Recent games by Peter Molyneux are like those blind dates, you know the ones, the ones were your pander-playing-friend is all: "Kyra, I've found the perfect girl for you, you've got to meet her, you'll absolutely love her. She's beautiful, brilliant, witty, kinky, she's just your type. She looks like a pre-Raphaelite, dresses like Marlene Dietrich, and talks like the Earl of Rochester." And, naturally, you get all fired up with enthusiasm and charge along, heart in hand, to meet the paragon. And, inevitably, well, it's not like she's a troglodyte or anything but the problem is she's simply not what was promised. So you go away frustrated and disappointed and feeling faintly cheated (as, for that matter, does she).

Fable, like Black and White and pretty much every other game Molyneux has thrown at us over the last few years, came bundled with big promises and, although I'm sure the game itself was probably quite fun (the one person I've met who did confess to enjoying it assumed it was parody) on its own terms, because it was meant to be this deep immersing look at, like, morality and consequences, man, in technical parlance, it blew a goat. Morality cannot be tracked on a numerical sliding scale: if you murder an entire village, eating enough tofu afterwards should not somehow make up for it. I squandered a few hours of play time on it; Dan did better but lost patience completely at the point when he realised that, having just gone to immense trouble to escort two AI-deficient merchants through bandit-infested woods, he could take the reward and the goodness boost, then butcher them horribly and nobody would bat an eyelid. Although he later admitted he found this quite satisfying.

Consequences, man, it's all about the consequences.

Riiight.

Fable II also came at us riding the hype-superhighway but I've learned my lesson: I didn't believe it any of the publicity. Truthfully, I'm still not entirely sure why I bought the game. But, I did, and I went in there expecting, not a comprehensive exploration of moral decisions and all the other shit Molyneux promised this time round, but a jolly sandboxish romp, lavishly executed and served up with a slightly cringe-inducing spatter of puerility.

And, you know something, that's what I got. Fable II met my devastatingly low expectations with a fair degree of flair. It was genuinely quite fun to play. The jaded universe of computer game reviews tells me that the game doesn't look as good as it should but I'm still new enough to my Xbox 360 that I'm pretty wowed by it: the water ripples, there are shadows, reflections and the grass blows in the breeze (all the things I start any PC game by turning off). The story is noticeably better written, better thought through and less cliched than the by-numbers effort of Fable I, and the world has a recognisable atmosphere so that you feel you are "somewhere" rather than merely the denizen of yet another Generic Fantasylandia. There's a tongue-in-cheek, steampunky / dark fairytale vibe that works really nicely - I was especially happy to have access to flintlock pistols, top boots and tricorne hats, and I'm glad to report that the Hero's Guild from the last room - the most ludicrously generic plot point conceivable - has collapsed. Yay.

Of course, Molyneux still hasn't exactly learned anything from Fable I. Fable II is more of the same with more, better-looking bells and whistles. But the morality system, on which the game supposedly hinges, is still made of stupid. In an effort to simulate the complexity of the human spirit, Molyneux has introduced a second axis to intersect with good and evil: law and chaos corruption and purity. I've spoken about moral dimensions in games before so I don't want to get into it all over again here but, given Molyneux's fondness for Saying Things, I managed to unearth the following interview quote from the bowels of the internet (where, probably, it should have remained):

"In conceptual terms good and evil is a very clear, well-defined and well-understood thing which is great when you're designing a game. If you're good, it's all about sacrifice and care. And if you're evil, it's all about being selfish and uncaring.

The way it turns out is, rather than just going for the polarity of killing things is evil and saving things is good, we've mixed that up. That's why we've introduced a few other scales, purity and corruption being one of them.

Cruelty and kindness is a really interesting one. Now you would naturally say, "Kindness, that's good. Cruelty is evil." Well actually if you've got a child ... to my son, when I say to him, "You can't have a chocolate bar two minutes before you go to bed," he looks at me and says, "Daddy, you're so cruel." Well I'm actually being kind. That's what's really interesting."

