This week, National Geographic announced it would publish its first-ever video game: Africa. Sony released this photography game in Japan on the PS3 but thought Western gamers would have a distaste for its pacifism. Going on safari, looking at semi-realistic African wildlife, and not hunting it all to extinction with a rifle? A-hyuck.

Having been to Uganda, I have watched this title for some time, and I'm glad NG is taking the risk of bringing it Stateside. In many respects, Africa appears to get the experience right—the slowness, the waiting, the appreciation as time lapses and you realize the world around you doesn't need an animal sighting to be rich. (The above trailer doesn't reflect that, trying to make the game look tense. It's not, thankfully.) But while Sony has tried to tout the PS3 as the ultimate 3D machine, this game only goes so far. The environments and animals look fantastic on first impression, but once you try living in it, the vegetation looks digital, and the animals interact in a robotic way. But the hyper-realistic photojournalism genre needs to happen—call it lamer than the real thing, but it's more interesting as a game than another friggin' shooter—and I can only hope this game's release next year lays some groundwork.

In other news, Seattle's Penny Arcade turned 10 this week. Congrats. Since I'm cheap, here's your birthday gift: Your second video game is a little better than your first (reminder: I really liked the first), and I look forward to the time when I can actually sit down and play it.

Of course, same goes for Fallout 3 and Fable II, two titles that I haven't sat with much since their release. Wuz the holdup? My reviews (yes, I finally did 'em, get off my back) are after the jump.

Fable II (Xbox 360) lost me early on. It tries to be a lot of games—a Zelda action-quest, with swords and arrows and magic; a life sim, with friendships and karma and marriage (Fable 2 voted no on Prop 8); a money management sim where you acquire property, steal, and/or work odd jobs. You can kinda do what you want, and for people who aren't typical gamers and like dicking around with houses and wives and whatever, that's there for you to do, but it's not very engaging. If you want to be a "good guy," interacting with other people is done via expressions (wave, pose, fart, give thumbs-up gestures) and gifts. For a little kid, this may come off like a deep version of Zelda, but the game's rated M, so there goes that. For a person with an actual social life, it's hokey and gets old mighty quickly; there's little of the virtual give-and-take that The Sims is obsessed with, so it feels tacked on to the action-quest stuff rather than a core mechanic worth messing with.

Or you can roll as the bad guy. That playstyle matches better with Fable II's hokey nature—kill civilians, steal their knickknacks, and bang loose men/women (though you'll get debilitating STDs if you don't wrap it up).

The main game, an action quest, is a straight-line affair that you've played before. Looks nice, controls well, has some hidden treasures, lots of killing and magic, not many puzzles. This is where the extra stuff should hook us as players, but even being evil becomes one-dimensional after a while, and the lack of a solid story that keeps anyone's attention is a death knell for a game so obsessed with virtue and karma.

Worth noting: you get a dog as a quest pet, but that's as cute as you want it to be. I know people who repeatedly pet and feed their virtual dog because they love dogs, not because the game requires it. It's a tangential gimmick, but for some people, it's an incredible one—certainly better implemented than the pets in the world's largest game—and that's more than fair.

Fallout 3 (PC, PS3, Xbox 360) - I lump this in with Fable because they're both obsessed with karma. In that comparison alone, Fallout 3 wins handily... on the surface. It's not perfect—you can be a jerk and steal/pickpocket/hack people's things all the time and still be called "good." But those are petty decisions. More pronounced choices—piss someone off in conversation, give a criminal over to the police, do work for a mysterious benefactor—change the gameworld dramatically, and often surprisingly, enough so that you've changed your entire play experience from that point on.

It's an overwhelming design decision. In Fallout 3, you're in an open, post-nuclear world with a simple goal—find your dad. But this goal turns pretty epic thanks to large numbers of quests, conversations, choices, and varied environments. And the game's not just huge; it's playable and compelling. The story truly works, complete with serious voice-acting, a smart crew of writers, and proper presentation to keep the plot essential to the experience, not distracting or annoying. And you have full-fledged gameplay choices; you can play as a sneaky guy, a combat guy, or a conversational charmer (or a mix), and each style is discrete.

But because of this, Fallout 3 forces an immense amount of OCD onto gamers. An example: You approach a guard at a gate that you'd like to enter. You save your game, then ask him if you can get in. He gives you a few options, and you ask yourself—do I bribe him, try to charm him, kill him, or sneak around him? And you try all of these out, loading the old save file after a likely screwup. Then you get into where he was guarding and realize you could've tried another way, so you load the old file again. Or you kill him with a silenced pistol, get into the stronghold a long distance away through the gate, and suddenly find a bunch of people trying to kill you—how could they possibly know you were the murderer? The AI will short-circuit like this often enough to make your "real decisions" feel less than authentic, forcing yet another reload.

Fable II may have felt more linear and non-controllable, but it never got tiresome as a result. When a game gives you every option in the world, "value" and "worth" for a huge game become meaningless if the options take you out of the game in a save-load-save-load way. Your mileage may vary; for me, the way Fallout 3 punishes failure, I spent too much time watching load screens and trying, trying again.

As a huge sandbox, Grand Theft Auto IV proves better as a basic game. But as a huge quest, Fallout 3 has more content worth investing in beyond the mere stimulus-response of running around and fighting, which just about makes the OCD stuff worth slogging through. If only the two games met halfway.