Demon's Winter: The Main Quest At Last

The main quest finally surfaces.

The ruined temple, which I had just entered at the end of my last posting, turned out to serve up the main quest. First, I witnessed an ancient conversation, replayed between two ghosts. One ended up sacrificing the other to his "god," who was stuck in a dormant volcano. I accidentally skipped part of the conversation, but the neat thing is that the game has a "(r)ead description" command that lets you re-view any text you encounter; sort-of a spiritual ancestor to games that let you re-watch cut scenes.

I'm sick of CRPG NPCs calling me "fools."

Soon I ran into Jesric of the High Temple of Malifon (the name making its appearance in-game for the first time) who said he was seeking the Demon Crystal. (Thanks, Jesric! I wouldn't have even known to look for it otherwise!) He attacked me by himself, and I was able to use my "surround him with my four best fighters and pummel him to death" strategy. He served up a lot of experience (1000) for not being so tough, plus a "heavy amulet."

If you could only attack diagonally in this game, Clinscho would have something to do.

A nearby cave contained a "prayer scroll," and towards the bottom of the dungeon, I found an ice door with a hole in it, which turned out to accept the icicle I had found yesterday. This teleported me to an altar room, where using the prayer scroll summoned an ancient god who gave me the main quest.

Could they have been a little more descriptive about "drawings of the creation of the universe"?

It transpires that some beings or gods called Ancients imprisoned Malifon under the mountain with a spell. The spell weakened over time, and with "outside help" (presumably Lanfear and the other Forsaken), the spell has been broken. Unless he is bound again, he will "sweep Ymros clean of life." Fortunately, an ancient order called the White Knights created an Orb of Great Power that can channel the One Power of the Ancients and create a new binding. I needed to go get it from the Vault of the White Knights.

I had done pretty poorly on my first trip to the Vault, which was only one level ago, so I decided to hang around a port town and do some level-grinding, alternating between ship combats (which give the most experience but no gold) and land combats (which give paltry experience but are the only way to get gold). The number of experience points needed to advance ended up getting so large, though (>10,000) that after a couple of hours, I had only gained one level. Fortunately, it was enough to get Fire Runes for my wizard (at last) and get one of my other characters skilled in Spirit Runes so I have two healers.

A gleeman recounts my past glories.

I also explored a huge continent on the western side of the map that, near as I could tell, had only a couple towns and a dungeon and otherwise mostly empty space. Like Faery Tale Adventure, the game brags about its size ("32 times larger than Shard of Spring," the manual says), but like Faery Tale Adventure, I find the world to be mostly empty and boring. To be fair, the enemies change with the terrain, which would be a positive if the enemies themselves were more memorable.

Returning to the Vault of the White Knights

Even though I didn't feel quite ready, my crew headed back to the Vault of the White Knights to obtain this Orb. The Vault was the largest and most interesting dungeon in the game so far. A spirit guarding the Orb of Evertime told me that I needed to pass a number of tests to prove myself worthy of it.


     
The tests all involved single combat for each of my five characters against a foe specific to that character. My wizard had to fight an imp, my barbarian a dragon, my monk a "karate master," and so on. None of them was terribly difficult, except for the ranger, who isn't very skilled at...well, anything.


     
There were rooms for characters I don't have, and the spirits in those rooms just "let me pass." I'm curious what foes the game would have provided for scholars and visionaries. At the end of the combats, the spirit let me march up and take the Orb.

Except for one battle with some high-level magic users, the game didn't throw many tough combats at me, meaning my first visit must have been a fluke. I should have held to my old Might & Magic credo: wait until an area kills you three times before you declare defeat.

Next up, I guess, is a trip back to the ruined temple so I can give the Orb to the ancient god.

