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One of the inherited doctrines of mankind is that the Quran is quoted or borrowed from the Bible. The Bible says that the Hoopoe is detested and unclean and forbid eating the Hoopoe.
The Quran says that the Hoopoe is intelligent, smart, knows and worships his Creator, and communicated with King Solomon.
Leviticus 11
Unclean and Detested bird:
13 “These are the birds you are to detest and not eat because they are detestable: the eagle, the vulture, the black vulture, 14 the red kite, any kind of black kite, 15 any kind of raven, 16 the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk, 17 the little owl, the cormorant, the great owl, 18 the white owl, the desert owl, the osprey, 19 the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe and the bat.
Deuteronomy 14
Unclean Food:
11 You may eat any clean bird. 12 But these you may not eat: the eagle, the vulture, the black vulture, 13 the red kite, the black kite, any kind of falcon, 14 any kind of raven, 15 the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk, 16 the little owl, the great owl, the white owl, 17 the desert owl, the osprey, the cormorant, 18 the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe and the bat.
In the Bible dictionary it is said: “Although the hoopoe bird is only referred to once in the Bible, it is known to be a faithful companion of people all over the world”.
However, the dictionary does not tell that the hoopoe is detested according to Leviticus 11 and also, there is no verse in the Bible which says that is a faithful companion of people all over the world. I bet that the writers of the Bible dictionary have read the Noble Quran and put such an observation about the hoopoe as a faithful companion of people all over the world.
The story of the hoopoe with King Solomon illustrates how faithful, smart was the hoopoe.
Hoopoe in the Quran:
The Hoopoe is mentioned once in the Noble Quran, in Surah 27.
Prophet Solomon was a king whose armies consisted of troops made of men and Jinns and birds. It is possible that the birds were employed for communicating the messages, hunting and for other suitable services.
Detective and Messenger of Prophets
[20] And he took a muster of the Birds; and he said: “Why is it I see not the Hoopoe? Or is he among the absentees?
[21] “I will certainly punish him with a severe penalty, or execute him, unless he brings me a clear reason (for absence).”
[22] But he (the hoopoe) tarried not far: he (came up and) said: “I have compassed (territory) which thou hast not compassed, and I have come to thee from Saba with tidings true.
[23] “I found (there) a woman ruling over them and provided with every requisite; and she has a magnificent throne.
[24] “I found her and her people worshipping the sun besides Allah: Satan has made their deeds seem pleasing to their eyes, and has kept them away from the Path, so they receive no guidance,
[25] “(Kept them away from the Path) that they should not worship Allah, Who brings to light what is hidden in the heavens and the earth, and knows what ye hide and what ye reveal.
[26] “Allah! – there is no god but He! – Lord of the Throne supreme!”
[27] (Solomon) said: “Soon shall we see whether thou hast told the truth or lied!
28] “Go thou, with this letter of mine, and deliver it to them: then draw back from them, and (wait to) see what answer they return”…
[29] (The Queen) said: “Ye chiefs! here is – delivered to me – a letter worthy of respect.
[30] “It is from Solomon, and is (as follows): ‘In the name of Allah, Most Gracious Most Merciful:
[31] “`Be ye not arrogant against me, but come to me in submission (to the true Religion).”
The story of how Solomon and the Queen of Saba (Yemen) met: One day Solomon inspected his birds but did not find the Hoopoe. When the bird came back he said, “With truthful news I come to you from Saba, where I found a woman reigning over people and they worship the sun instead of Allah.
Solomon ordered the Hoopoe to return to her and give her a message calling her not to exalt herself above him (Solomon), but come to him in all submission. The Hoopoe did his job perfectly.
In the Qur’an (27:20) we read that Prophet Solomon reviewed his birds and found Hoopoe missing. His most movable arm was the birds, which were light on the wing and flew and saw everything like talented scouts. Prophet Solomon conveys his anger and his yearning to punish Hoopoe severely if he does not present himself before Prophet Solomon with a realistic explanation. Within a short time, the Hoopoe came back and said, “I have got knowledge of things which you have no idea about. I have brought sure information about Saba (Yemen now). There, I have seen a woman ruling over her people: she has been given all sorts of provisions, and she has a wonderful throne. I saw that she and her people prostrate themselves before the sun and worshiped the sun, instead of Allah.!”
