Download Full Xbox Games on Live!!!

Microsoft has just announced a new Xbox Live feature that will allow gamers to download full Xbox games on thier Xbox 360 through the Xbox Live Marketplace.

This new feature is in celebration of the fifth year of Xbox Live on December 4th, 2007. When the service first launches, gamers will be able to download popula classics from the original Xbox including Halo, Psychonauts, Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge and Fable.

This new service will launch with an array of blockbuster titles spanning the most popular genres from action-adventure to classic role-playing games, and Microsoft promises that the catalog of games will continue to grow. No disc will be necessary and games can be purchased through the Marketplace for only 1,200 Microsoft Points.

The original Xbox wasn't particularly impressive as far as RPGs go, so I'm not sure what to expect out of this. So far Fable is the only RPG announced for the service and that game is totally mediocre in my opinion. Hopefully the Kingdom Under Fire series goes up for download. Still, it sounds like a pretty cool feature and one that I'm sure I'll take advantage of.

Ranting about Fable

If you don't want to hear me ranting about Fable, the hugely anticipated RPG for the original Xbox, then don't bother reading this post.

---Start Fable Rant

For whatever reason, I never played Fable when it first came out. Recently I've had some free time, so I decided to give it a shot. I've heard it was a short game, so I figured I could fit it in between a few review copies.

Anyway, I was pretty disappointed. I'd heard mixed things about the game, so I sort of knew what to expect... but, I really hope Fable 2 is better than this. For a game that was supposed to be THE RPG, the role-playing elements were really shallow and the game length was tiny.

In all honesty, I liked the fact that the learning curve was small and the gameplay was pretty straightforward. That made it a fun game to play and kept it from becoming too complicated. Still, I would have liked the mechanics BEHIND the gameplay to be a bit deeper (like the character building).

Oh, and the lock on irritated me a lot. Not only was it pretty rough to lock onto a specific enemy in a group, but you lost your lock when they'd knock you over. So every time they'd knock me down, I'd get up and be locked on to some random object in the room, and the camera would have left the enemy and I couldn't see where he was or dodge his incoming attacks.

And the backtracking... aaah! The actual world was so small that you end up having to go back and forth to the same few places OVER and OVER again. It was tedious and boring. There was a lot to do in the game, but very little of it did you HAVE to do. On one hand, it's nice to give gamers the freedom to choose, but on the other hand the game was so short that if you put any side questing off for a little bit, you'd end up beating the game before you got the chance to do any of it. I didn't do much of the optional stuff, but there never really seemed like much of a point. The game did a poor job of introducing the optional stuff, but moreso, I just didn't find the game interesting enough to want to continue exploring. As for the side quests, the only real point in those was to make money, which I had PLENTY of throughout the whole game.

I'll take Oblivion (or Morrowind) over Fable any day. The whole idea behind Fable was "For every choice, a consequence". If you want a game like that, go with KotOR or Oblivion instead.

--- End Fable Rant

Sorry about that. Just wanted to get it off of my chest.

As long as I'm at it, here's a link to Just-RPG's old Fable review. It wasn't written by me, but I agree with the score.