A few other miscellaneous things:

• The day/night cycle is starting to annoy me a bit. Every 200 moves or so, the game world closes in on you to simulate getting dark, and the game forces you to camp and sleep. Triple that number of moves would have been nicer.
• I just discovered today that you can flee combat. I did it accidentally, while moving a character near the edge of the screen. This will make traveling by ship a little more feasible.
• Of my five characters, the most useless is probably my ranger. His hunting ability became moot once I started to make money, and his vaunted "monster lore" ability is really pretty useless. He sucks in combat (partly because I didn't hold out for a high strength score). If I wasn't so far into the game, I'd ditch him for another monk.

Presumably, this is to help you plan your battle tactics, but I haven't found much use for it.

• Getting the Kung-Fu skill turned my monk into a real bad-ass. Now he ends up stunning his opponent on about 30% of his hits.
• Enemy spellcasters keep freezing my characters, a condition that lasts permanently until you cast the "melt" spell, which I didn't have until after the ruined temple because I didn't save enough intelligence points to get my wizard Fire Runes. Every freezing means a trip back to a town with a healer. Another common problem is to be bound in chains, the antidote to which is a "break bonds" spell, but it's part of Metal Runes, which I also don't have.
• Final judgment: there are a random number of moves in between land battles but a fixed number in between dungeon battles.
• A weird buggish thing: when I enter a dungeon, only the few squares around me are visible, presumably because it's "dark" and the game wants me to use a torch or a "magic torch" spell. But if I just go into camp and exit again, everything is lit up and visible.
• A few times, when desperate, my monk has prayed to his god. Not once has this had any results. The game manual and all the churches in the game make a lot out of a religious system that has virtually no effect in terms of actual game play.

I wish I had some idea of where I stood in terms of total game progress. In some ways, I feel like I'm just beginning, but there aren't that many dungeons on the map!

One final, somewhat amusing, note: although I've done surprisingly well following my rules (especially the no spoilers rule), today I found myself exercising an obvious loophole. My rules say that I can't quit and reload just because I don't like a certain result. If a character dies in battle, I need to raise him myself, have him raised in a town, or replace him. Naturally, this is something of a pain in the neck when it happens deep in a dungeon.

If my entire party dies, on the other hand, not much choice there. I need to reload. You can see where this is going. If a battle goes poorly and I lose a couple of characters, suddenly my other characters lack a certain motivation for victory. You could even say that their depression makes them distressingly suicidal. This hasn't cropped up in a lot of other games because most of them are either single-character or limited-save. In Might & Magic, when I could only save in towns, it was always worth it to haul dead characters back to a temple, lest I lose all that adventuring time. But in games where you can save every step, like Demon's Winter, the dynamic changes.

In modern games, like Oblivion and Baldur's Gate, I get around the problem by forcing myself to only use auto-saves. If the last auto-save was 30 minutes ago, no way am I going through all that again just to avoid spending the 3000 gold to raise Jaheira. In this era, without auto-saves, I either have to establish a rule limiting my saves or just force myself to try to keep my party alive, no matter how convenient it would be if they all died.

Demon's Winter: Exploration

My crew turns out to be a bunch of sissies.

    

In my last posting, things looked pretty bleak. It turned out I underestimated my ability to escape the dungeon, heal up, and return. I noted that there's a random encounter every 43 moves, but they vary wildly in difficulty. The difficult ones killed me and caused me to reload; the easy ones I defeated and was able to save. When I got out of the dungeon, two of my characters were dead, but I was able to make my way up to the town of Woodhaven, heal, rise a level, and return. This time Xerxes fell in the first battle, and only my wizard died, costing another 900 gold to resurrect. 

       

I was tempted to declare "Won!" at this point.

        

As far as my characters were concerned, they had won, defeating the demon that had unleashed the kobolds on their home town. Only an old man's warning that Xerxes was just a "puppet" kept us from celebratory feasts. 

