The Molyneux Paradigm: Hate The Past Hype The Future

As is common with Kinect, enjoyment of the title will largely be based on how accurate your set-up is. I played the game with a 42" TV in moderate lighting conditions and adequate space around me. Some will experience the game in better conditions, but I prefer to review Kinect releases with what I feel is a realistic representation of most gamer’s arrangements. To calibrate, there’s a special tool that has you cast spells at stationary enemies. It seems easy enough, but after using the new settings, attacks were going all over the place. It took about four calibrations to get it as accurate as possible. Once calibration is correct, there is a learning curve to get spells accurately cast. To really nail it, your arm must be fully retracted before extending, with the palm facing up at all times. It sounds simple, but remembering to keep correct form during the heat of battle can be tricky.

There were many secrets to discover in Albion, which was necessary to pad out the game. The main story campaign was short by RPG standards, so having optional side quests and secrets added value to the title. Demon doors would have treasures such as legendary weapons if you could solve the riddle to open them and there were many silver keys scattered across the land they were needed to open silver treasure boxes. They may have have fixed this in the subsequent reissues of Fable, but in the original Xbox version there was a glitch to get unlimited silver keys. This worked by getting a key, doing a hero save but not a world save and then load the file. The character will have the key in their inventory and the key will be waiting to be collected in its original spot.


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

While creating a sprawling Adventure game strategy 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.

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 the 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.

Choosing to be good or evil was usually straightforward. Several of the main quests had an optional way to end them depending on the outcome, typically spare the foe for good points and kill them for evil. There were a couple quests where there were two available quests but they were the same event, the choice was just to determine what side the player was on which actually was a cool way of making it feel like you were choosing a side. A more fun way to rack up the evil points was to just go on a Grand Theft Auto style rampage in town and kill a bunch of guards and civilians, but again no killing children since they take away your weapons in the towns with kids. This can actually cause some problems, since you may want to go to town but end up having a massive bounty in several towns that doesn't expire for a few days.


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