Skyrim: Down and destitute from riften to solitude - the tale of poverty in a fantasy world.

He sleeps soundly; snoring, farting and occasionally murmuring. I tip toe past, my sight set on his wardrobe, yes finally it will all be mine. Charcoal, a cooking pot, also some fresh leeks. I leave with my disappointment, and fresh leeks out into the night, i am the theft of Morthal. More like undeveloped peasant town, hahaha, i can’t even afford to rent here.

I’ve served four stints at the Jarls pleasure, and i’m not talking about his short sword. I have no items, because each and every one of them was stolen, by me. I have no children because i have no home, and i have no home because i am pretty poor at my profession… i am the worst theft in all of skyrim. In a land of endless captive cold, where dragons rule the skies and great civil wars rage, i the main character missed the memo. After the requisite carriage ride and tutorial, which i decided my character was drunk for and so largely believes was a illusion made by Sanguine, the daedric prince of debauchery, during my stupor the quest began.

From there he decided it was too dangerous for him to bare arms and drink ever again. He must give one up. So now he’s a pacifist in a land of sword crazy burly men, and women. Untalent at magecraft the most he can muster is a bright light that gives him away in the dead of night during his lurking. Though he is admittedly otherwise a very talented lurker. His herblore too is rather lacking, gone are the days of cheese sandwich alchemy. This leaves him with one avenue for work. Breaking into people's home and scrounging their shit.

He is very cunning often waiting until people are sound asleep before barging in like a bull in a china shop, and pretending he got lost on his way home. Once he stumbled upon a plot by a powerful vampire to take over the town, only to be chased away by her love crazed thrall as my inebriated thief couldn’t bring himself to fight back, in case the magic sky dragon ever comes back.

His life here was going nowhere, so i got bored and decided that he had decided to go off on a adventure, lacking the fiscal and social commitments to do otherwise. He was not missed… by a stray arrow, which stuck him in the… thigh (close one)
After passing by a guard swimming through the air i decided it was time for a drink. So stopped by the local tavern, a quick conversation with the barkeep later i learn i still had no money and that i wasn’t supposed to just start necking whatever wasn’t nailed down. This earned my first stay in the Whiterun dungeon which unlike the Morthal jail, wasn’t too cold for rats… yay?

I was out in no time, if by no time you mean 4-5 months with good behaviour. Pretty ingenious way to avoid the guards on the front gate if you asked him. Looking for work the local companions guild told be i could join if i could hold a sword. After explaining my misgivings in a calm and careful manner they told me quite precisely to get bent. Taking their advice to heart i hit up the cloud district, which people assured me i’d not get to very often, and managed to find a neat set of fine clothes along with my second stint in dungeon, this time i’d snuck in my copy of the lusty argonian maid; however my character was illiterate, at least it saved using the rats as toilet paper.
Deciding to move on i first sold my only possession, or tried to, turns out my shit smeared copy of a book describing the sexual escapades of a lizard were not in high demand in the ultra conservative, fundamentalist talos loving north men.

Onwards to winterhold, here i was with my own folk, or as the locals had taken to calling them, the dam grey skins. That’s right i’m a dark elf, what of it? I mean really, how can you be so bigoted as to get hung up my race, it’s not like i’m a orc or something. Onwards to the nearest tavern. There i met a orc wanting to punch my lights out, for some reason he didn’t understand i was calling him a pig faced mountain fucker ironically. What is it with north folk and having no sense of humour. So between my pugilistic hesitations and his berserk rage my nose was beaten to resemble my groin which itself was beaten into a bloody pulpy mess… not even the boredom of prison had done so much damage to my genitals. Jokes on him i stole his sweetroll, which is how i earned my first fine in winterhold, which upon being unable to pay became my first stint in the winterhold jail which was both cold and had rats.

After the stumps healed i didn’t stick around, the weather in winterhold was far too racist so i headed south towards the rift and it’s town… riften, home of the thieves guild. I see what they did there. Here i found my calling, the one place i could truly belong: An orphanage! a young boy in winterhold had told me to go there and murder the lady who owned the place and to be fair to the boy he was very polite when asking, so i felt obligated to foster good behaviour, through not foster him specially on the count of being a vagrant vagabond drunkard who was one step away from become a full flown skooma addict.

I had cross by moral code and could never again claim to be a pacifist, which was perfect timing because i was soon recruited by the dark brotherhood, they were so impressed with my kill stealing that i was press ganged into service, their hidden layer was a marvel of treasures and trained killers. Naturally i was caught with sticky fingers and was promptly kicked out until i could pay a fine, which for me meant forever. Skooma is not cheap!

What was cheap were the cloths i was able to strip from a murdered woman on my way into markarth, a town so retro-steampunk-dwarven i was forced to leave, or i nearly did, it turns out there had been a spate of murders and secrets conspiracies going around, a concerned party needed a talented lurker to break into hold and retrieve clues. Honestly i was the best work i’d had in years and nothing quite compares to #monetised-lurking. Unfortunately, my contact was found out an i was thrown into a prison, and not the fun kind, but one where you have to do real work, a mine!

