A night in Tameril

Blessed Oblivion how do I love thee.  

So the newest and greatest of the video games was release yesterday. I have been waiting for this for some time. Oblivion is the 4th game in the Elder Scrolls series. It is a very wide opened game, you can choose to follow the main story/quest line, but there is a multitude of exploring and secondary quest lines… become the head of the Mage’s Guild. Defeat a thieving ring etc, etc.  The world allows you to explore at your own pace. It also allows one of the most flexible class creation systems I have seen. Instead of your standard fighter, mage, thief (which you can choose if you want) you can combine different skill set together into you own class… Currently I am playing a Destruction (combat) based mage, with light armour, a sword and stealth abilities.

Since I have not purchased a new video game in about 18 months I treated myself to both the collector’s edition of the game and the strategy guide. I do not get grief from my wife about spending since I have been a good boy over the last couple of years, however, apparently buying a video game before your birthday is not a good idea. Seriously though, how could she expect me to wait another 3 weeks that would be torture.

I patiently waited for the early evening hours to pass. I was a good father and did not dwell on the package that was waiting for me in the den… I did not make excuses and spent a good quality evening with the boys, not rushing them to bed( as much as I wanted to go and play). I did sneak in to install the game earlier, but that was only 2 minutes of click, click and then walk away and let it install( I love games on DVD, no switching cds anymore) . As part of savoring the experience when I did make it downstairs I did not jump into the game, but made a pot of decaf and sat back and read the manual and the character creation section of the strategy guide.

Then when I had digested the information and the suspense was too much I fired up the game… I watched the opening credits, the introductory cinematic… the main game page and the menu started to load, the immersion was complete and then boom…

Crash to the desktop. The game exploded. Grrr no surprise as this tends to happen with all of the Elder Scrolls games…but it did piss me off.

Over the course of the night I had 2 more crashes, once during character creation and another around midnight, which I figure was a sign that I needed to go to bed….

While Wednesday is usually spousal snuggle time I think I may write a rain check to the wife and once more head into the realms of Oblivion.