I don't even know where to begin with this, it's so entirely brimming over with wrong. But let's start with the obvious: our whole judicial system is based upon the notion that good and evil are neither well-defined nor well understood, to say nothing of the enduring popularity of, well, religion. The reason that Fable's morality system will never be more than superficial at best and fucking insulting at worst is that it springs from this, you'd think, pretty obvious fallacy: the circumstances in which one human being can point at the actions of another human being and, with absolute conviction, say "that is an evil act" or "that is a good act" are pretty damn rare. I mean, yes, arbitrarily killing people, or raping sheep, probably puts you on the Red Team but, outside of computer games, warfare and severe psychosis individuals tend not to engage in either act. The fact that you probably think I'm on shaky rhetorical ground right this second, only goes to show that the concepts "good" and "evil" and the meanings behind them and attached to them are impossibly complex. Yeah, that was a cheap shot, wasn't it?

But that's what Fable does: it rates everything you do, and regardless of whether you want to call the action good, evil, pure or corrupt, Harold or George, because the game has pre-programmed absolute moral standards (whose moral standards, though? Eh? Eh? That's a question nobody can answer because Molyneux believes good and evil are simple concepts) there is actually no space for moral complexity: there is only kill the merchants (+10 evil), save the merchants (+10 good), eat the steak and onion pie (+10 corruption), eat the mushroom stuffed tofu (+10 purity). Furthermore, everything is presented as an absurd accounting sheet: thus by denying his child chocolate every night for a year, Molyneux could accrue sufficient kindness points to allow him to torture a peasant to death for shits and giggles and still break even.

For the last fucking time: this is fucking stupid.

(actually, wait, no, I'm not done picking - the chocolate/child issue is not at all interesting. It's not about the ambiguous nature of cruelty and kindness, it's about the fact that different people see things differently and that, as a parent, you get to make decisions on behalf on your child because children are not sufficiently intellectually and socially developed to make them for themselves.)

But, just to get this runaway juggernaut back on the road again, at least this time round, with Fable II, I knew what I was in for and had prepared myself accordingly. If you stop and think about it for about 0.1 of a second, the whole of Fable II comes tumbling down around in a big pile of just plain dumb, but if you can stop your common sense and go "la la la la" it's actually quite a lot of fun. The game is big and bright, and there is sufficient depth to its shallowness to make wandering from town to town, annoying, seducing or ignoring townfolk as the whim takes you, buying properties, decorating houses, taking random jobs that ought to be way beneath you, engaging in petty acts of crime and malice, and doing the occasional casually good deed (gosh, it's sounding like my life, except for the property magnate bit) genuinely engaging. Although what you do doesn't actually make that much difference, bar people going "boo you suck" or "yay, you're great" (and, occasionally, for no apparent reason "I don't like your gloves") there's enough customization to keep you playing happily.

Oh, and you also get a much-hyped dog: he dog will patter along at your side during your adventures, unearth treasure (that you could have found yourself anyway) help you in combat (which you can do by yourself anyway) and generally not live up to the hype. Except ... except ... you'll get attached to him. You just will. When he isn't at your side, you'll look for him. When he does something cute, you'll delight. When you spot some treasure, you'll pretend not to see it so your dog can come dashing up, tail wagging, to tell you he's been useful. When you're in the middle of a goblin-infested cave, hanging by a thin thread to life with an urgent rescue mission to complete, you'll find yourself playing fetch with your damn dog.

It's faintly embarrassing how much you'll love the dog. But you will.

After a couple of hours of play time, I'd done about 5 minutes of the main quest but I'd also bought several stores in Bowerstone, really cemented my relationship with my dog and bought him a hideously flash collar to prove it, learned a few dodgy seduction tricks to try on both the ladies and the gentlemen, made about 80% of the population of the Bowerstone fall hopelessly in love with me, toiled away at a lousy blacksmithing job in order to be able to afford the most expensive clothes on the market, dyed my frockcoat sunshine yellow and my hair bright red, acquired a long plaited beard so my lovers would have something to hang onto, explored with Dog pretty much the entire surrounding countryside, and generally piffled, dithered and time-wasted myself into feeling I was genuinely part of the world. Nothing I did mattered, but it mattered to me. And being followed around by an adoring crowd of both sexes with little red hearts floating above their heads, all of them chorusing interminably about how great I was... well ... I was enjoying that. A lot.