          

I was pretty flush with cash, so I treated myself with some weapon and armor upgrades. This would be a good time to mention that I really dislike the inventory system in this game. When you find objects, they are unidentified, and unless you have someone with the identify item skill, you have to take it to a town and pay 85 gold to get it identified. Even the identify skill doesn't much help because it only works once per day. Most of the stuff is nonmagical, meaning the identify fee is a waste of money. When you've identified a magic weapon or armor, the game doesn't change its name to something like "short sword +2"; instead, it puts a little * symbol next to it and you have to go into camp, view the character, page through to his equipment, then select the particular piece of equipment to see what it actually is. 

     

Unmemorable symbols designate magic items.

           

At this point, I had no idea where to go next in my quest, so I started sailing around to the different islands, exploring, and getting into high-experience-winning sea battles. I leveled up a couple of times. I finally found the college of fire runes, but they told me my wizard wasn't smart enough. That hurts.

      

Where I grew up, we'd kill a man for saying that.

           

On a large island in the northeast, I found the College of Kung-Fu and gave a boost to my monk's fighting skills. I also found the College of Spirit Runes nearby. My wizard had started with spirit runes, and I had hoped when I found it I could give the skill to some of my other characters--they all have spell points, and nothing to cast with them. Alas, none of them had the requisite intellect. 

     

I wasn't ready for this place.

          

Close to the College of Spirit Runes, on a mountainous island, I found a dungeon called the Vault of the White Knights. Figuring any port in a storm, I started exploring it, and I promptly got massacred by a large party of mountain giants. 

     

This is about as bleak as it gets.

            

I kept exploring west and I came across another dungeon called The Crystal Cave, "carved out of a large glacier at the base of the mountain." A few steps into it, I figured I'd again stumbled into the wrong place: 

             

But the ice dragon turned out to be surprisingly easy. Beyond him, I found the College of Ice Runes, which I didn't need, and in another corridor of the dungeon--past an easy battle with a yeti--I found an icicle. There seems to be no place to use it in this dungeon, so I stuck it in my inventory, which is just about bursting with stuff I've picked up from various dungeons. I'm not sure what I can safely get rid of. A nearby island gave me the town of Aurora, which unfortunately doesn't have a dock; my ship is dangerously low on health, and I'm at the north pole. And a third island in the area held a ruined temple, where my party explores as I say goodnight. Hint time: was there something I was supposed to find in Qoorik that would tell me where to go next? (I left the place with a ton of equipment I never got a chance to use.) As far as I know, the main quest (the Demon's Winter) still hasn't started.

The Most Annoying CRPG Enemies

#1

        

I've made some progress in Demon's Winter, but not enough for a full posting. This "special topic" occurred to me in my Oblivion thread when I was talking about Morrowind's cliff racers. I'll update it as I go through future games, but based on the games I've already played, these are the creatures that make me long for NetHack's Scroll of Genocide.

1. Reapers (Ultima IV)
         

         
The reapers in Ultima IV have a spell that puts your entire party to sleep, and they use it over and over and over. "But I have an (A)waken spell!" you say. You fool. The spell only awakens one party member at a time, and by that time the reaper's put your entire party to sleep again.

This would be forgivable, maybe, if reapers were otherwise challenging, but their regular attack is so pathetic that there would be no reason not to set up camp right next to a reaper. In fact, if you could capture one, they might come in handy. Take it out of its sack at night, let it put everyone to sleep, and enjoy it's occasional tickle as you dream. Mothers would say, "Oh, honey, you can't sleep? Let me get the reaper out of the attic."

Their only purpose is to slow you down; to make you take baby steps through the room before you can finally get in weapon range. The room above, which had nine reapers, took me 45 minutes. Jackasses.

2. Sprites (Might & Magic I)
             

          
Sprites love to roam the corridors of Sorpigal, the starting city in Might & Magic, and if you encounter a pack of them before you hit Level 4, you might as well shut down the game and reload. Their special ability is a "curse" spell that lowers your chances of hitting them, and when they cast these spells en masse, you can't hit anything. Only when you get spells that affect entire groups of monsters do they stop being a threat. Centaurs are almost as bad, but by the time you start encountering them, you have better defenses.

