The first of five Fable II episodes is ready to download from Xbox LIVE, and it’s totally free.

This is all Peter Molyneux’s crazy idea – he announced that the original game would be broken into five sequential chunks at during his recent GamesCom speech, around the same time that he unveiled the first details of Fable III.

We’re not sure why anyone would want to play/own the game in this way, though. Surely it can’t be as economical as buying the whole thing on a single disc? We’ve spotted new copies online for under £15, and a good deal less for pre-owned. According to the official blurb you’ll need to buy further episodes in order to enable the game’s full LIVE functionalities too, which is a bit sly.

All that aside, at least this first downloadable episode won’t cost you a bean, and you can’t really say fairer than that for 2GB’s worth of gameplay. As such this is an excellent introduction to the fabulous, freely roamable world of Fable II. So how about giving the freebie a lengthy look and making any future purchasing decisions on that basis. And if Microsoft fails to punt subsequent episodes out at pocket money prices, well, you know what your options are...