Fus Ro Dah!

The beauty of neglecting to update your blog with any sort of consistency is that when something exciting happens there's no real drive to follow any thin veneer of consistency.

Skyrim:
Skyrim is rocking my world. Much like it's rocking the world of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of other people.

This image no doubt depicts a character in Skyrim having a friendly chat with an undead sorcerer. "Chatting" has lethal results when you talk in dragon speak. The player can learn to speak in dragon language and these "words of power" all have unique magic-like effects and where from slowing down time, or summoning animal companions to, my personal favorite, unrelenting force. This causes your character to project a powerful shockwave throwing anyone unfortunate enough to be in front of you while you scream nonsense words into the air. Ideally, the unfortunate enemy ( or friend, or horse, or bunny) will be standing on the edge of a massive cliff, but one can't always be so fortunate.
     Excluding the chronic poor choices of playing various MMOs, Oblivion (precursor to Skyrim) is the game that holds the title of Most Hours Played (in a single play through anyway), so I was eagerly awaiting the release of Skyrim. I queued up at my dubious local GameStore I looked upon dozens of crazies who came out to pick up a video game at midnight! Get a life! So I got my copy around 1 AM. And what a night I had!

Skyrim has delivered in every way I wanted to, and more-or-less no ways I didn't want it to. The previous Elder Scroll games were very micro-manage-y about how you built your character and you could "screw up" your character by poor choices leveling and allocating skills. Skyrim has simplified the system quite a bit. If I absolutely had to lob a criticism it would be that through their attempt to simplify the leveling system we lost some of my favorite skills, such as acrobatics (jumping really high) and athletics (running a long time and fast). And I'm not trying to convey this as some mythical "perfect game". It's buggy as hell. I've encountered some disappointing boss fights where what should have been an epic battle (with me dying alot) turned into the boss running around like a maniac, but refusing to actually attack me as I planted my sword into his head over and over again. All in all though, this has all the trappings of being a new favorite game for me.