Tigranes

Level 33 and still stomping around getting things done, though the list of open quests is now down to a dozen or so after some ferocious wrapping up. Enjoying how each area of Skyrim is 'themed' by a particular conflict, e.g. the variations of the forsworn conflict around Markarth, though obviously with Bethesda there's no moral dilemmas or difficult choices to be found. Also enjoyed the part of the main quest where you , quite fun stuff - even if they had to spoil it with a scripted "A-HA" at the end (that you can't avoid because ) Master is still quite hard and in many cases, the only way for my character to survive is go around snapping as many necks as possible with Mehrunes' Razor + 30x backstab - although I only have 1 perk on One-Handed and my skill remains 49. Open field archery is getting difficult because enemies are pretty hefty in areas, though there still remains differentiation. Seems like the way dungeons in particular were level-scaled is that everyone IS level-scaled, but by and large, no matter what level you are some enemies will be very challenging while other ones will be a walkover, opening up more tactical options. And of course they get better quality weapons, but not armour, so they don't look utterly stupid with daedric bandits, etc. Yet to see how it pans out at even higher levels but I think it's OK. I accept that with something as huge as Skyrim complete hand-crafted would be a mission. The Daedra quests are pretty cool, though I wonder if there are any future repercussions to currying favour with them - I expect not, but would be cool if there were.

As in, how many different fun ways of fighting are there in Oblivion or Skyrim? ANd that's important to replayability because you spend most of your time fighting.

I feel like there's really only one fun character you can play in Oblivion and Skyrim, and that's sneak+bow+either illusion or conjuration. Possibly mix it up with alteration and destruction. Alchemy, enchanting & smithing is great fun but doesn't actually effect what you're doing in combat where you spend 80% of the gametime; straight up melee seems pretty boring because the fighting mechanism remains far inferior to Witcher or Gothic. It was a bit better in Morrowind because there were a lot more crazy things you could do with spells. I do plan to try a straight up fighter type, but not sure if it'll be fun.

Phineas Gage says hello.

Volo wins, again.

About 40-50 hours. I was really disappointed with Oblivion by this point, Skyrim is still pretty fun. I love the return of Dwemer ruins in some areas that really replicate the one step = you die feel you had in MW's ruins, at least on Master difficulty (though I don't know how this fits in lore-wise). I see some level scaling going on with bandit chiefs with glass daggers, etc, but it seems to be a bit more tailored than Oblivion so that at least they're not running around in full Ebony plate or something stupid. I've finished several guilds now and I thought the Mages' was humdrum, just forgettable - Thieves' was quite good though with a cool finale though it really needed more Garrett-ish thievery stuff in the middle as opposed to the stupid dungeoneering (are they even thinking about this? "Hey guys, 95% of our game is fighting in dungeons, so we should put some of that in our THIEVES GUILD questline too!"), Companions was OK. Currently doing Dark Brotherhood and Stormcloaks, which seem interesting thus far.

First Thanksgiving in America = school closed, everyone's left town, and water/electricity out tomorrow. Getting some work done and Skyrim.

I wouldn't mind that model for Obsidian. It would be nice if they had an IP and franchise of their own that sold well enough that they were able to have Chris Avellone, Josh Sawyer, etc work on successive iterations and really get things right, without juggling multiple projects and schedules and going from one borrowed IP to another.

I'm not sure what to think about Skyrim's dialogue. I think it's a lot better than Oblivion, and in some cases I'm quite satisfied with what they've managed to do. Most important is that I think they've restored some of what was really special about Morrowind, which is that there's various versions of the truth and so NPCs are real actors who speak what they believe, not a "Truth/Lie" toggle relative to a global player-oriented lore, which is of course what made Oblivion so artificial. Skyrim doesn't do it consistently like MW does (Vivec, books, etc), but I liked what they did with the different kinds of conversations you get/overhear re. Whiterun's Jarl and Windhelm's Ulfric, and that again in relation to, say, the Solitude palace mage's take. Of course, that is punctuated by occasional bits of Oblivionish stupid nonsense, usually in minor quests, and also I think the quality of the prose itself is not great, so it's really boring when they do long, drawn out cutscene dialogues that you can't skip - e.g. Ulfric and Galmar taking 30 sentences to say what should really have been 5, or pre-battle speeches on various occasions where you need to sit and hear them whine on and on. I guess they were going for realism and portraying how people with hats on can never know when to shut up. In terms of writing/plot/quest design widely speaking, I'm not sure yet, and I haven't taken any storyline to anywhere near conclusion except the Companions, which was so-so. I'm hoping that the factional divisions and the dilemma over the future of Nords/Skyrim gets a good treatment, but I'm also expecting that, true to Bethesda's writing style, halfway through you'll just realize everything was a conspiracy from the evil Thalmor/whoever and there is a clear Good and Evil and you just need to get a Deus Ex Machina to make it all right. Oh, I really liked the little touch where you help the crazy man on the road with his stupid box, and

Great, the game must have patched / tried to patch without me knowing, and now Skyrim.exe is gone. Thank you Steam.

