Review: Fable Anniversary

Sure, you see the hero grow from a child to an adult, but the childhood lasts about five minutes and adolescence no longer than ten. The rest of the game simply sees you controlling your average adult warrior. There are also elements like marriage and family drama that come into play that never realize their full potential. Instead of being an experience where you truly assume the role of another being, it’s built like an average RPG with some nifty life-building elements thrown in. Still, it’s a criticism of the game as old as time itself (or at least the Xbox 360) and the important thing is that the game is still enthralling all the way through.


There aren't all that many good movies based on video games, but maybe that's just because the right adaptation hasn't come along yet. Video games are more cinematic and visually impressive now than ever before, and their popularity means that Hollywood is continuing to try and find ways of turning major video game franchises into major movie franchi

Fable eventually was released in 2005 to high anticipation, but the game failed to live up to Molyneux’s sky-high aspirations. The game earned acclaim for its real-time combat and various methods of dispatching foes, but the morality system was much more limited than originally pitched (good and evil were the only really distinctive ways to progress in the game) and a number of features such as the children component were missing. The abilities to impact the story and the world around you were disappointingly limited as well. But despite these problems, Fable was still received with enough praise that it became a full-fledged series, with Fable II dropping in 2008 and Fable III in 2010.

Of course, it’s no secret that Fable is a great Adventure game strategy, so the most important aspects of this release is if it's aged well (read above) and the quality of the port. Simply put, the result is leaps and bounds above the original. Fidelity, special effects and lighting have all improved and it’s clear to see the differences in almost every area. Upgrades to characters and building exteriors are the most noticeable, with faces seeming more realistic and less pixelated and buildings revealing never-before-seen nuances. Even trees in the backgrounds and leaves on the pathways of villages are more detailed. Everything has a smooth look which gives it a nice overall aesthetic comparable to other Xbox 360 games. The only flaw in the new look is that sometimes things can be a bit too smoothed over and come across a little smeary. Sometimes the sharp edges of the original helped to keep objects separated, something that can sometimes be a problem here. The other continually noticeable boost is the lighting, with plenty of new shadow effects and nuances between different lighting situations, where as before things were basically light or dark. Overall, while it’s not perfect and hampered by the fact that practically every Xbox 360 game now looks long in the tooth, it’s certainly the preferable way to experience the Adventure Game News — nostalgia or not.

The sense of freedom became apparent in the early stages of the game during the tutorial. There was no fighter, mage or rogue class; the player simply trained in archery, melee combat and spellcraft. How these skills developed was based on what approach was used in battle and doing successful combos with any of them would multiply the gained experience. The experience was divided into the three combat categories along with general experience that could be distributed as desired. Personal experience seemed that mastering consistently high combat multipliers with the bow was tricky, but by halfway through the game the character would easily be a formidable magic using tank. Bandits, balverines and trolls quickly changed from dangerous enemies to cannon fodder.

While Molyneux has certainly made this attitude a recurring (and expected) one, many of the creative ideas from him are the ones that never saw the light of day. Personally, I’m of the small camp who believe the Kinect/Natal demo Milo was an interesting idea that deserved to be investigated upon further ; maybe not with Kinect, but with the idea of simply talking to a person and developing a social relationship with them over time, similar to how you build the foundation of a city into a giant metropolis. Molyneux’s Milo project became one of the most iconic figures of the early years of Kinect, but the project was never realized, Kinect functionality or not. And quite frankly, Milo remained one of the more interesting Kinect projects. Considering the widespread disapproval of Kinect, one of the few good things to come out of it was the potential of a game like Milo . Molyneux was trying to make something cool out of something massively disliked: Milo out of Kinect.


Based on the Fables comic books by Bill Willingham, The Wolf Among Us is a cool, noir detective story with a fantasy twist. When characters from fairy tales are exiled to live in the human world, the Big Bad Wolf changes his ways and becomes Sheriff Bigby Wolf, the lawkeeper of Fabletown. After discovering the horrible murder of a young woman, Bigby embarks on a desperate hunt for a serial killer and along the way finds himself digging deeper into the corruption and organized crime at the heart of the Fable community. It's a tense story with plenty of interesting characters, and it has the potential to be a great crime thriller movie - with a talking pig as a bo