The essence of dread...a fear factor modern titles lack: The elder scrolls: oblivion.

The elder scrolls: roman numerals: oblivion.

Ermmm, right so i have a headache, not an excuse or anything but i felt like we needed an icebreaker and well we’re into it now so let's not lose momentum. Last week My coworker suggested people should have to disclose their hiv status on their jobs applications. I don’t have HIV, to my knowledge but i do own a copy of the elder scrolls for oblivion. Which is a bit of a misnomer as we act in game against the interest of the demons, sorry i mean Daedra, that live there. King four arms and spiky thinks the place we live is his place to live and we don't want that for the aforementioned reason of us living there already. Wasn’t that a neat synopsis, i wish all media was so easy to describe... I think we can all agree poetry is bad.

Right onto the meat and potatoes, i was running low on supplies in my home, near the northern town of bruma and we had guests coming that night, the air was crisp and scented with the gentle fragrance of pine. It was winter and cold one at that, no staying out longer than needed. I was waiting for the game to town to load in when i caught sight of my own reflection and realised i have yet to succumb to the vampiric disease inflicted on me by a homeless man two nights prior. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem but i’m disliked by the local clergy for my stance on talos worship and they haven’t discovered that tuberculosis is a thing yet. The game tells me i have begun to crave blood but really i'm in the mood for chinese.

This is a fantasy world however, so there is no china, until player numbers start to dip and we need to make some mad bank with kung fu pandas. So like i said, meat and potatoes. The trouble and strife asked i pick up some herbs and alchemical supplies because she has back pain, probably from the odd way she sleeps. that sort of thing is legal here if you have a doctor's prescription. Shock horror the shop’s closed. So i pop into the local mages guild, bunch of litteriate wanker. In the future they’ll be things that read for you and all you’ll need to know is how to cut wood and standardised assembly jobs or so i’ve come to believe

This is dragging on a bit but there was an invisible dude, and when i bumped into him i thought it was demon come to steal my kneecaps. so i punched him square in the taint and now the guards on my tail. Great opportunity to talk about the combat mechanics… i however spend all day jumping so i leapt onto a rooftop and waited till they got bored and went for supper. I returned home with supplies in tow and the missus asked if i’d apologised to the  priest yet, i said “she’d still not apologised for insulting stendarr by worshiping a man beside him and i would withhold by apology until such a time as she found herself in possession of a lick of sense” in truth i’d not seen her but the wife's lips curled into a wicked sharp smile as she saw the pride flash across my face. I blushed, caught in an act that she revelled in. perfectly plain to the untrained eye but she took such delight it felt perverse. It was.

So then we got down to it, the meat and potatoes. Things got steamy, we almost opened a window but didn’t want to let in the cold, soon we have a rich broth ready our supper. We laid the table and waited for our guest to arrive. Lovely couple, bit naive. We talked about all sorts, bandits, the grey fox and a new grand champion in the capital and my wife’s recent recovery for an illness, her skin was paler. We said it was the bad weather. They said the stew tasted odd, lacked salt and garlic. Supplies are short we said. The husband started to make his excuses and  My wife glared at him and his wife rose to her feet in an outrage, i did so likewise, locked the door drew my blade and settled down to the main course as the fangs descended from my wifes lips  … dear reader it’s far too cold to be homeless up in bruma and the priestess is a devout worshiper of stendarr… no one came looking for them you know, best you mind who you go to dine with, remember they’ll be dining with you too…..MUHAHAHA.

Is there any more to politics than shouting what we think repeatedly? Fallout new Vegas might have an answer

Preppers are a phenomena of people getting ready for the end of the world and collapse of society or at least a natural disaster. While i wouldn’t recommend befriending any such fellow i couldn’t hurt to know where the proverbial squirrel keep their nuts, just in case they get caught short on the can when the bombs drop.it must be said they have  entirely the wrong end of the stick. The apocalypse isn’t about survival in of itself but the philosophical, social and psychological underpinnings that accompany it. We won’t be worried about concerns such as if we have enough beans to last the week, we’ll be spending our time contemplating if our traditional morality has any place in this brave new world in between bouts of smashing jill from next doors skull in with a baseball bat to make the nightmares go away.

Lots of games have tried to bring us round to these sort of considerations but i haven’t played them. i have a keyboard and must scream, so… fallout: new vegas? A game made from a another game but with less shooting, a smaller map, more bugs… but is somehow better. Now i know that pissed some people off, good. I wrote it mostly to wind you up but i stand by it as a seeker of objective truth. I suppose i’m expected to give a run down of the plot and then pick apart why it’s different to it’s parent game...eh.

I’ve kind of got some more pressing concerns though, with most of humanity, mad, mutated or mutilated you’d expect bum bags to be back in but no, disappointing. They're quite nifty really. I mean they just sit there right where you hands are near to and have storage and ease of access for everyday utilities. It just makes sense, i’ve seen people wearing tires on their shoulders and goat skulls on their head, they have next to no practical considerations at all. Most people choose to wear dirty clothes, no seriously it’s a choice. There is detergent and clean running water in a big ass dam nearby, why don’t they wash?

Well i’ve got some idea. You see the plot in near the dam and i’ll be damned if i mention the romans, too late i suppose. Nothing’s better at creating a breeding ground for an endless series of reboots and reimaginings than a society on the brink. In fallout land Caesar's legion is the epitome of this mindset but rather than go with a all female cast they opted for shove a hundred volts of grimdark into rome's proverbial nipples, this doesn’t need to censored because i clarifying that they are male nipples. Now they kill for no real reason, brand people needlessly and use weird contortions of logic and reason to justify a conflict that does not seem necessary once we get to the third act but is the underlying hook.