Prophet Solomon said, “We shall just now see whether what you say is true, or that you are a liar. Take this letter of mine and cast it before them; then get aside and see what reaction they show.” Qur’an, 27: 27-28.
Here, ends the role of Hoopoe in the story.
In this story, the Noble Quran gives the Hoopoe some characters that need intense research to be elucidated by the scientists. The Hoopoe had the powers of observation, discrimination and expression that it should pass over a country and should come to know that it is the land of Saba, it has such and such a scheme of government, it is ruled by a certain woman, its faith is sun-worship, that it should have worshipped One Lord, Allah instead of having gone off track, and then on its return to Prophet Solomon it should so clearly make a report of all its observations before him.
In spite of great advances in science and technology, man cannot tell with absolute certainty what powers and abilities the different species of animals and their different individuals have got? Man has not so far been able to know through any certain means what different animals know and what they see and hear, and what they feel and think and understand, and know how the mind of each one of them works. Yet, whatever little observation has been made of the life of the different species of animals, it has revealed some of their wonderful abilities. Now, when Allah, Who is the Creator of these animals, tells us that He had taught the speech of the birds to one of His Prophets and blessed him with the ability to speak to them, and the Prophet’s taming and training had so enabled a Hoopoe that it could make certain observations in the foreign lands and could report them to the Prophet, then we should be prepared to revise our little knowledge about the animals in the light of Allah’s statement.
“… We raise to degrees (of wisdom) whom We please: but over all endued with knowledge is One, the All-Knowing.” Surah 12:76
Back to our main issue; one may ask this: Is the Quran quoted from the Bible? And which book precedes the sciences? The book which that the hoopoe is a detested bird or the book which precedes the sciences and says that the hoopoe has the powers of observation, discrimination and expression and it is one of the best detective and messenger?
FROM BARCELONA TO BILBAO, THE SPANISH LANDS ARE THE PLACE TO CHILL IN STYLEBudget airlines have brought us a step closer to Europe and the climate has always been a pull for us pasty northerners, but recently, the Iberian cities don’t seem to be out of the press. A whole new world of style has been born in Spain. Chef Ferran Adria leads the Spanish cullinary scene with his globally revered, triple-Michelin-starred restaurant, El Bulli, situated on a remote, rocky beach 2 hours from Barcelona. His vociferous support for Spanish produce, Sherry and wines has made the rest of the gastronomic world sit up and take note and has propelled Spain to new heights of international respect. The list of fantastic restaurants and bars within Spanish borders is endless, but we’ve put together a selection of not-to-be-missed venues for a weekend in the sun.
IBIZA
Ibiza or Eivissa, depending on where you emanate from, is Spain’s most famous island and its double name is mirrored in a peculiar split personality that has developed over the last ten years. It is known as the clubbing capital of the world, drawing music connoisseurs from across the globe for its jaw-dropping DJ line-ups and its range of superclubs that hold thousands. At the same time, thanks to reality shows like ‘Ibiza Uncovered’, the so-called Isla Bonita is burdened with a reputation for attracting the worst element of Brits abroad. Lary lads and loose lasses stumble through the streets of San Antonio wreaking havock, making mischief and collapsing in a heap at the end of the night. But beyond all of this, there is a very sophisticated element of Ibizan life – a third personality that escapes most of the tourist trade. A new generation of bars have evolved into world class venues with slick interior design, atmospheric lighting, extensive cocktail menus and some of the best resident DJs in Europe.
When the Warhol bar opened in December 2001, its mission was to attract the stylish and beautiful, and now anyone who’s in the know in the music, fashion or media worlds can be found flocking to it for album launches, catwalk collections or photoshoots. The Base Bar continues to draw the music buffs and Café Mambo on the opposite side of the island has stolen the glory from Café Del Mar next door as the best place to watch the sun go down. Wine Bar is a new development, whose proximity to Pacha nightclub has sealed its future as an all-year fashion hang-out where you can dump vodka limóns in favour of fine wines and Fino. Then there’s cushion-strewn Mao Rooms, from London’s Chinawhite crew, which has become a first class lounge on the Ibiza scene.
For food, L’Elephant is the island’s top French restaurant, located in the small town of San Rafael just outside of Ibiza Town. Sa Capella is a beautiful and impressive restaurant housed in a 16th Century church resplendent with stone statues, foliage and faultless service. La Casita in Cala Llonga is a sleek and stylish terrace restaurant serving gastronomically inventive dishes from its old farmhouse location.
