Games currently in my systems
Groggy PS2: Final Fantasy XII
XBox 360: Mass Effect
Wii: Super Mario Galaxy
PC: World of Warcraft
PSP: Dungeon Maker: Hunting Grounds
DS:Pokemon: Pearl
Board Game: Puerto Rico

Dec 11

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Category: Reviews

Oblivion was one of the first games released for XBox 360 and it is amazing what they have accomplished. The graphics are impressive, especially the wilderness. Individual blades of grass are carefully rendered into an enticing attraction that begs you to go run up and click on it. And oh yes, you will. Even the rich storyline and unfathomable number of quests is boggling. The amount of text the writers had to crank out has likely lead to more than a few compensation checks.

The game is, on the surface, a huge, open-ended RPG that is pretty immersive. The underlying structure though, as I soon realized, is that this is a single-player party game with more mini-games than Mario Party 8. Here is a list of those mini games:

Realize your armor is broken in least amount of time game
Get out of a bad auto save situation with least number of repeat deaths game
Find out what all of your buttons do without stabbing a NPC game
Fully explore all 22 menus game
Pick a lock in under 10 minutes and using less than 30 lock picks game
Try to resist picking every plant and mushroom in view game
Pick a lock and go to jail game
Pick a pocket and go to jail game
Accidentally click on a cup in front of a guard and go to jail game
Meet a guard on an empty street and go to jail game
Go to jail and go to jail game

And the grand-daddy of all mini-games:

The turn into a vampire and try not to take the game out of the console and break it in half game.

Seriously, that vampirism thing was a pain in the ass.

It isn’t all fun and games though, there are a a ton of quests as far as the eye can see. The learning curve for understanding how to efficiently move and do quests is sharp, but that is part of the journey I guess. I have not finished the game yet and I really don’t want to speed that up. Exploring this rich world is right up my alley and I’ll be sad when every stone has been turned over and every … freaking vampire slain.



Laurels
Good
Bad
Wow is this place big
Will take you 16 hours to figure out what the markers on the compass mean
Seriously, there is less text in a set of encyclopedias
Person with OCD will be stuck in a field of nightshade flowers for an hour
Lots of guilds to join. Can you become an Eagle Scout? Quite likely
When Ann Rice wrote about vampires being romantic and wonderful, she was lying.

-Groggy

1 Comment so far

  1. Tru Brujah December 11th, 2007 3:55 pm

    I liked being a vampire. The mini-game “bite the dame on the neck, and if she wakes up stab her, and when the guards show up, melt faces” was quite fun.

    It was nice to have the “just ate dinner” buffs as well.

    Of course, sunlight killing me in like 10 seconds was not so much fun, but if you can run fast enough and be all “rarrr rarrrr!” it’s kind of fun.

Leave a comment