On the other hand we have NCR and their ‘president’ Aaron Kimball. On the wiki, under the heading “assistance” is reads, “helps nobody” this is telling for the entire administration. Their inability pass meaningful reforms for a nation in dire need of liberty and equality while still serving their own selfish and destructive agenda is reminiscent of anyone you don’t agree politically. There is also a man called mr house but the game told me he was de facto leader of new vegas and i refuse to recognize that a figure head can accrue power by any other means that democratically, so i don’t have to think about the role economics plays in the shaping of liberal democracies and account for the actions of politicians i have subsequently had to label as maleficent… because i am smart.  

Wow, politics in a videogame. I actually found this to be a real breath of fresh air, most media tends to be strictly apolitical and objective in its focus, blah blah blah i got bored of that joke. Fallout has a survival mode. I did not use it, instead i spent my time talking to a girl called veronica, sounds abit like veruca. She has a big metal fist and likes to punch the bads, agreeable sort. I repeatedly tried to romance her because i struggle to connect with human beings. When (eventually) she took me back to her place.. for what i assumed was sex. Instead i was inducted into a remnants of the US army, i was to told to keep my sexuality to myself and given a scholarship then graduated with a major in looking fab in a suit of armor.

Highlight reel, that time i blew up a spaceship, invisible bluemen, comical photo of me attacking a merchant. Subsequent of me crouched over body with a thumbs up and smile. New vegas in the distance, screenshot of the game crashing, screenshot of downloading bugfix mods, photo of benny’s bloodied and mangled corpse being cooked by a miniature thermonuclear weapon. Subsequent photo of myself with the head of said corpse, again thumbs up. A drunken night out on the strip, sightseeing at the dam. War, war never changes.

Bonus round: Why aren't there more horses in games? I don’t know, i am really curious. Maybe they’re hard to draw.

What can GTA: sa tell us about the links between post -scarcity economics and futurisms strongest critics?

The key to designing a impactful and immediately recognisable character is the silhouette. Characters like the ones you're interested in have this quality, google it if you don’t believe me, i win either way? This would be a really good segway into talking about the game limbo, it’s restricted aesthetic and how it generates atmosphere to contribute to the core experience… so then, grand theft auto: san andreas. An entry into the series during rockstar studio’s we’re not numbering these phase.

If you’ve played a gta game it's basically the same principal but if you haven't and i’m assuming you haven't or else me saying this is superfluous you go around as crime man CJ johnson, being a gangster and committing crimes. Unlike most games it is a the superb masterstroke of videogame design and storytelling, a heart wrenching down and out struggle of trying to reconcile the american dream with the inevitable conflict of social forces greater than oneself, like “rules” again attaching plastic explosives to the elderly and not robbing banks, ideas that would leave ann rand rolling in her objectivist grave.

That’s right the entire story reads as reimaging of atlas shrugged much as what ulysses is to the odyssey. Rand's influence is everywhere here from that controversial thing she said about that one thing and then all the others too. Wow you never realised when it’s been staring you in the face the entire time. Cj is the protagonist, the protagonist in atlas shrugged is a protagonist. This isn’t rocket science people. Let me give you an example:

The day started out better than most, weather looks good, pollution minimal. The neighbor's dog was silent for a change, thankfully. I had a filling breakfast, this time skipping the bacon during which time i got a call from an old aquience hoping to meet up, a delightful prospect. I took my car down to see my friends, a real slow ride, and was pleased to note a lack of criminal activity that normally pervades the locality.

Once with my friends we played a game of basketball and found myself instrumental in my team's success. Then we retired to a friends house to play games, i won several and gained from it a small wager…then i decided to do the train mission… all i had to do was follow. The. damn. Train. I’ve had nightmares about that day ever since, feeling like a horse with no name. My therapist says i can’t keep blaming myself but those words are tears drops lost in the ocean. How can anyone let me get myself into that situation? I tried i really did but every time a relive it the outcomes the same.

This feel hits at the heart of our comparison here. Rand asserts in a quote i found on google “the man who lets his leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap” far be it from me to expose my nocturnal habits at the local scrap heap to the readership of this journal but R/dragonsfuckingcars has had a perverse effect on the maturation of my psyche. The only thing for it was to embrace this harsh but succulent philosophy... i was running down the dream.

So i went into business for myself and became a free bird, after a bout of shipping herbal remedies which are legal in the state of san andreas, if found myself able to purchase a set of garages that allowed my establish my second hand motor company. For there i invested in a RC urban start up and soon found myself engaged in all out miniature scale war with a rival firm. This is when i found myself working for the yakuza, going to flight school and robbing a casino. I was living the dream i had learnt to value myself, my own happiness was mine to achieve and i even had a jetpack and two tickets to paradise. Then it all went south.

My deadbeat brother go out of jail and wanted me to go back to my old ways, he wanted the gangs to start back up and already i could feel myself slipping back to a helpless socialist mindframe. I was no longer invincible, my ammo ran dry and i could no longer punch cars and send them floating off into the air. I had lost my cheat codes. I realised that a my fat stacks had been spawned in, so too had my muscular physique and flying taxi. I was a wreck for weeks. I hit the sauce hard, i could hardly hold the line.

I didn’t stay that way forever, maybe somebody up there likes me. My brother whom i’d scorn sponsored me through the AA. i got clean and now work a 9-5 at a downtown car dealership. I’ve starting seeing a girl from the local diner, Denise she talks even more than i do and has the cutest laugh, she’s some kind of wonderful. I’m a man of modest means, sometimes i wake up at 2am and drive round the block for an hour before i can go back to sleep, i miss the life i had, but now with her i’m finally happy…...one day we might have our white wedding.