3. Gigglers (Dungeon Master)
        

          
Everything about these little thieving bastards is annoying, from the shuffle of their feet as they approach from behind to the annoying sound they make [MP3 link] as they steal your stuff and go scampering off into some dark corner. Eager not to lose your prized Sword of Whatever, you go charging after them, falling into traps, encountering foes you didn't expect, getting lost, only to finally run into them, have them steal something else, and go running off again. The only solution I found was to keep a couple of fireballs handy and loose them at the moment of their approach.
             
4. Flying Eyes (Might & Magic VI)
           

           
Technically, this is a class of creatures, including flying eyes, terrible eyes, and maddening eyes. The last name is best, though it would be better if they'd called them drive-you-insane-and-make-you-want-to-smash-your-computer eyes. How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways: you stay out of melee weapon range; you keep moving, so missile weapons and spells usually miss you; you have a spell that cancels every single one of my spells, and you don't even have to hit me with it; indeed, you can even cast said spell through walls, so that the merest hint of your presence on a level above or below me, or through a wall adjacent to me, will send me spinning into the dark with no protection. Your ranged attacks turn my characters insane. And there are about 600 of you in Castle Darkmoor; clearing the castle literally takes a day of game time.

One of the greatest pleasures of Might & Magic VI is returning to Castle Darkmoor once it's respawned and you've achieved mastery of blaster rifles.
         
5. Cliff Racers (Morrowind)
          

           
These relentless @#^*$s are near-legendary: The way they tail you from above and suddenly descend without warning; the way they pile up on top of each other so suddenly you're facing eight of them; their heart-stopping screech; and most of all, the way they chase you tirelessly across the entire island of Vvardenfell. They're everywhere. You literally cannot outrun them. (If you're very lucky, you might be able to trap one behind a fallen branch and make your getaway.) If you encounter one as a low-level character with waning health, you'd better hope you have a teleport scroll, or you might as well lie down. They'll even follow you into towns, mercilessly attacking guards and citizens, sometimes killing quest-dependent characters. Oh, and they have a reasonably good chance of giving you blight disease!

Their only saving grace is their racer plumes, which you need for levitation potions.

The Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages notes that "the development team has admitted the sheer amount of cliff racers in the game was a mistake." No kidding. In Oblivion, there's a reference to "St. Jiub, who drove the cliff racers from Vvardenfell." Jiub is the Dunmer who you encounter in the ship at the very beginning of the game. I'd love to replay Morrowind as him rather than the Nerevarine.
         
6. Beholders (Baldur's Gate II)
        

          
Man, these guys are tough. You encounter them by the dozens during one of the quests, and they blast you with rapid-fire damage, petrification, and death spells. They also have an annoying habit of ignoring your summoned creatures. Your only defense is to seriously buff your lead character and send him gingerly forward while everyone else rains missile weapons at them.

Late in the game, you get a cloak of mirroring that turns their own spells back at them. The character wearing it can stroll through a beholder dungeon, letting all of them slay themselves, collecting all their experience, without having to lift a finger. They're either bloody impossible or no challenge at all. That's what we call "bad balance."

7. Barrow Wights* (Icewind Dale: Heart of Winter)

  
The opening sections of the Heart of Winter expansion to Icewind Dale have a host of creatures that are good candidates for this list, including wailing virgins (spirits who decimate you with magic while hovering just outside of attack range) and drowned dead (nearly impossible to damage). But barrow wights have to be the worst. When you first encounter, them, they are way overpowered. A single wight can tear apart your entire party if you encounter him unprepared, and they move at double-time, so you can't outrun them.

