A Few Hours in Skyrim
I have never cared much for dragon-slaying, wizards and warlocks and all that stuff, preferring instead to visit the future and fly to the stars. But I might just change my mind about fantasy settings thanks to Skyrim, the fifth and latest of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls role playing games for the PC and consoles. It’s not only the first Elder Scrolls game that I’ve played for more than a few days without losing interest, it’s also among the best games I’ve played in the last year.
Once, many moons ago, I wrote a review of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, which at the time was a brand new fantasy role-playing game from Bethesda and the fourth in a long-running series. Although the review reads as a fairly glowing account of the game, I am here to report to you — only six years after the fact — that I grew bored with it after a couple of weeks (maybe 20 hours of gameplay, if that?) and loaned the game to a friend. I never got it back. In fact, since my friend took it with him to China, I think it’s on the other side of the world now. It should speak volumes about my feelings toward the game that this doesn’t bother me.
This past fall, the next chapter in the Elder Scrolls game series, entitled Skyrim, arrived. It was heralded by weeks, if not months, of pre-release hype and anticipation. Since the new game’s formula looked appreciably similar to Oblivion, and I’ve always much preferred sci-fi/cyberpunk games to medieval fantasy games, I decided to ignore it. But over Christmas my curiosity (and all the praise on the Internet) got the better of me, so, with a gift card I received for the holiday, I purchased a copy of Skyrim for the Xbox 360. Could it hold my interest longer than Oblivion?
So far, it has — and at level 24, I’m easily twice as deep into Skyrim than I ever was into Oblivion. In fact, there hasn’t been another disc in my Xbox’s drive since Skyrim took up residence. Although it’s really the same type of game with its hub-based, open-world exploratory RPG model, somehow Skyrim and Oblivion feel like very different games. In Skyrim, I have yet to encounter a single quest, boss fight or gameplay trope that has irritated or bored me. Contrast this to the sealing of Oblivion gates in the previous game, a recurring boss-style task so frustrating and annoying that it served as the final death knell for my interest in continuing to play. Skyrim’s equivalent, if it can be called that, are its dragon battles, which come off as the complete opposite: challenging without being cheap or hair-pulling, epic in importance and effect, and very personal to your character. In other words, fun. You know, what games are supposed to be?
In fact, my experience with Skyrim has been so enjoyable that I daresay this will be the first fantasy RPG that I intend to play through to completion. And that says a lot coming from a guy who actually finishes maybe 10-15% of the games he buys, for a variety of reasons I won’t go into — not the least of which is being unable to afford the luxury of the time commitment necessary to do so.
Abandon Ship
The topic I was discussing in my last entry — which marked the unheralded return of the Oddball Oddcast in a pared-down form — was not really done being hashed out in my head at the time I posted it. Shortly after I recorded those oh-so-scintillating 12 minutes of gabbling about the MMORPG Star Trek Online, I finally decided that I was gonna blow some walking-around money and get the “Original Series Bundle” through the game’s online store.
The “TOS Bundle”, as it’s called, would have given my in-game character the ability to walk around the original Enterprise bridge and interior, several classic TOS uniforms to wear, the TOS-style Type II phaser, and a classic shuttlecraft to…do something with, I guess. Maybe crash-land on a planet of big hairy trolls, or fly into the maw of a planet-killer. Even if I never would up getting much further in the game than I did during the beta, it would be cool for a little while.
However, apparently the makers of Star Trek Online are not very interested in taking my money, despite the incredibly big show they make of it. And this, I discovered, was only the first of many reasons why I now feel increasingly compelled to just stay away from this game.
Oddcast 1/11/2012: Star Trek Online
This episode of the Oddball Oddcast discusses Star Trek Online, soon to relaunch under a free-to-play model, and the nigh-uncontrollable compulsion I feel to play it despite having very little time or appetite for MMOs. Which half of my personality will win out: the dyed-in-the-wool Trekkie, or the busy dad with no patience for online buffoonery?
Sacred: A Mainstream Gamer’s Medieval RPG
My friends will tell you that I’m not much for medieval PC RPGs like Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind. I’m more of a mainstream FPS gamer who likes your run-of-the-mill Dooms, Half-Lives, and all that other crap. But even I can get into a good medieval RPG if it’s accessible enough, and that’s where Sacred comes in.
Sacred, by German developer Ascaron, is an RPG for the masses. It approaches gameplay in a manner very similar to Dungeon Siege or Diablo, which means that everyone and their mother can figure out how to play this game without much trouble. At the same time, it’s a stunningly pretty and graphically rich little number, with a very good English translation (none of the usual “Engrish” hiccups), very good voice acting, addictive gameplay and mechanics that are easy to grasp. If you have a hard time figuring this game out, then “there’s really something wrong with you and you’re different and strange.” (Quoth the Doom II v1.666 post-game splash screen.)
I’ve only just begun my quest in Ancaria (the name of the gameworld), but I’ve got a good taste for the game already and I can tell that there’s going to be a huge replayability factor due to the way the characters are set up. I’ll touch on some of the stuff I’ve learned along the way, as well as submit to you a gallery of screenshots I took during my last session. Hopefully all of this will aid you in deciding whether Sacred is a game you want to spend your hard-earned dollars on!