BARCELONA
Physically compact, yet culturally enormous; bohemian, and at the same time ultra chic. Barcelona is one of those cities that is all things to all men. It’s hub of creativity, with internationally renowned art galleries, designer shops and architectural delights that are second to none. Glitzy modern façades juxtaposed with the unique contorted architecture that is Gaudi’s legacy. Delightful squares and meandering boulevards that invite you to amble along for hours, glancing in the designer shops north of Plaça Catalunya. Then break your journey in the basement bodegas and tapas bars of La Rambla. In the summer, you can relax beachside at one of the scores of bars and restaurants along the Mediterranean coast of the Olympic port, dining on morning fresh seafood with a cold Manzanilla at your side. Aqua is a favourite hangout with bleached wooden tables and chairs spilling onto the beach front. For something more urban, Lupino, in one of the grafitti-ridden backstreets of the Raval district, is a fashionable spot with an alfresco terrace in similar style to one of London’s Hoxton haunts. Its slick, warmly lit interior is in direct contrast to the industrial carpark and the boqueria market that it looks out onto. The gourmands would prefer to venture into the commercial district to critically acclaimed Comerç 24 (closed in August), where the El Bulli trained chef, Carles Abellan, serves fantastic modern style tapas to a well-to-do professional crowd. For those of a more adventurous nature, a trip into Mount Tibidabo will provide views over the bustling city. A day at the theme park on high can be followed with drinks at Mirabelle and then completed with cocktails and dancing at the converted mansion known as Partycular. The sophisticated Eixample area offers a number of trendy escapes such as lounge bar Smooth, with its awesome selection of wines and Sherry, and velvet-clad Snooker, which won design awards when it opened a decade ago. El Ascensor in Ribera attracts the beautiful young things and with any luck you’ll be caught in the lift with one of them as you ascend to the modern designer club.
MADRID
It’s big and bustling, it’s loud and crowded, lascivious characters skulk in dark corners, and taxi drivers will try to rip you off. It’s a capital city and no mistaking it. Slap bang in the middle of the Spanish mainland, Madrid is hot – and with none of the forgiving sea breeze that blesses Barcelona, the teracotta cityscape looks practically kiln-baked. But it’s not all stress and strife. The best place to start relaxing is in Paseo del Prado, the expansive promenade that puts all of the city stress on hold. Down the spine of the Prado are three gurgling fountains that are fed by a subterranean stream. Adjacent to Prado is the beautiful, landscaped Retiro park, alive with street performers, bandstand and boat rides on its artificial lake. Sandwiched between the two is the botanical garden, an oasis of peace at the nucleus of the city. Café Miranda captures the spirit and colour of Madrid. Modern European cooking accompanied by a vampish dinner show with drag queens and a psychadelic decor. Drag queens feature at Gula Gula (Gran Via 1) too, where eating at the self-service buffet is a colourful and entertaining experience. A more sophisticated option is La Vaca Veronica where market-fresh ingredients are combined to terrific results. For something on the fashionable tip, Larios Café is a glamorous spot and its delicious Cuban cuisine is popular with the arty designer crowd. But if you’re looking up-market then Salamanca is the area to head for. The Beverley Hills of Madrid, Salamanca is awash with high class restaurants and glitzy bars. El Mentidero de la Villa (C/Santo Tomé 6) or grandiose Pedro Larumbe (C/Serrano 61) for exquisite fish, Estay for contemporary tapas or Boulevard for quaffing with any A-listers that are in town. Another trendy getaway is El Viso Madrid (C/Juan Bravo 31) set on a number of floors with a beautiful terrace bar, basement club and a very well-heeled young clientele. For a change from the norm, La Ida is a funky, chilled bar with no signage to give it away and an unconventional interior design. Frequented only by those ‘in the know’, it’s definitely worth seeking out.