Fighting them is like preparing for Waterloo. You buff the hell out of your characters.You set any traps you have. You summon as many creatures as the game will let you summon. You cast "haste" on your party. You slowly advance forward, keeping your summoned creatures ahead of you, until one sees you. If you're lucky, he charges your summoned creatures while you pummel him with arrows, spells, and magic items. In a few seconds, your summoned beasts have been turned to vapor. Hopefully, by the time he comes in melee range, he's either badly wounded or almost dead. He takes your lead character down to 1/4 hit points before you finally kill him. You stand over his corpse, arrows running low, spells spent, exhausted from the "haste" spell wearing off. Congratulations: you've killed one. There's like 25 more.

(*The original posting had "cold wight" here, which is a separate creature in the game that I confused with barrow wights. Thanks to an anonymous commenter for pointing that out.)
   
8. Wisps (Ultima V and Oblivion).

     

Wisps are very different creatures in these two games, but they're infuriating in both of them. In Ultima V, they can possess your characters, which leaves you with no good options except to kill them. You can negate the possession with a "negate magic" spell, but the problem is that wisps hide out behind walls, and they need their magic abilities to teleport into range. Thus, if you have "negate magic" active, you can't fight them, and if you turn it off, you end up fighting your own characters.

      

The only thing worse than wisps is wisps AND sharks

.       

Oblivion's wisps are some of the toughest bastards in the game. They take very little damage from non-magic weapons and they cast continuous "drain health" at you, which not only depletes your health but regenerates theirs. It's possible to beat at one with a sword, axe, or mace for an hour, constantly refreshing your health and stamina with potions, and still have them at full health. The only solution is to charge them quickly with a magic weapon--shock works best--and whale at them before they can get a good rhythm going with their damage health spells.

The good news is they drop glow dust. I was always short on "light" potions.

   

These two games, however different their original treatment of wisps, have something in common: they both completely retcon wisps in later installments. In Ultima VI, they become telepathic communicators to another dimension, and in Skyrim, they become dangerous-but-nowhere-nearly-as-annoying emanations from a "wisp mother."

More annoying enemies added to this list as they occur to me!

Demon's Winter: A Slight Thaw

I don't like this guy.

   

When we last left Demon's Winter, I had finished two dungeons and I was a little uncertain about the game. But I was also exhausted, having just finished an entire month on the road, and my perception was a little skewed. Since then, I have warmed to the game a bit.

My next step was to travel to a dungeon called Qoorik on an island south of the mainland of Ymros. (I kept calling it Zoorik in the last posting; the odd game font is a bit confusing.) To get there, I needed to purchase a ship from one of the port cities. Once I had the ship, though, I was in no particular hurry to get to Qoorik, and I spent some time sailing around the game world and visiting various temples, and training guilds. There are a lot of temples in the game, which is odd given that they have such a limited purpose.

The world of Demon's Winter, courtesy of Andrew Schultz, who I talked about in a posting last year. I'm not 100% sure that a game map came with the game, so I might be viewing massive spoilers here.

There are a bunch of places to train, but with only a limited number of skills that each character can learn, I was a bit wary about spending any of my points. I had my paladin master fencing, I gave berserking to my barbarian, and my wizard mastered wind runes.

Is it just me, or does this sound a bit lewd?

    
On the sea, I was introduced to the joys of sea combat, which hasn't changed appreciably since Ultima II: I basically hit the (f)ire key and shoot at other ships and the occasional sea snake. These battles give an absurdly high amount of experience--at least 10 times the average land battle--but it comes a high cost. If the ship takes on too much damage, it sinks, so I have to repair it frequently, which costs a lot of gold. Some of the battles inexplicably take place in areas surrounded by walls, and if I miss the enemies, my cannonballs ricochet off the walls and smash back into my own ship! I fought on the sea until I was out of gold and then headed for Qoorik.

Bland but rewarding combat with pirate ships.