I'd been playing self-consciously opportunitistically. I'd do the right thing if it didn't take me out of my way to do it, but I wasn't above stooping to crime if I thought I could away with it (I did murder a shop keeper down a back alley in order to be able to buy his shop more cheaply). But equally I wasn't doing anything to signal my inherent evilness to the world: my prices were reasonable, my social interactions were courteous, and I was a terminal tofu-eater, so my purity rating was high. Yep, I was a bastard with the face of an angel and the clothes of a fop and proud of it.

Unfortunately at this point everything went horribly wrong, both in game and out.

The main plot took me to the Pointless Village of Oakfield, where my cosmopolitan ways were unappreciated by the populace. Specifically, I encountered Tom the Monk on a bench outside the local hostelry. I don't know what it was, something about his demure posture, the way the honeyed evening light fell upon his cowl, but my heart, thus far unmoved, was struck. I decided Tom the Monk ("serious, gentle, celibate, loving" - how was I know he was serious about the celibate?) was the man for me. Thus followed a pleasant few minutes of chit chat, flirting, gift-giving and so on and so forth. I danced for the Tom the Monk and he was delighted. I played my lute. I danced again - my dancing is very much loved across the face of Albion. And, then: time to pop the big question. "Fancy coming back to my place?" I asked, waggling my eyebrows suggestively, unaware that my antics had drawn a huge crowd behind my back.

Tom the Monk was ...

... well.

I still bear the emotional scars of his rather adamant rejection.

And thus I became the most hated man in Oakfield in about 10 seconds flat.

Time to get out of town. Except on my journey to pissing Oakfield, the bandits had taken out the bridge that would allow me back to Bowerstone, which understood me and my needs, so the only way on was forward. Reluctantly, then, Dog and set off on the next part of the main quest, which involved talking to the Abbot at the Temple Light. I can only presume Tom the Monk had been bad-mouthing me because I was not exactly welcomed by the community when I finally arrived. As I approached the Quest Giver, I heard him start mumbling something about his daughter and I had just enough time to think to myself "gosh, that's Stephen Fry" before ... I don't know quite what happened ... but my attention flickered and I just sort of ... wandered off.

That's thing about games like Fable - they do that to even the most focused gamer. The sandboxyness means there's no urgency to anything, the richness of the world means there's always something shiny happening just out of the corner of your eye and, years of playing RPGS, have honed my reflexes to the point where I automatically recoil like a double-barreled shotgun from any quest that seems even remotely relevant to the main plot. You can always come back to it. That's the way RPGs work, dammit.

Except in Fable you can't.

There's a glitch you see.

If you walk out on Stephen Fry, that's it, curtains for you, adventurer. Unless you see the cutscene through to the end the first time, it simply won't fire again. Leaving me stranded in a pissant town that hates me, with no way to progress, and no way to go back.

Furthermore, the game only allows you one save game (why????) so I can't even restore my game to an earlier point in my adventure.

Thank you for that, Peter Molyneux. Thank you.

(I would like to emphasise that I am saying "thank you" in the "fuck you" voice).

I do understand ... huge game yadda yadda ... pressing deadlines yadda yadda but Microsoft has been throwing money at Fable for years now. And surely "player has attention span of psychotic gnat and walks away from cutscene" is a common game design issue. Surely at some point in developing or testing, somebody else +walked away from Stephen Fry.

Or, you know, maybe not.

Maybe they were sitting around a table and the developers said: "You know, we could have a failsafe here, in case the player does something untoward but generally commonplace" and then they thought: "Well, we could, but let's just use Stephen Fry instead."

And, it's true, it was a moment of madness on my part. I can imagine no other circumstances in which I would have been anything other than transfixed with ecstasy at the dulcet, plumy tones of Stephen Fry coming at me from my Xbox 360.

But for fuck's sake, this kind of glitch is unforgiveable. There can be no excuse at all. None.

I think we can safely say that I have learned some valuable moral lessons from Fable II.

Always listen to Stephen Fry and never buy another game from Peter Molyneux.