Running Fable in 2022
This is a sticky note more than an actual blog post. As alluded to in ESXi revert panel and in why the fuck does the internet not have the answer sometimes the internet does NOT contain the answer to issues I am having, and as such I am resorted to a) finding the answer myself by experimentation and b) filling my desktop with notepads with half a dozen lines on some extremely esoteric and specific issue I am having that apparently no other living soul has ever encountered.
Fable is a game that I can’t quite explain why I like. It never delivered on…well almost ANY of the promises it made. Seeing your character develop and progress through age is TECHNICALLY built in, but it sure as hell wasn’t what we expected. The alignment function was pretty ham-fisted and honestly KOTOR did a much better job of that, but man becoming a menace called “Lord ArseFace” and having the NPCs refer to this title with voice acting is beyond hilarious. Plus, the aesthetic. I sometimes see stone structures in real life and think to myself “Christ this makes me want to play fable”.
Out of the gate I was having issues getting it to run. Never mind the port is reasonably shithouse, and the control mapping is completely nonsensical due to it being designed to still be played with a controller.
No, our issues are DLLs. Being a part of the legendary collection from 2004 it isn’t fresh and surely wasn’t designed with 64bit machines in mind, no siree.
It will complain about msvcr100.dll being missing. Once again, this a 64-bit machine. To rectify this issue, lets install a visual c++ redistributable. Hmm it says 2010 has the DLL we need. We are on a 64-bit machine so let’s use the 64bit release of 2010.
WRONG. YOU LOSE, YOU GET NOTHING.
You need to install the 32-bit version of the visual c++ 2010 redist; if you install the 64-bit version, it won’t run whatsoever.
If you decide with your big brain to install both, it’ll complain about versions (The Application Was Unable to Start Correctly 0xc000007b).
The only way to get it to run is to remove both 32 and 64 then only install the 32.
I am sure some smart person will ask ‘why not just play fable anniversary’ and the answer is simple; much like the Spyro remaster, it doesn’t feel the same. Part of the charm of the game is the particular models and shading, and the remaster just doesn’t capture it. This applies to both fable and Spyro and basically fucking everything that’s been remade. D2 doesn’t feel the same in its remastered state. Never fear dear reader, for I have a project cooking about Diablo 2 that you (me) will like.
I even gave the Spyro game a good, decent solid crack again literally an hour prior to finishing this post off. I gave it a good couple of hours, finishing the entirety of the Artisans world (except the fucking flying mission cause fuck that) and I just…honestly had to question myself why the fuck I was playing it. I realised I was only playing just to hear the Stewart Copeland music. The controls are much better, I’ll 100% grant it that. but otherwise, it just isn’t as fun as the original. Not that the mechanics have changed at all, the undeniable charm that makes platformers tolerable is just straight missing. My god I hate platformers.
I think we can deduce from this and a few of my other posts that I am the prototypical genwunner. It’s a hard one to simply attribute my preferences solely to nostalgia, because I don’t only TALK about the old gens, I play them. I have crunched the original Spyro onto my psp and am tearing it apart right now, up to the beast’s world. I am tackling both Pokémon red and crystal simultaneously for the millionth time because I love and enjoy that 8-bit aesthetic. I like to think I’d appreciate the remakes more if they had the original gen 1 sounds, but as the Spyro remake proves, it’s not enough. I am not exactly sure what makes the magic, but something does. Or I could just be getting old.
Anyway, stay tuned for more useless rants that could be summarised into my internal wiki, but I choose not to. See you in the next post!