SEVILLE
It is the flamboyant heart and soul of Spanish culture and a city that lives for tradition. From religion, which is embedded in its very essence, to football, politics, food and drink, the Andalusian capital thrives on its roots. Bull-fighting and flamenco are at the centre of its cultural calendar. And tapas is simply the done thing, for it was in Seville that the global obsession was born.Languishing at Spain’s southern tip, the sun-baked streets bask in the glory of a near-tropical heat. It is explosively colourful and architecturally stunning, its foundations carved from a multitude of occupations that span three millennia. The people smile, things move ever so slowly and mañana never seems to come. A weekend is simply not enough in Seville. You need time to stroll around from tapas bar to tapas bar, soaking up the atmosphere and the locally made Sherry; to meander along the river at sunset, stopping to crack open a bottle of Amontillado to mix with the rays of a sinking sun; to wander through the charming squares and the winding, cobbled streets of the Jewish quarter; and to drift from one hip bar to the next in trendy Alameda. Restaurants are less commonplace than in Barcelona or Madrid and Tapas bars take precedence. Egaña Oriza (C/San Fernando 41) combines bar and restaurant with elegance blending Basque and Andalusian cuisine in an expansive early 20th Century terazza. Another magnificient dining experience is La Albahaca – an exclusive townhouse which serves imaginative Spanish fusion dishes. Casa Robles serves gourmet Sevillian cuisine and is favoured by the Spanish royal family. Its sister restaurants Robles Placentines and Robles Tapas offer a less formal environment. La Colonial de Vinos y Viandas (C/Valpaiso 13) is the place to head for Spanish wine lovers – an amazing array of wines are accompanied by Cuban cigars and tasty tapas. Or try the inventive Mediterranean cuisine at La Madraza (C/Peris Mencheta 21), where you can titilate your taste-buds while gazing at the artworks on the walls which double as a gallery space.
BILBAO
Fifteen years ago, Bilbao was just a busy port and an old iron mining town. Fondly called ‘Botxo’ by the locals (Basque for ‘hole’), Bilbao escaped becoming a hole (literally) in the 90s with the gentrification of the dock area and the creation of such cultural magnets as the Guggenheim Museum and the concert hall, the development of the park, and the Sir Norman Foster designed metro system. The best way to get the most out of Bilbao is by way of a Txikiteo (the local version of a pub crawl) with a glass of Sherry and a plate of tapas in each bar. Alternatively, go top-end with Michelin-starred Zortzika – the lunch menu is best value. There’s also relaxed, but fashionable El Perro Chico, which looks out onto the recently cleaned river. Tapas bars tend to be more on the dark traditional side, but Harizki (Ledesma 7) goes against the grain offering gourmet style dishes in a slick, bright interior. As with other bars around Calle Ledesma, this place stays open a little later than the rest of the city. Worth a visit too is Artajo (Ledesma 4), where locals swear by the mussels in anchovy sauce.
JEREZ
The people of Jerez live for Sherry. Flamenco is a favourite pass-time and while drinking and dancing are woven into the fabric of life, it still remains a relatively peaceful and unspoilt part of Spain. Beaches and mountains are within reach at either side, vineyards and orange groves surround it and the ruins of once magnificent castles punctuate the landscape. It is a beautiful and ancient city, which despite being serviced by the no-frills airlines, still manages to evade mass tourism.The wide avenues of the city centre are full of shops and tapas bars are everywhere. Pass by Las Bridas for the kind of portions that you can share around or head for La Abacerio (Plaza Rafel Rivero) for a lively evening in alfresco surrounds. Good tradicional cuisine is to be had at Gaitán or El Gallo Azul (Calle Larga) for something a little more experimental. And whatever you do, make time to visit one of a many bodegas that are open for Sherry-tasting tours. It’s an unforgettable experience and one that will ensure you go away itching to come back.
SAN SEBASTIAN
One of the most fashionable places in Spain to holiday, San Sebastian couldn’t be further removed from the cheap resorts of the south. Golden beaches are beautifully maintained, landscaped parks and gardens, majestic mountains and the thrashing seas of the Bay of Biscay combine to dramatic effect. Designer shops keep the spendthrift upper classes happy as do some of the finest bars and restaurants in the country. Arzak is at the top of the list of restaurants to visit for the foodies (you are recommended to book at least a month in advance). Chef Juan Mari Arzak is often at your side to help you decide on dishes which change daily. Akelarre with its mountain location and views over the Atlantic offers a combination of traditional local cuisine and modern Basque interpretations and is not to be missed. All of the late night action happens in Parte Vieja, where tapas bars line the streets (try La Cepa, Martinez, Ormazabel and Gaztelu all on C/Agosto) and you can dance and drink until the very early hours.
