Retro Game Friday: Fable

This week for Retro Game Friday I’m back with another game from the now defunct Lionhead Studios. It’s Fable!

Plot Synopsis: On his sister’s birthday, a young boy’s village of Oakvale is raided by bandits; killing the boy’s entire family. An old Hero, Maze, rescues the boy, seeing great potential in him; Maze trains the boy to become a Hero at the Heroes’ Guild. Years pass; after honing his skills, Maze informs the Hero of a blind seeress living among a bandit camp near Oakvale, and advises the Hero to infiltrate the bandit camp.

Plot: The plot is decent, but so filled with stereotypical things that it’s also not that amazing. This is probably due to Molyneux over reaching again, but that’s more a fault of the actual game developers rather than the story writers.

Gameplay: The gameplay is okay, but honestly compared to the promises of what Molyneux wanted to include in the game, it makes this look like trash. Fable is often used as an example of never making claims of features before you’re sure of them being doable in the game, unless you specify that. Overall Fable plays like any other Action RPG , with a morality system that affects appearance and seemingly choices, but really doesn’t.

Art: The art has aged incredibly poorly, although I’ve heard it’s since been remastered in HD, so that remake might be worth checking out. Maybe.

Music: Standard Fantasy fare, it’s not all that amazing.

Overall: Skip this game, it’s one among many that tried to be amazing, but failed miserably.

For those who like: Action-RPGs, Adventure, Fantasy, Drama.

Not for those who don’t like: Any of the above, or tons of missing features.

Retro Game Friday: Black & White 2

This week for Retro Game Friday I’m covering the sequel to one of my favorite games. It’s Black & White 2!

Plot Synopsis: The player is called to the world from a “pure prayer” and thus comes upon a scene of a Greek city being devastated by a huge Aztec army. After the player saves a certain number of people, their people are transported to a new land with a handful of refugee worshipers, the player must re-establish a power base from which to eventually defeat the Aztec empire.

Plot: The plot was okay, but really the meat of the game was always in the gameplay.

Gameplay: Like in the first game you could evil or good, or more neutral. Frankly I enjoyed the more neutral path as I got to make my populace happy, but was an absolute terror to my enemies. One of my favorite tactics was to have my creature toss corpses into enemy areas to cause chaos. Yeah I’m particularly evil in that manner, but frankly it was effective as hell.

Art: The art is much improved from the first, but it still has aged poorly. It’s better, but you can really tell how old the game is (12 years). There are probably mods out there to improve it if you wanted to play the game now.

Music: I honestly don’t remember much of it.

Overall: A great sequel.