Review: Fable: The Journey

Member the games you used to play? We member. The basement at the Hardcore Gamer office has a section known as the Crust Room, with an old grey couch and a big old CRT TV. All the classic systems are down there collecting dust, so in an effort to improve the cleanliness of our work space, we dust off these old consoles every so often and put an old game through its paces, just to make sure everything stays in working order. We even have a beige computer with a floppy disk drive.

There’s something odd about an HD port built for a console which itself has games that are being ported to a superior console. Let’s reflect on Fable Anniversary for a second: it’s a 2014 Xbox 360 remake of an Xbox game from 2004. We’re in an age where people are demanding for spectacular looking games like Grand Theft Auto V and The Last of Us to be ported to Xbox One and PS4, and this is an Xbox 360 port of an original Xbox game. As such, judging it is fairly hard to do after spending countless hours over the past few months scrutinizing next-gen ports like Tomb Raider, Madden 25 and Call of Duty: Ghosts, when Fable Anniversary would be a resounding success if it matched the 360 quality of any of them. Still, while a remake of Fable might have been better suited for release before Fable II or as a three-pack with its sequels on Xbox One before Fable IV (please click the next website page?), the sheer fact that Lionhead and Microsoft care to do it at all is great fan service for players who have had to deal with an antiquated game — classic as it may be.

Peter Molyneux’s role in the gaming industry has been one of the longest in the industry’s history, with his first game, The Entrepreneur , being released in 1984. The Entrepreneur , despite Molyneux’s enthusiasm toward it, was a mass commercial failure, said to have sold only two copies (one of which rumored to be from his own mother). After the game’s brutal release, Molyneux left the industry for the next three years, until he teamed up with Les Edgar to begin the game development company Bullfrog Productions. Though the company released a scrolling shooter named Fusion a year before, 1989 marked the release of Populous , Molyneux’s claim to fame and what is arguably the very first "god game." Populous was a commercial success, becoming the best-selling game from the company and becoming the progenitor for future strategy games of its kind. Further Bullfrog games like Dungeon Keeper followed in Populous’ wake until Molyneux created Lionhead Studios to produce other god games like Black and White . Molyneux steadily continued experimenting with new ways to play with Fable on Xbox and use of Microsoft’s Kinect peripheral (with the tech demo Milo ). Currently with 22 Cans Studios, Molyneux is developing a "spiritual successor" to his game Populous called Godus , which met funding goals on Kickstarter in 2012.


Given the current Hollywood craze for comic book movies, now is the perfect time for a movie version of inFAMOUS . This open world game casts players as Cole McGrath, a bike courier who gains electricity-based superpowers when he's caught at the center of a devastating explosion. After the smoke clears, Cole is faced with the choice to either become a superhero and save the citizens of Empire City, or use his powers to become a supervillain and make people fear and despise him. No matter which path you pick, this is one comic book style video game that we definitely want to see on f

With a sprawling, graphically intense world part of a near fifteen-hour campaign, Fable: The Journey breaks any conceptions of what a Kinect title can be. It’s not demo material or a novelty release, but an uncompromising Adventure game collectibles game that weaves an engrossing story while utilizing the full potential of motion control. It doesn’t always work flawlessly, but the sheer ambition alone makes it a must-own for Fable and Kinect fans alike.


With prosthetic limbs becoming ever more advanced, the world of cyberpunk shooter series Deus Ex is starting to seem like a realistic vision of the future. As human beings start to use technology to evolve their own biology, the player is faced with some hard choices regarding what the future of the human race should look like, and how it should be governed. The original Deus Ex is still the pinnacle of the series, but Deus Ex: Human Revolution was the title that really demonstrated just how great a movie adaptation could l

Project Ego sounded like nothing I had played before. Being able to pick and choose which quests to take wasn't exactly groundbreaking, but the idea of the game taking place across the character's lifetime was intriguing. There was talk about how the character would be designed and uniquely tailored to the player's gameplay and they would be able to have children that would have a significant impact in the world. The character would receive unique scars from battle, they could plant a sapling and watch it grow in a massive tree throughout the course of the game and the NPCs would have unique reactions to the player based on their deeds to create the sense of a living world the player was truly a part of.