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- Large variety of skills to upgrade and use in combat
- World is vast and beautiful
Cons
- Combat system is repetitive and easy to manipulate
- Far too many side quests, none of which are fun
- The countless choices have little impact on actual gameplay
- Buying houses, furniture, vegetables and getting jobs don’t belong in games
by Rabid Rabbit
Fable 2 is yet another over-rated game that focuses too much on side quests that simply aren’t fun and leaves the main campaign boring and repetitive. Similar to the distractions that made Metal Gear Solid 4, Spore and Grand Theft Auto IV boring games, Fable 2 gets distracted from providing meaningful and interesting gameplay. Far too much effort was placed on meaningless tasks that don’t materially affect gameplay, such as getting married, choices between good and evil and jobs to earn money. The main campaign involves traversing a large world and fighting a series of non-descript enemies that lack variety. The actual fighting mechanics quickly devolve into button mashing regardless of your preferred method of dispensing with your foes. The end result is a game that strays into many different gameplay elements but never makes any of them particularly fun. The developers simply forgot to make the game fun. Apparently they knew this was a problem when they released a statement asking people to have non-gamers try the game. Apparently it was made for people who don’t know what to demand from a game rather than traditional gamers who have more discerning tastes and demand higher forms of entertainment.
The crux of Fable 2 is choices. The main adventure is littered with a myriad of choices to help or harm people. If you choose to help people, then you are revered by citizens and gain their favor. If you choose the path of the dark side, then people will fear and despise you. It’s amazing that so much time was spent on this gameplay element, but it actually has very little impact on the actual game. The only material effect is how people react to you and evil characters’ complexions will deteriorate into a purple monster with horns. When you go into town, citizens will run in fear from evil heroes and may charge you higher prices for goods. You can reduce any price hikes by simply scaring them into lower prices though.
Any benefits from being a good person can be earned as an evil hero by scaring people or stealing from them as an evil person. There are just different means to the same ends. Without a material impact to your choices other than people calling you a murderer and running from you, it’s really hard to take these choices seriously. The entire system falls apart and becomes more of a nuisance than a unique aspect to tinker with.
The Fable 2 world is vast and includes a number of towns and people to interact with. You can choose to be a law-abiding citizen or you can just kill people for their goods, money and gifts. If you kill people or get caught stealing, then you should expect the police to quickly arrive to keep the peace. They will give you the choice to pay a fine, complete a community service task, or you can resist arrest. The community service is typically just a simple task to help someone or kill some bandits. If you resist arrest, then expect to be constantly chased by guards in town that you must fight.
This entire crime punishment system is extremely easy to circumvent. All you have to do is continually commit to community service tasks that you don’t ever complete. After choosing to complete one of these tasks, the guards will leave you alone and give you a few days to finish your work. If you don’t finish the task, you can simply request another task. The result is that you can do whatever you want in town without ever suffering any negative consequence. The only other noticeable effect is that your reputation follows you to every town you visit and people will fear you and call you a thief or a murderer. For a game so focused on choices, that seems like an easy choice to me: just steal and kill as much as you want without ever getting punished.
There are also a wide variety of choices for how you interact with people in town. You can choose to be nice by telling jokes or complimenting people to gain their favor or you can be mean by insulting them or giving rude gestures to lose their favor. There are also seductive gestures to attract people of the opposite sex. If you show enough interest in someone, then you can eventually propose to them by giving them a ring. After purchasing a house, you will be married to your fiancée. If you have unprotected sex (yes the game actually has condoms to prevent pregnancy and STD transmission), then you will likely have a child.
Like the rest of the game, the entire marriage and family system is extremely simple. The main result of a family is a budget drain on your income. If you keep your spouse happy, then you will get a gift from them when you arrive home from adventuring. You can also name your child. That’s about it. For a system that took so much work to incorporate into the game, you’d hope there would be more to it, such as training your spouse and kid to aid you in your adventures. Nope, there’s nothing like that in this game. If you like this boring gameplay and are a glutton for punishment, you are able to become a polygamist and have more than one family in the world. Like the rest of Fable 2, there isn’t much interesting depth here to keep you coming back for more of these Brady Bunch antics.
Towns offer a wide variety of things to do, but almost all of them either have no point or are extremely boring. You can get a job to make money, but why would you want to do that when you could be fighting monsters and playing the main campaign. We all have jobs, and we leave them to have fun playing games rather than to start another job inside a game. If you choose to take one of these jobs, you will enter a world of hurt involving extremely repetitive tasks that require no skill. As a blacksmith or wood cutter, you are simply timing button presses to a sliding scale. If you become a bar tender, you simply hold down a button to the end of a meter to pour a full glass of beer. None of these tasks ever change no matter how much you get promoted. Other jobs involve fetching people or items, such as the bounty hunter job.
