Review: Fable: The Journey

While creating a sprawling Adventure game beginner guide controlled only by body movements may seem impossible, the world has been carefully sculpted around the concept. Nearly the entire game is on-rails, with player-controlled progress limited to traveling via horse and carriage. Movement of Seren is controlled by grabbing onto the reins. Once holding on, jerking both hands up in a cracking motion makes the horse go faster, while pulling your hands up towards your body stops her. To move left or right, you pull the hand of the intended direction towards you while extending the opposite arm. Intensity is based on how fast and dramatic the gestures are. Instead of simply darting to the next area, however, players must pay attention to not run into obstacles while scoping out any side-areas, where treasure chests or revealing NPCs can be found.

NPC reactions is an area where Fable probably could have benefited from some more tweaking, since early on in the game no one takes the hero seriously, but after playing a few hours the player is likely either the most beloved or feared resident of Albion. The citizens of Albion are superficial as once the fame came in so did the opportunity to take on a spouse or three. Fable was progressive in terms of marriage, allowing the player to take a spouse of the same gender and engage in polygamy. Well, maybe polygamy wasn't accepted in Albion since there could only be one spouse per town, so these multiple partners weren't exactly legit. They ended up leaving me anyway since I never spent any time with them or gave them gifts, but considering how difficult and time consuming it was to actually take a spouse to bed, they seemed to be more trouble than they were worth. The main purpose spouses served in Fable was when playing as an evil character, killing them would net so many evil alignment points.

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 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.

Another big improvement is that of the interfaces. The previous ones were rough even in 2004, seeming basic enough to be more at home with PS1-era games. Thankfully, they've been completely overhauled for this release, matching up better with click the up coming website subsequent Fable games. Navigation-wise, they’re a bit too clumsy. The triggers, shoulders buttons and analog sticks all come into play when scrolling around, resulting in a learning curve that shouldn’t exist for menus. Still, there’s only so much that can be done and at least the old interface wasn't simply re-skinned.


We've all seen action movies where the hero shows up just in time to prevent nuclear bombs being dropped on the United States. Well, the Fallout series is set in a world where that hero never showed up. What makes the Fallout games particularly good source material for a movie adaptation isn't so much the story, but the setting. When the dust clears, America is a blasted wasteland occupied by small pockets of life including bandits, monsters, slavers, weird cults, military factions like the Enclave and the Brotherhood of Steel, and a whole lot of regular people just trying to scratch a living. For the right filmmaker, this world could be the perfect backdrop for an original story set in the Fallout unive

This idea continues with microtransactions, something that Molyneux has been dead-set on improving. Trust me, I don’t like how microtransactions are being used today , but Molyneux has been working on ways to use them without letting them lean toward the realm of exploitation. He’s condemned the use of microtransactions in the mobile version of Dungeon Keeper , claiming they are not consumer-friendly, but he wants to find a way to make them palatable to an audience. That’s become something of another recurring trait of Molyneux: taking something universally disliked and trying to refine it so that it isn’t hated nearly as much.

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.