>A note for those who don't care about video games...
why the hell are you here? Go see if you can find the archive page, there's enough interesting tidbits from when my life was exciting to keep you occupied while everyone else reads about video games.

I am going game crazy lately, I picked up a copy of Oblivion over the weekend. Jay had gotten it for XBOX360 on Saturday when Nicole and I stopped by. It had just come out, and it looked and sounded amazing. It was really made for the console and the optimization shines on the 360. At that point I didn’t even know they made it for PC, but when we stopped at Target later in the day I saw it. The special edition (that someone had opened) for less then the normal version.
I was all for it with a little prodding from Nicole – apparently she wants to play too =)
Check out the review and notice the difference between the
XBOX screenshots and the PC screenshots. There’s a lot more smoothing in the XBOX, and it’s almost shinier. The PC does HDI lighting (and I’m assuming the 360 does as well), which makes everything glow with life. I’ve seen HDI lighting in nVidia demos, but not in an actual game yet. I’m very impressed with the effect, but the game won’t let you enable both – I just have to figure out if the card really isn’t capable, or if that’s to prevent people from crashing their system if they don’t have SLi. Since I do, I’m going to give the system settings a shot – make it do antialiasing via the drivers in addition to the HDI. It needs a little smoothing to look as good as the XBox, and it could possibly bennefit from a higher resolution.
They keep making the games more and more complex, and other then adding another gig of RAM I haven’t done anything to the same computer from a year ago. I’m amazed at how well the FX can handle stuff. It’s always running at 100% usage, but hardly see a stutter even when looking at these huge landscapes. I look forward to turning up the shadows and draw distance on the grass and trees. Looking out over a mountain, watching the grass move in unison with the wind is an extraordinary sight. I’ve never seen such beatiful scenery in an actual game. My thoughts go back to the 3D Mark benchmark “Nature” which shows a very detailed scene with waving leaves… this leaves them all behind.

I could rant on how it looks forever, but the big item here is how it plays. It’s like no role playing game. I don’t think I’ve ever used a sword in first person, and it’s awesome. You have a real block, and choose to play it however you’d like. You can dodge by jumping back, to the sides, or hold up your shield (if you have one) otherwise it results in a parry. You get a sense of what is too much for you right away. More then one person, or a skilled magician is often a handfull at first, and that’s as far as I’ve gotten, so can’t get into how it progresses.
The first hour or so walks you through the game, a quick tutuorial piece here and there, shoot arrows, pick locks, and loot bodies. At the end of it all it suggests a class depending on how you’ve played the game so far. You can also create your own class with a combination of 2 skills, and 7 abilities to choose what you want to specialize in. Every class can you every skill, but the class really defines what you’re best at. It’s so well done, I’m quite engrossed thus far and hardily recommend it.

I was talking to Matt (swears by WOW, and can’t go back to non MMORPG) and he brought up the interesting point that though you could get all this gold and treasure and such, what’s the point? Who’s there to see it?
I really couldn’t think of a good retort at the time, but maybe it’s just that “back in the day” when there was no online, you played for the sake of having fun, exploring, discovering new creatures, items, and talking to people. The NPCs are for information only, and many will often offer quests. It’s just fun, and I don’t feel the pressure of online, neither by peer or wallet. It’s a one time fee, and from the looks of it there are many plugins created by users – new armour, new weapons, quests, and lands as well. Where you can’t really compare apples to apples against Warcraft, it’s probably one of the best standalone experiences you can have.
New content is the major difference. WOW is a constantly changing world, but it takes so much time to be better then everyone else. In standalone, you start a hero, you end a king. Play it how you want, and experience the different aspects of each class.

I’ve never been one to play a game over and over. I don’t play it again in hard mode after beating it, and I’ve never had a real role playing game. I used to play MUDs, I played Bard’s Tale (original VGA version), but they never held my attention until the end.
This is the RPG to sway those that don’t like RPGs.