You can also earn money by playing some games. These games mimic real-world games such as craps, card games and slots. A significant amount of effort went into differentiating these games from their real life counterparts. This becomes obvious when you watch the 5 minute tutorials that teach how to play the games. All of the games involve mere chance and require no skill on your part. Why would throwing dice be more interesting than actually playing the game’s main quest? It’s really absurd how much effort went into these games rather than making the main quest more interesting.
A number of possibilities are available in towns. You can choose to steal from merchants. When you attempt to steal, an icon appears to let you know if someone is watching you. If you are seen pilfering the store, then a guard will approach to punish you.
You can also choose to buy a wide variety of food and items with a myriad of different qualities. It’s really perplexing why people would care so much about different grades of meat, fish, pies, fruits and vegetables. There’s even tofu! The only way these different types of food impacts gameplay is that you will gain weight if you eat too many fatty foods, such as meat and pies. However, gaining weight doesn’t change your speed or the amount of damage you do in combat, so why should you care unless you are a narcissist?
You can also buy houses and shops. Then you can change your properties’ rent or the shop item’s selling prices to affect your profits. Other than additional profits, the only impact to raising prices is your alignment becomes more evil. If you decide to live in a house, you can go out and buy furniture, which increases the house’s value. Yes, you can actually choose to spend your free time looking at different grades of furniture in a video game. If that doesn’t put you to sleep, I don’t know what will.
The game also gives you a dog to accompany you through most of your tasks. His main purpose is to help you find buried treasures or hidden treasure that are off the main paths. He can also be trained to improve his treasure sniffing abilities to find more valuable loot than worthless things such as rancid tofu. If you knock an enemy down in a fight, your dog will also pounce on top of him to cause some additional damage.
With so many side quests and distractions, you’d think the game is a social interactions simulator and there weren’t any problems in the world. If you ever get out of town, you’ll realize there is the typical world coming to an end plotline along with an antagonist to stop. Your main objective is to gather three other heroes to combine forces and stop the world from becoming enslaved. The story unfolds through a series of tasks strewn across a large world with various enemies to defeat.
In order to progress through the story and gain new tasks, you must increase your renown throughout the world by helping people. The world of Fable 2 is large and these tasks are scattered across its many locales. To help ensure you don’t get lost trying to find your next task, the game includes a glowing trail for you to follow to your next objective. Once you have traveled to an area, you can choose to save time by letting the game transport you to your destination.
Combat is resolved by defeating enemies with melee fighting mechanics, shooting foes or employing magic. The associated skills of strength, skill and will increase as you use them in combat. Each downed enemy drops experience based on the ability type you use to defeat them. If you perform well in a fight by winning quickly or taking little damage, then you’ll be rewarded bonus experience. Then you can spend the experience to further hone these skills. Increasing some skills can provide new abilities such as sword counters and combos, but most upgrades simply cause more damage or increase your life meter rather than adding any depth.
Strength skills include causing more melee damage, reducing damage you take and increasing your life bar. Skill abilities revolve around improving shooting accuracy, damage and your ability to avoid enemy strikes. Will abilities include a variety of spells.
Direct damage spells hurt enemies with elements, such as fire, electricity, and blades. You can choose to cause more damage to a specific target or distribute your love through an area of effect spell. There are also indirect spells, such as raise dead to summon minions to aid your cause and charm spells to temporarily remove some foes from the fight by confusing them. The magic system is oddly unbalanced. Magic spells are cast without limit because you don’t spend mana points to cast spells. The result is you can just sit back and cast unlimited spells if you create a buffer against enemy attacks, such as summoning a horde of undead creatures with the raise dead spell.
While there are a variety of different abilities, fights generally devolve into simple button mashing. You’ll either madly press buttons to hack and slash with your melee weapons, shoot with your crossbow or gun or continually cast your spells. There’s very little depth in the actual encounters. Almost all enemies are dispatched with the same maneuvers regardless of how different they look. The only exceptions are the large trolls, which have specific weaknesses to target. Most of the campaign involves these repetitive fights, which makes it more of an effort in patience to endure the game’s monotonous encounters rather than having fun.
