There's a Point, But I'm Not Going to Tell You What It Is

You may have noticed that I haven't been posting. There are several things that I could blame this on: lack of things to write about, homework, rediscovering the wonders of social interaction. I should blame it on general apathy, because there's no reason why I can't just StumbleUpon something and pretend it's relevant, like I always do.

What I'm going to blame it on is Oblivion, because it's the Best. Game. Ever.

I mean that. I really do. Normally, I'm not much of a CRPG fan. They tend to compare poorly with the tabletop experience. Wasn't impressed by Neverwinter Nights, wasn't even particularly impressed by Morrowind. (The Morrowind thing may have been a matter of perception and timing, a theory I plan to test this weekend by re-experiencing it.)

I'm not even much of a gamer. I've played Sim games, but those don't really count. Diablo 2, Jak and Daxter. SSX. That's about it. I dabble, mostly because I have friends who are gamers. I tend to be bad at them, so it takes real effort for me to get into one. (You ever hear the Jak 2 MISSION FAILED screen? Every five seconds? For twenty minutes? My gaming experience in a nutshell.)

And then I played Oblivion.

I've actually wanted it, badly, since I first heard about it, way before it came out. It just sounded cool. It was going to have erosion, for crying out loud. (Don't think it actually does, in the release, but this was pre-game buzz.) Then it actually came out, and it turned out that my video card was about a million years too old to play it, and then it turned out that to get a decent video card I'd need to get a new motherboard, and if I was going to get a new motherboard . . . well . . . my computer was really okay for everything I already did, and I wasn't much of a gamer, anyway.

So then, I got the laptop, and one of my first thoughts was: must have Oblivion now. (My actual first thought was: I never need be away from the internet ever again.)

So now I'm finally playing it. And it's awesome. On so many levels. I've spent the entire weekend playing it, I've got several friends who are playing it, and anytime my brain has thirty seconds of downtime I'm thinking about it.

I spent a few weeks playing it semi-casually, fiddling with it when I had a bit of spare time. Then I started doing the main quest, and that really grabbed me, in a way that I've only been grabbed by a few things in my entire life. (One of those things was DragonballZ, but we're not going to talk about that.) And now that I'm out of that, I'm playing the game "as it was meant to be played," by wandering around at random, doing things, and I'm having an unbelievably good time doing that.

Now, I had a point to all this. I found me a new blog. Yes, indeed. And I really should explain why all that was relevant, and link to the part of that blog that I'm actually interested in, and talk about why Oblivion is so awesome, and what's so cool about the main quest, but, y'know, it's late. And this post is long enough as it is.

So instead of writing about all that now, I'm going to do something incredibly lame. I'm going to promise to post about that, tomorrow. Or quite possibly the next day. Because, really, what this blog needs is a few good cliffhangers.