Joystiq’s Top 10 of 2008

Joystiq brings us their picks for 2008’s best video games, and at this point it isn’t much of a surprise that both Fallout 3 and Fable II both made the list. What is somewhat surprising, though, is that Fallout 3 took #4 while Fable II scored the #1 spot:

In many ways, Peter Molyneux and friends at Lionhead had a steeper hill to climb than most of the games on this list. Fable 2 is, after all, the sequel to 2004’s Fable one of gaming’s great “disappointments.” It went something like this: the delta between what was promised and what was delivered was so great, that the press roped in by the charming Molyneux and by proxy the players, retaliated. The result: what really wasn’t a terrible game is still now, years later, remembered as a disappointment.

Enter: Fable 2. Like Nintendo’s illustrious Zelda series, Fable 2 is more of an aesthetic, as opposed to a narrative, sequel. You’ll spot familiar gameplay elements, familiar narrative themes, and even some familiar places this is definitely a Fable game. But it’s also something entirely new: a new Albion, with a new Hero, new quests, a new enemy and, most importantly, the newfound ability to marry execution with ambition.

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Fable 2 has not only refined Molyneux’s original promise but, in doing so, has even surpassed many of our earlier, admittedly inflated, expectations for that game. Much like Molyneux, Fable 2 is the comeback kid, knocked down in the first round, but with too much ambition too much heart, like they say in boxing to stay down.