Most fights are rather easy, but even encounters that may offer a challenge are simple because there is no real consequence to losing a fight. If you run out of health, you are knocked out rather than dying. The only downside to getting KOed is that you will lose any ungathered experience. You can eat food or drink potions to increase your health, but there’s really no point in wasting your time buying the food and eating it. Just make sure to gather any experience if you are low on health and then you won’t lose anything by being knocked out. You’ll be revived to the same fight without having to walk back to the encounter and you won’t waste any money on healing items. So you can just mash buttons without paying attention to your health level because losing a fight has no negative consequence. These ridiculous gameplay elements further reduce the point of the fights and the campaign itself.
There is also the option of join a friend’s campaign in the game’s co-op mode. As with most games, playing the game with a friend can make it more fun. It’s pretty cool that the game is flexible enough that you and your friend don’t even have to be in the same place. You can choose to take on different tasks and not be in each other’s vicinity. While co-op mode generally add to the overall experience, it’s hard to say it makes a huge difference considering it doesn’t fix the game’s numerous other problems.
If you can endure the boring main quest to the end, you are rewarded with a horrid ending. I’m not talking about an ending movie. I won’t give anything away, but it’s important to note that there isn’t a final confrontation. After pouring hours into a boring campaign and exploring mundane side quests, Fable 2 simply continues to underwhelm with a slow boring end to the game that you have little control over. Well, at least the game’s boring features are consistent from its beginning to its ultimate ending.
The game’s vast world includes a wide variety of landscapes. From the dreary swamps to the lush hilly areas to the dark caves lit by torchlight, the world of Fable 2 is a beautiful place to explore. The only downside is that its ambitious long draw distances coupled with numerous enemies do create noticeable framerate hiccups throughout the quest.
Overall, Fable 2 promises a lot. It allows you to explore towns and make many choices. There are many side quests, jobs, businesses to buy and people to interact with, but none of these distractions are interesting. The main quest and its combat system have a wide variety of skills and enemies to fight but none really differentiate themselves from each other. The end result is a game that fails to entertain or involve you regardless of what you are doing in the game. It simply isn’t fun, no matter what you do or what choices you make in its elaborate world.
“A narrative or story is anything told or recounted; more narrowly, something told or recounted in the form of a causally-linked set of events; account; tale, the telling of a happening or connected series of happenings, whether true or fictitious” (Denning, 2006).
Your life is a narrative, counted and recounted from many different perspectives, and by diverse people. There are settings, themes, characters and plots – just like in any movie, book, historical account or legendary fable.
In this article we review the approach of Narrative Therapy and how it can be effectively used by counsellors to assist individuals improve their lives.
Fundamentals of Narrative Therapy
The Narrative The Drawing Anime & Cartoon Characters : How to Draw Flames
rapy is an approach to counselling that centres people as the experts in their own lives. This therapy intends to view problems as separate entities to people, assuming that the individual’s set of skills, experience and mindset will assist him/her reduce the influence of problems throughout life. This therapeutic approach intends to place the individual in both the protagonist and author roles: switching the view from a narrow perspective to a systemic and more flexible stance.
Systemic and flexible stance? Yes. The aim is to help clients realise what forces are influencing their lives and to focus on the positive aspects of the ‘play’. In many events of our lives, we tend to focus on particular things and ignore others. Analysing our lives as a play, or a system, helps us understand the different forces and roles that are influencing our behaviour. This in turn gives us flexibility to invoke the necessary changes for improvement.
“The products of our narrative schemes are ubiquitous in our lives: they fill our cultural and social environment. We create narrative descriptions for ourselves and for others about our own past actions, and we develop storied accounts that give sense to the behavior of others. We also use the narrative scheme to inform our decisions by constructing imaginative “what if” scenarios. On the receiving end, we are constantly confronted with stories during our conversations and encounters with the written and visual media. We are told fairy tales as children, and read and discuss stories at school.” (Polkinghorne, 1988)
Merging a familiar set of events (one’s life) to a familiar structure (a narrative story) is a useful strategy. The emotional, cognitive and spiritual perspectives of a person are usually combined in order to derive meaning to an event. In many instances, one or two perspectives will prevail over the other(s), and this will depend upon the particular scenario and the individual’s personality traits.
As an example, we can compare the perspective of two people who have different levels of emotional intelligence. According to Coleman (1998) “intellectual and emotional intelligence express the activity of different parts of the brain. The intellect is based solely on the workings of the neocortex, the more recently evolved layers at the top of the brain. The emotional centers are lower in the brain, in the more ancient subcortex.” Thus, individuals that are more ‘emotionally intelligent’ will draw different conclusions, and behave differently in certain situations.
