There’s something odd about an HD port built for a console which itself has games that are being ported to a superior console. Let’s reflect on Fable Anniversary for a second: it’s a 2014 Xbox 360 remake of an Xbox game from 2004. We’re in an age where people are demanding for spectacular looking games like Grand Theft Auto V and The Last of Us to be ported to Xbox One and PS4, and this is an Xbox 360 port of an original Xbox game. As such, judging it is fairly hard to do after spending countless hours over the past few months scrutinizing next-gen ports like Tomb Raider, Madden 25 and Call of Duty: Ghosts, when Fable Anniversary would be a resounding success if it matched the 360 quality of any of them. Still, while a remake of Fable might have been better suited for release before Fable II or as a three-pack with its sequels on Xbox One before Fable IV (please?), the sheer fact that Lionhead and Microsoft care to do it at all is great fan service for players who have had to deal with an antiquated game — classic as it may be.

Sure, you see the hero grow from a child to an adult, but the childhood lasts about five minutes and adolescence no longer than ten. The rest of the game simply sees you controlling your average adult warrior. There are also elements like marriage and family drama that come into play that never realize their full potential. Instead of being an experience where you truly assume the role of another being, it’s built like an average RPG with some nifty life-building elements thrown in. Still, it’s a criticism of the game as old as time itself (or at least the Xbox 360) and the important thing is that the game is still enthralling all the way through.

Whether you like him or not, Peter Molyneux is a man that’s in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction with the status quo of the industry, and that’s really what makes his career so incredibly fascinating.

Gameplay itself is a nice blend of action elements with those traditional to an RPG. On the offense, a melee weapon, long range weapon and magical will powers are always available, each assigned to a different face button. For defense, numerous gear combinations are available to ensure you’ll always be protected in the heat of battle. Plus you can block and roll. Enemies tend to rush you and offer quite a challenge for those unfamiliar with the proper strategies. Grinding isn’t a common occurrence, but going into battle well stocked with items is always necessary. While it’s not the deepest system, it’s still arguably the best one in the Fable series and remains enjoyable today.

What better way to reinvent a gaming franchise than taking away the controller? It’s a risky proposition to turn one of the most successful Xbox franchises into a Kinect-only title, but that’s exactly what’s been done with Fable. Instead of producing a family-friendly mini-game based game, however, Lionhead Studios have created a full-blown Adventure game Updates that manages to rival the main canon in scope. Not only is Fable: The Journey an evolution of the series, but a crucial experiment to see if Kinect can manage to produce a story-driven experience with nothing but the player’s body.

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.

And really, Peter Molyneux, for all his broken promises and enormous aspirations, is an innovator. He’s proven his enchantment with taking well-tread ideas and making them into something unexpected. Populous remains one of the most important games of all time, and that couldn’t have happened without some desire to step beyond the established setting. Fable to a lesser extent and certainly with the Milo demo, Peter Molyneux hasn’t made anything flat-out terrible in decades. But his tendency to get excited about his new ideas so much has led to a negative perception of who he is: many in the gaming community consider him a dreamer, not a doer. Quite frankly, I think that’s unfair to say. Some companies are perfectly content with what they’re doing in gaming, but Molyneux has proven time and again that he’s never satisfied with his creations. He’s always reaching further, even if his eagerness to progress has made him despise the past and ignore the present in awkwardly narrow-sighted ways.

While Molyneux has certainly made this attitude a recurring (and expected) one, many of the creative ideas from him are the ones that never saw the light of day. Personally, I’m of the small camp who believe the Kinect/Natal demo Milo was an interesting idea that deserved to be investigated upon further ; maybe not with Kinect, but with the idea of simply talking to a person and developing a social relationship with them over time, similar to how you build the foundation of a city into a giant metropolis. Molyneux’s Milo project became one of the most iconic figures of the early years of Kinect, but the project was never realized, Kinect functionality or not. And quite frankly, Milo remained one of the more interesting Kinect projects. Considering the widespread disapproval of Kinect, one of the few good things to come out of it was the potential of a game like Milo . Molyneux was trying to make something cool out of something massively disliked: Milo out of Kinect.