     
In a couple of towns, I got interesting hints about the main quest. I had thought that the game didn't reference Shard of Spring, but I was wrong:


       
The next town served up a reference to the villain in this game:
     

       
After reading both of these, I realized with a start that the main quest of Demon's Winter hasn't even begun! For all my characters know, they're just trying to figure out why the pack of goblins attacked Ildryn. In other words, the "Demon's Winter" of the title hasn't actually started. This comment by Giauz had gone over my head the first time I read it, but he's right. If SSI had made Baldur's Gate, they would have titled it Child of Bhaal.

Qoorik turned out to be invisible, but I knew where to look and ended up stumbling into it. The experience I got from ship combats served me well, as the dungeon knocked up the level of monsters significantly, throwing demons and high-level spellcasters at me. My wizard become essentially a healer only: I needed his healing spells too much to waste spell points on offensive spells. I had to resurrect characters a couple of times.

This troll turned out to be a lying bastard.

    
The dungeon was huge and multi-leveled, and I don't know if I explored all of it (I find it too hard and unrewarding to make maps for isometric games). Amidst a number of fixed encounters with Xeres's minions, I solved several inventory puzzles. A troll blacksmith game me a broad sword that he said was designed to kill Xeres, but when I had it identified in town, it turned out to be cursed. I found a black wand that I had to use on an archway to teleport between levels. A skeleton key opened a door in a crypt and took me to a shifting maze of tombstones that I had to navigate.


       
An old bookcase concealed a secret door that led to a skeleton holding a piece of paper that said "Ymros is Mine!" There were runes painted on the wall, that have the same number of characters: perhaps this is a code key for a later puzzle?


       
In another room, I found a bag, used it to scoop up some red dust that I then burned in a censer, and I got an image of a demon who said: "The father of demons sees all. Only those who possess the demon crystal can escape his sight." Other items I haven't figured out the use for, including a piece of papyrus, an ancient tome, vials of goblin's and unicorn's blood, and a microscope (it doesn't seem to do anything with the blood).

A Ouija board in a "gypsy room" told me to "walk along river Styx until you find the ferryman." I did that, and gave him some black coins I'd found to take me across a river. There, I encountered a tough battle with a "gravekeeper":

      
When I finally killed the gravekeeper and his minions, my characters were nearly dead and my spellcaster was out of spell points. I limped my way through a fire-shrouded maze and, at last, encountered Xeres, whose screen shot leads this posting. He slew me without much trouble--several times.

One thing hasn't changed from Shard of Spring, although in the first posting I thought it had: the game throws a "random" encounter at you every 43 movements, no exceptions. This makes it particularly hard if you're stuck deep in a dungeon with low hit points and spell points; you can't trust luck to carry you back to the exit. This is where I stand now: stuck between Xeres, who I can't defeat, and the long return to the entrance, which I can't make. I'm also almost out of food, so walking around and repeatedly resting isn't an option.

Though I'm not looking forward to starting over again, there are several things I've come to like about the game. The inventory puzzles have been intriguing and the encounters more memorable than in Shard of Spring. The dungeon was a fun challenge to navigate (though I wish I hadn't gotten myself stuck).

I'll keep throwing myself at Xeres and let you know what happens. I may have to start over. In the meantime, here's a video of my most successful battle against Xeres. You can see how combat works. The monsters move around the screen in odd patterns, making it tough to gang up and kill them one-by-one.

I actually managed to kill the demon himself, but his minions finished off my characters. I never got this close again in six or seven other combats. I suspect I erred in assuming that the cursed sword was a fake and tossing it; maybe it really was intended to kill Xeres.

Keep in mind, this is still the beginning of the game! I can't imagine it gets easier.

Game 1257: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

The answer to the question "Where the hell have you been for the last week?" is a funny one. (Unless you've been eagerly awaiting my next Demon's Winter posting, or my next Bard's Tale III posting, or my next any posting that re-establishes some kind of regularity and order to my blog.) Here it is: my CRPG addiction has been threatened...by my CRPG addiction.