This is only an example of possible disparities in perception and decision-making. It is the protagonist responding to the setting, the characters, the theme and plot.
Techniques and Objectives
“The techniques that narrative therapists use have to do with the telling of the story. They may examine the story and look for other ways to tell it differently or to understand it in other ways. In doing so, they find it helpful to put the problem outside of the individual, thus externalizing it. They look for unique outcomes: positive events that are in contrast to a problem-saturated story.” (Sharf, 2004)
Externalising the Problem
In Narrative Therapy the problem becomes the antagonist of the story. Certain behaviours are based on particular ‘unhealthy’ or ‘undesired’ characteristics – such as lack of patience, aggressiveness, etc. Thus, they are approached as not a part of the client but as an opposing force which needs to be ‘defeated’. An example would be a child that has a very bad temperament and tends to be aggressive to other kids at school and his parents. The child might feel guilty for his temperament and blame it on himself (“I don’t know… it is the way I am…”). The counsellor will work with him towards isolating that undesired trait (aggressiveness) and placing it as an external trait – not a characteristic of the individual.
This strategy helps clients re-construct their own stories in a way which will reduce the incidence of the problem in order to eliminate negative outcomes and reinforce personal development and achievement. The protagonist becomes the author and re-writes the story constructively.
Unique Outcomes
If a story is full of problems and negative events, the counsellor will attempt to identify the exceptional positive outcomes. When exploring unique positive outcomes in the story, the counsellor will assist the client in redeveloping the narrative with a focus on those unique outcomes. This assists the client in empowering him/herself by creating a notion that those unique outcomes can prevail over the problems. Think about this analogy: you are a novel writer. You were given a novel to review and publish the way you prefer. You have read it and found it generally poor, but there were some interesting ideas which you liked. You selected these ideas, and re-write the novel around them. You can make a flawed story become a bestseller.
Alternative Narratives
The focus of Narrative Therapy is to explore the strengths and positive aspects of an individual through his or her narrative. Therefore, the main objective of this therapeutic approach is to improve the person’s perspective internally (reflective) and externally (towards the world and others). Alternative narratives are a simple way to relate to this concept. This technique works in combination with unique outcomes. How? The individual will reconstruct a personal story using unique outcomes, therefore, focusing on the positive aspects of a previous story in order to achieve a desired outcome. This process is based on the premise that any person can continually and actively re-author their own life.
By creating alternative perspectives on a narrative (or event within the narrative) the counsellor is able to assist the client in bringing about a new narrative which will help combat the ‘problems’. This is similar to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy as it aims to create a positive perspective of an event.
Boundaries of Narrative Therapy
Despite being a widely used approach, particularly when combined with other therapeutic approaches, Narrative Therapy has certain boundaries or limitations. In many occasions, diverse clients may expect the therapist to act as the expert, instead of having to ‘conduct’ the conversation themselves. For this reason, Narrative Therapy can be challenging when the individual is not articulate. Lack of confidence, intellectual capacity and other issues could also undermine the expression of the individual through a narrative.
Another common boundary of Narrative Therapy is the lack of recipe, agenda or formula. This approach is grounded in a philosophical framework, and sometimes can become a particularly subjective or widely interpretative process.
The Leading Role
The most important aspect of Narrative Therapy is to empower the client. Placing the client as an expert, and understanding his/her story instead of attempting to predict it, indicates the therapist’s mindset. The idea is to emphasise the therapeutic relationship, in particular the therapist’s attitudes. This standpoint encompasses many of the important aspects of good interpersonal communication, such as: demonstration of care, interest, respectful curiosity, openness, empathy, and fascination.
Once this collaborative relationship has been established, the counsellor and the client can move forward and work on how to improve the outcomes of the narrative:
“Once upon a time… there was an optimistic, content and productive person…”
References:
Coleman, D. (1998). Working with Emotional Intelligence. (1st Ed.). London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Denning, S. (2004). Steve Denning: The website for business and organizational storytelling. (www.stevedenning.com/What_story.html)
Polkinghorne, D. (1988). Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany N.Y.: State University of New York Press
Sharf, R. (2004). Theories of Psychotherapy & Counselling. (3rd Ed.). Pacific Grove, CA: Thomson Learning.