not the only things that have changed.

The second installment of the series finally allows for players to choose the gender of their character, an obvious feature that was entirely absent from Fable and the follow-up expansion, Fable: The Lost Chapters.

Additionally, strapping young heroes of both genders get a faithful companion to accompany them on their journey: A dog that can be either the cutest, friendliest thing in the world, or the most menacing of hellhounds, complete with glowing red eyes, depending on the hero’s alignment.

The game begins, as in the first Fable, with your character as a child. You are an orphan, and a poor and dirty one at that, in the care of your adolescent older sister Rose.

Although your time spent in childhood is meant primarily as a tutorial on game mechanics and a quick primer on the world you inhabit, moral decisions you make as a filthy street urchin will impact the world in surprising ways as you grow up.

This is an especially nice improvement from the first Fable, when it seemed game developers were exploring the potential behind morality decisions. In the first game, you could terrorize peasants and smash windows all you liked, but at the end of the day, the rest of the world went about its business unfazed.

Fable II, on the other hand, doesn’t let you off so easily. Some decisions will come back to haunt you.

Controls are more or less what any veteran of the first Fable will be familiar with, with a few slight changes. For one, players can no longer select favorite social expressions for the D-pad menu. Instead, the right button will always perform a random positive expression, and the left side will perform a random negative expression.

Food and potion items will also appear in random order from time to time in the D-pad select slots, depending on how many hits the hero has taken, and how much life juice they need back.

On the subject of food and potions, in-game food also received a healthy dose of realism. Fresh produce and other vegetarian items such as tofu will give your hero points towards purity, while eating meat items will add corruption points. Unlike vegans in real life, however, your character does not affect a smug and morally superior attitude to the rest of the world’s inhabitants.

Additionally, meat, pies, beers and cheese will all pack pounds on to your noble frame, in a “realistic” take on food that completely discounts metabolism and is sure to traumatize an entire generation of gamers into obsessive anorexia. If your character gains too much weight, not only will you puff up quite a bit, but townspeople will hold nothing back in their opinion of your physique.

At one point in the game, I was ambushed with only one potion and an assortment of food in my inventory by a small army of bandits. From the look of my poor hero after the battle, it would have been fair to surmise she had taken to eating the bandits as she killed them.

Pandering to the instant-gratification crowd, Fable II features a variety of potions, not only for calorie-free healing, but time-free leveling up as well. Players who rack up a modest amount of gold in the game can take their cash to the nearest potion trader and buy potions for experience points (some potions give well over 10,000 points a pop), no nasty fighting necessary.

With the disappointingly short length of the first game, I had been hoping developers would take the opportunity to make Fable II a lengthier, more complex and engaging game.

Unfortunately, Fable II follows in its predecessor’s footsteps a little too much, and for such an anticipated RPG sequel it turned out more as a simple, straightforward bedtime story, rather than an epic adventure.

If you enjoy spending $60 to play “dress-up” and “house” in a beautifully rendered world, Fable II is your game. Otherwise, spend your money on one of the many newly released titles that are actually worth the next-gen sticker price and save Fable II for a rainy-weekend rental from Blockbuster.

Fable IIMicrosoftX-box 360: $59.99****