Here's how it started. Five or six weeks ago, Irene (my wife) and I were looking for something to do on a Wednesday night, and she suggested that we go buy an X-box 360, having never upgraded our original X-box. She had read that you can get Netflix Instant Play on it, as well as stuff from Zune*, and anyway she likes games. Actually, to clarify: she likes watching me play games while she shouts helpful suggestions and looks up hints online.

Now, you hardcore gamers are thinking that I have the perfect wife, and I admit she can be pretty cool. But she only likes a small subset of games: cinematic, fairly linear, plot-heavy CRPGs with lots of dialog options, like Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire. This is great, because I like these games too, but frankly once you get past them there aren't many like them. I tried to show her Morrowind on the old X-box, but she was bored to tears with it.

So. We pop over to Gamestop (yes, I'm that square) and pick up the console and two games she likes the look of: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Lost Odyssey. I try to tell her that the Star Wars game isn't going to be like KOTOR, but she doesn't listen. We get back, and sure enough she soon gets tired of it when she realizes there are no dialog options. She likes Lost Odyssey a little better, but I don't. So we stop playing games for a few days and watch all the seasons of The Guild (great show; I should do a special topics posting on it later). Then, a few days later, she's reading X-box 360 game reviews online and says, "Have you ever heard of this Oblivion game?"

"I think I played it once a few years ago," I say, teetering on the verge of an outright lie and then finally going over the edge. "I didn't get very far." (She won't want to buy it if she knows I've won it three or four times.)

"It's supposed to be really good," she says. "But I guess it's a sequel, so maybe we should play the others first."

"The first two aren't available on the X-box and you wouldn't like them anyway," I say quickly. "And you don't need to play the first games to understand the fourth. It takes place in an entirely new part of Tamriel and your character is unconnected with the past plots."

"Apparently," I add, as she looks at me suspiciously.

So we go buy it. All the time, a warning is ringing through my ears that she won't like it, but I don't listen to it. If I can get her to enjoy Oblivion, it's like synergy. I can spend quality time with her and play games. Thoughts of what will happen to this blog are there, but not in the forefront.

She's enchanted at first. We spend what seems like forever making the character. A cat lover, she immediately wants to play a Khajit.

"You can't play a Khajit your first time 'round," I explain. "You have to unlock some achievements first."

We finally settle on a Dunmer (female of course) and get started. The game immediately fools her (like it fooled all of us) by pretending like it has dialog options when you first speak to the emperor.
             

One of about five dialog options in the entire game (and no, choosing what topic to ask about is not a "dialog option").

          
She spends an eternity deciding on a class, carefully reading the game manual to me while I tell myself, "You can't tell her you already know all this. You can't tell her about custom classes. You can't tell her about the leveling problem. Just go with it." We make the character an agent.

Within a couple of hours, she's seen past the game's facade and has realized that she doesn't like it, especially when I insist on doing side quests (she wants to just follow the main quest). So she's done with it.

But of course I'm not. I'm hooked again. And for the past week, all of my normal CRPG time has gone into Oblivion. When she abandoned me, I created a new character and laughed maniacally as I decided this would be a complete game: all quests solved, all Oblivion gates closed, all skills to 100, all places found! As she headed off to work every morning, I made a show of firing up my laptop and recounting all of the things I had to get done today. Then, the moment her car left the driveway, I kicked on the console and sat on the couch for 8.5 hours. The moment I heard tires crushing ice, I saved, turned off the console, and leaped back to my computer.

"Did you get a lot of work done?" She'd say, as she took off her coat.

"A little," I'd reply. "These clients are killing me, though. I spent most of the day just cleaning data." Yes, I'm a horrible, horrible man.