There are some instances where you are stunned or disoriented - e.g. the ground shock of a giant's attack, enemy power attacks. But yes, melee combat I always felt was rather dull in MW/OB/Skyrim.

I'm using the above UI now, as well as an alternative font (which makes a huge improvement to the whole We Copy Apple UI art style).

I don't know. I felt all the running back and forth Morrowind required was only excusable because of how great the atmosphere was - and even then, if you walked for 15 minutes then got killed by a cliff racer, #@#*(&$. Abusing FT too much really ruins the game though, because you essentially plop yourself down in the middle of a totally disconnected piece of landscape. It's impossible to get immersion because you're not exploring, you're just running through a series of disconnected, self-contained maps like you would in counter-strike multiplayer or something. I tend to run around everywhere on foot, then use FT once I'm not seeing anything new in the area.

Because a single pirate will probably try 20 times to play multiplayer. Not great stats.

No, he was all the more hateable for that ending because you feel like you've just had to roleplay an immature eight year old. So much time, head-grabbing, angst, yelling, special effects and dramatic music goes into a totally juvenile self-realization. It's like one of those people who are really Serious Business about how nobody appreciates him and he hates everybody, but actually, he's just a lazy self-centered poo-poo that just needs to grow up a little.

I still don't have a good way of handling more than one cave bear or snow bear. In fact, even one is trouble. I've just found the mysterious forge thing below though, and it looks like I might be able to mix up a tome for frost/storm atronach, which should help.

Level 25. Finally visited Windhelm, not bad but there doesn't seem to be a lot of things to do here. Maybe I'll find out more - I wonder if I need to advance the MQ to get civil war stuff going. Killed a dragon when it came down in Winterhold and it was more effort to run away. Dragons are boring as hell. They're not scary - a sabre cat is more lethal. They take ages flying around and around. They give no sense of accomplishment because it's just wait, fire bow/magic, repeat. Maybe it'll be slightly better with melee characters, but... as usual, the most hyped part of a game is the stupidest.

Thief 2 seems to break in different ways every time I try to get it running. I wouldn't mind a properly packaged compatible version that I can buy off GOG, though I almost never repurchase games.

I liked 8 but it was the first RPG I played in my life so that has something to do with it. 6, 7 and 9 are the golden boys, really. I think 9 was the best constructed game in terms of features, balance, etc - it has everything good about the proper FFs before they turned too far to Linear Cinematic Emo-Drama.

Showracemenu's main problem is it resets your stats in crazy ways as well. I played around with it early on but Oblivion's tilde+ESC combo to bypass this does not work, so I just started a new character. No doubt somebody will find a way to make it work, though. I've also been pretty happy with level scaling. I'm level 24 now and I'm finding that in areas nearer the center I still come across new dungeons where I can happily one-shot people with sneak+bow or they're low level enough I can cast fury on all of them and watch them duke it out. Whereas it looks like some areas use animals as a natural deterrence - e.g. . I can't say for sure until I experiment with different characters, but for now that seems quite nice.

Are you guys trying to argue with the Volo?

Making kimchi 'properly' is a mission. It takes experienced moms days of work, which, from what I see, mostly involves heavy duty wrestling with large units of cabbage. There's a lot of different types - in Korea there are weird ones like crab-kimchi-soup-thing (which is actually nice and not crazy like it sounds), cold kimchi soup that's not spicy at all, etc. I buy mine and make stuff with it. It's great how many Korean dishes are pretty much "add x with kimchi, let cook". Speaking of curry, I may be in India next month.

The Thieves Guild was very good in Oblivion - the Dark Brotherhood in Obv had its moments but the plot was terribly emo-goth, the TG plot had a major consistency failure but was actually interesting and the quests were, too. I'm still in the early stages of the TG for Skyrim and have yet to meet the DB, so I don't know. There's been a mix - the more hand-crafted quests are impressive so far (only just about to infiltrate ) but the random ones really look filler.

I love curry and can make it pretty decently, but it just takes too long to let it cook properly. And then, the smell...

My ultimate back up plan for enemies way out of my league: muffle + paralysis potion + 15x dagger backstab. If they can't be sneaked upon it's Flame Atronach and a lot of running around. This happens quite ofteno n Master.