This Month in Xbox Nation Fable, Psi-Ops, and everyone's favorite advice column: Ask Itagaki. Find out what's in the latest issue.

It's been a weird month over at XBN. The Friday before the magazine went to press, our feature review of Hitman: Contracts got clipped. Shot in the head and dumped in the river. Eidos, which publishes the game, just couldn't get us a final version in time for the deadline. Panic ensued, and Fable came to the rescue, Peter Molyneux having had the dubious honor of being trapped in a room with XBN's Greg Orlando for an hour during the DICE summit in Las Vegas (where the big cheeses of the game industry talk about, yep, the game industry). Fable, as it turns out, is almost ready and in fine form. Good save! We had a cover. You can read all about it on page 50 of this issue.

You can also read, in both Inbox and Xrated, about Capcom's disastrous Steel Battalion: Line of Contact, the Live-enabled follow-up to its superb Steel Battalion. To cut a very long story short, it simply doesn't work. It's broken and may not be fixable (we'll have to wait and see whether a patch sorts things out). The problem is, it's on shelves, and many of you have already bought it. So my question is this: How did Capcom come to release a game in such a poor state of repair? And, for that matter, how did Microsoft -- which closely vets all games published for Xbox -- let them?

-- Simon Cox, Editor-in-Chief

Features

Fable Nearing completion and looking very, very good indeed

Psi-Ops You can pick the furniture up with yourself on top and fly around

Xpress

Mortal Kombat: Deception Midway shows there may be life in the old dog yet for the Mortal Kombat series

Pariah First look at the top-secret game the Unreal guys are working on

International Global Xbox reportage

Pop Quiz The boys from BioWare on life, love, and old RPGs

Live

Unreal Championship 2 You have permission to use the word "awesome"

10 Great XBL Games So now you know

On the DL This month's top downloads

Live Guide

Future

Burnout 3 First hands-on with EA's Outrun-esque speedster

Men of Valor: Vietnam The best Vietnam game of the bunch, we reckon

Urban Decay Gritty, dirty, underground games that are coming your way, including NARC, Manhunt, Mercenaries, DRIV3R, and Fight Club

Plus: Tron 2.0 Red Ninja Advent Rising Flatout Conker: Live and Uncut The Red Star Mega-Bits Update: Halo 2 Playlist

XRated

Reviews of: Alias Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance 2 Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death Ninja Gaiden Steel Battalion: Line of Contact The Suffering NBA Ballers Tenchu: Return from Darkness Fight Night 2004 Samurai Jack Pitfall: The Lost Expedition All-Star Baseball 2005 ESPN Major League Baseball Dead Man's Hand

Xtra

The 50 Best Xbox Games XBN picks the games you'd, like, die without

Tips/Codes Ninja Gaiden! Breakdown!

Exit Next month in XBN: Jade Empire, Far Cry, KOTOR 2, and pray to the Gods of Screenshots -- a new Halo 2 pic

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Xbox Nation.