A week later, I'm a bit Oblivioned-out. I certainly haven't finished. And this isn't my official posting on the game, of course, which will come for real some time in 2023, probably. But here are some notes from my fifth or sixth playthrough:

• I decided to do something fun this time. First, I picked up Martin immediately on arrival in Kvatch, and I took him on my quest through the city to kill all the Daedra. I decided we were fire-forged friends at that point, and rather than return him immediately to Weynon Priory, I enlisted him to follow me all over the province, exploring dungeons and solving quests. He fights well and can't die. Sometimes I lose him in a dungeon, but he always shows up at the exit when I leave.

• The game is most fun, in my opinion, between Levels 2 and 10. After that, it gets a little ridiculous, with every roadside bandit sporting Elven or ebony armor. Fortunately, if you play it right you can decide when you level up. I wait until I have at least 50 skill level advances since the last level.

• The disadvantage to playing on the X-box is that you can't install any mods, some of which I found delightful, correcting the very problem mentioned above and making the game both harder and better-balanced.

• The NPCs are, in my opinion, the weakest part of the game. Unlike some reviewers, I'm not enthralled by the fact that all of the dialog is spoken. I'd rather they'd spent their time offering actual dialog choices to the PC. The voice acting isn't even all that good. It seems like the same five voice actors did all the voices except the Emperor and Martin, and sometimes an NPC (often a beggar) changes voices in the middle of a chat.

• Related to this, there's essentially only one way to solve any quest you get in the game. And the game gives you quests without so much as a by-your-leave. Yes, you could ignore them in the quest list, unless you have CRPG OCD like me.

• I don't see how you play this game "evil." It's hard to reconcile becoming a member of the Dark Brotherhood with caring about the main quest line and serving the Blades. If you play "good," it's hard to reconcile doing anything but the main quest line. With Oblivion gates popping up all over Cyrodil, what possible justification do I have finding Ayleid artifacts for some rich dude, or bottles of wine for a publican? And the simultaneous existence of the main quest, the Shivering Isles quest, and the Knights of the Nine quest makes little sense. The only logical way to play the game is to solve the main quest as soon as possible, and then do everything else, unless you do what I do and come up with some kind of external role-playing reason to take a long break in between stages of the main quest.

• Thus, it isn't the plot that I like but the game play itself. Things that I find absurdly enjoyable: lighting up a torch for the first time as I enter an unexplored ruin; using a Nighteye potion to spot enemies at long range, then sniping him with an arrow soaked in a Damage Health poison from a hidden alcove; loading up on everything I find when I first enter a dungeon and then slowly discarding things that aren't worth their weight in gold, then aren't worth twice their weight in gold, then three times, and so on, as I get more overburdened; saving up incredible loads of reagents and then mixing up a huge batch of potions all at once; luring enemies into booby traps; throwing the bodies of each slain enemy all the way down the Oblivion fortress spire; saving up low-level damage scrolls that I find and then using them all at once against a single enemy; whacking a bandit with a dagger poisoned repeatedly with Damage Fatigue, waiting until he collapses in exhaustion, then beating him to death with my fists; pickpocketing enemies before I backstab them.

I can't show images of any of this, of course, since it's on my TV. (Cue six people telling me how I could, in fact, show images.) But it doesn't matter, because I'm done with Oblivion for now. It's taking too much of my time, and I don't just mean CRPG time. The benefit of playing CRPGs on my computer is that I'm at my computer and thus not liable to forget my "to do" list.

Although I still prefer a PC to a console, there is something enjoyably lazy about playing CRPGs from the couch on a big screen. I keep meaning to look up how to connect my computer to the television, but I don't suppose it makes much sense until I get out of the era in which I still need DOSBox.

For the next two weeks, I'm back on track and will have a posting at least every other day. I promise.


*Addendum: trying to purchase Microsoft Points through X-box Live failed with every one of four credit cards I tried, and it also led to every one of those credit cards being frozen for potential fraud. I had to call them all and explain the purchase attempts were legitimate, but even after doing so, the charges still wouldn't go through. I had to buy the points through Amazon via gift card and then "redeem" them. Message boards were full of people with similar stories. I'm mystified.