Fable - The Lost Chapters - Initial Thoughts

About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)

 Fable® is a groundbreaking roleplaying-adventure game from Peter Molyneux, in which your every action determines your skills, appearance, and reputation. Create your life story from childhood to death. Grow from an inexperienced adolescent into the most powerful being in the world. Choose the path of righteousness or dedicate your life to evil. Muscles expand with each feat of strength. Force of will increases with each work of wit. Obesity follows gluttony, and skin tans with exposure to sunlight and bleaches bone-white by moonlight. Earn scars in battle and lines of experience with age. Each person you aid, each flower you crush, and each creature you slay will change this world forever. Fable: Who will you be?

Previous Playtime

5 minutes

What Was I Thinking When I Bought This

Though I've been critical of my shopping habits in the past, I think this is the first game where I feel comfortable just flat out declaring - purchasing it was a mistake.

I owned Fable for the original Xbox, and it was one of my favorite games. I bought the PC version because my main console for the past eight years has been the Xbox 360, and thus my copy of Fable has been doing nothing but collecting dust. I thought it would be nice to have an accessible version of this classic game.

That was not my mistake. My mistake was buying this game just a couple of months before Fable Anniversary was released. I've since learned that this version of Fable doesn't even let you use the controller! It apparently predates the ubiquity of the Xbox 360 controller in PC gaming.

If I were a wiser person, I'd take this as an object lesson in rushing to buy things without doing your researcher, but I think we all know that I'm not that wise.

Expectations and Prior Experience

 It's been a long time since I played this game, but on the other hand, when I first bought it, I was in my cash-strapped "buy a used console game every couple of months and play the hell out of it" period, so I (used to) have a pretty extensive knowledge of the game. I don't anticipate any surprises, but that's the funny thing about memory. If I'm forgetting something, I won't even know it until too late.

I'm sort of dreading playing this on PC, though. Even though the game was delightful, I anticipate serious hand cramps trying to control it with a keyboard and mouse. Even after all this blogging, I've never quite got the hang of pure PC controls for action games. Trying to keep track of left and right hands feels less natural to me than worrying about two thumbs.

I've also got a special request for this game. Assclown from rpg.net wrote:

How about a puppy kicking evil playthrough of Fable as a challenge project? Should also kick you into full rambling mode about good vs evil in games which I would like to read.

 All I can say here is "be careful what you wish for." I don't mind doing this, of course, though given the way Fable's morality system works, I can't imagine the result won't be disappointing. "The nature of evil is . . . farting on people. Seems strange, but there it is." Or maybe not. I do recall there are some pretty wicked things you can do, but even so, my memory of Fable's dark path is that it is cartoonish and petty cruelty, and not really worth any kind of discursive essay. I guess we'll see.