As thoughtprocess has pointed out, Fable II is releasing very soon, about 9 days from now and we here at Plastiksickness are extremely excited about this game for a multitude of reasons that he pointed out previously, but there's also another title releasing on the same day that we haven't talked about too much yet and that's Far Cry 2. 

Being developed by Ubisoft, Far Cry 2 seems to be the underhyped game of the year.  Not receiving the most attention compared to some games such as Gears of War 2, Fable II, and Fallout 3, Far Cry 2 has a lot to prove, and from videos and interviews we've seen so far, it might do just that.  I don't know how many of you have been following this title, but here's a little info.  It's 50 square kilometers and is considered a completely open sand-box style first person shooter.  You're in Africa on the hunt for a man called The Jackal who is creating chaos by selling weapons to both sides of civil war watching them kill each other.  So, during the game, you must make companions found throughout the field and gain information to find The Jackal and take him down.

What Far Cry 2 does differently from what we've seen in the past is that the game is open ended; no more linear levels where there's a start and a finish.  Plus, from the start, you get to choose who you want to be between a selection of 9 different characters.  Although there won't be huge differences between the characters, the people you don't choose will turn up during the game and help you out when you need it or give you different missions to progress the story.  And these NPCs will be helping you on some of the missions and if they die, they're out of the game for good, but if they live, they be with you helping along the way even more with different missions and objectives you're given.  The game will constantly compute who is alive and who has died.  If this works out how they say it will, it will be groundbreaking for the genre and force developers in the future to create more in-depth and detailed games.  Ubisoft is truly pushing the genre into a direction that it needs to compete with the other genres out there.

The idea of having different animations for 'healing' your character is extremely creative, so instead of getting hurt and just running over a health pack to revive your character's hit points, you go through these different animations such as taking a bullet out of your arm with your machete, flipping your arm back into socket from the elbow and also doing the same with your legs if you jumped off to high a perch.  These little detailed distinctions from other games of the same genre really put Far Cry 2 in a class of its own, if the developers can pull it off. 

If you'd like to check out some videos for Far Cry 2, check out these links...