I’ve long since been a hand a breaking out of almost any prison but seeing as the guard just drag one back and i get fed i’ve never really felt the need to spurn my penal sentences, unless it involved the jarls short sword. It was about 20 minutes and a brief montage before i was ready for my great escape. Unfortunately i was shived while wiping my ass on a rat and so ended the ballad of skyrim's worst thief.

Game has horses but i could never afford one and stealing one earned me a stint in prison. 

The PUBG: The ultimatum

From here until the new year it’s all a down hill slide. Nothing good was ever achieved on the cusp of winter. Today is no exception! Splat splat splosh goes the third shower of the morning as i sit in an unlit hovel overlooking the spectacle through a thin veil. One last surge and then it finally lets up. for a moment, thoughts clear i take my mark.

Pace, action, tension and excitement. No room for holding back i need to capture the zeitgeist of human experience and to do so now i must ride at the very forefront of games journalism. To pause on a beat, reflect on circumstance or offer insight would be an insult to just how very hip and happening this post will be. There is no context when you're riding the crest of a wave, there is only you the board and shore line racing towards you. Before we beach ourselves on the metaphor i think it wise to now state, that i, like so many other people with misleading T-shirts, do not surf.

Pugb, pubg, pgbu: player unknown’s battlegrounds. So just battlegrounds then, i guess we say dante’s inferno. Well i do, you say not that pretentious trash literary allusion again bvgroti to which i swiftly and reproachfully announce: i can’t. For this text, has no text, no context and no explicit imperative. What's an explicit imperative? GO FUCK YOURSELF! Although the games been hinting i should do that for a while.

Simply the game does all and tells all through it’s mechanics. Is this a good thing? Well it was certainly interesting the first time i saw a red splodge appear on the map and i decided to go check it out only to find myself promptly saturated in mortar fire. That is to say, i doubt they could have got much more in before it wouldn’t be a cadava anymore, maybe some kind of new experimental smoothie. This would be amusing if true, heck it might be anyway but it’s not my place to judge (but just so we’re clear it ought to have garnered at least a wry smile)

I learn the game the same way most did, through a sequential percolation of information as the pubg wave broke up on shore of the gaming masses. From Twitch, the Youtubes, and other platforms that exist did the videos come. All things to all men. A call to do the thing. We lobbied up and got to it, not as pioneers but as colonists and like colonists, boy did we starve… and leave behind a problematic legacy which mires foreign policy even today. (such a brave thing for me to say)

The soft touch i use for my PC gaming, that is to say all my gaming. Isn’t exactly at the cutting edge. I don’t want to be too mean to the poor dear because she has been a sturdy and reliable thing for many years and i’m fairly convinced she can tell when i’m talking shit about her and will punish me accordingly. My point here, if there is one, is it takes me an awful long time to load into the game.

In earlier builds this meant laying in a ditch for five minutes while the game world loads out an ethereal playdough, but since then with a constant barrage of updates making the game more or less optimised the effects have varied. Ranging from everything working just fine, to the repeatedly crashing upon launch. My favourite of these effects is the ability to phase through solid walls in game. Client side collision detection and the games tendency to take a while fully rendering an asset from the playdough realm allows me to pass through the blobs of shapelessness that will resolve into the building proper a few seconds later. It acts of a counterbalance of the initial frame rates being in the region of somewhere between 5 and -5. This more often than not, gets me killed, as uncle Ben says: Delicious rice ready in 10 minutes, also if you’ve got power you’ll prolly f’ it up so just say home and watch netflix or sumin. One such instance was me ploughing a car half way into a house, only for the house to then render around the vehicle causing it, and me to become a new flavour of smoothie.

Mutation: it is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to evolve from a single-celled organism into the dominant species on the planet. This process is slow, and normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia, some programmer fucks up and we leap forward. What could be more cutting edge than the ability to pass through physical objects. Imagine if you didn’t notice the door in front of you as you walked, so you simply passed through it. What possibilities would that create, a cornucopia of experience at the fingertips being snuffed out by a click of a shotgun as the mic spamming child in the next room spots my reality bending glitch and tastes the coming of his chicken dinner.

Maybe the reason we don’t have super powered people today is because humans show an instinctive desire to snuff out anything they can’t understand. This is doubtful speculation and probably a waste of time to spend much thought considering, but what can i say. While waiting for the game to load i’ve had time to reflect on inane musings that mean little and just fill the gaps. Speaking of gaps, this brings up a fairly unique question, as i report my experience of the game, i figure due to my hardware it’s fairly unrelatable to the average player, so then what purpose does a review serve if i talk about aspects they’ll never engage with and events that were entirely fictitious… again probably best i don’t spend too long on this one in case the answer undermines my authority.

Though at the core, my experience is much the same. Waiting in a broom closet with three teammates waiting for some poor unfortunate to walk in and discover our smoothie selection via shotgun to the mouth. Only to then walk outside to get picked off by a sniper, blown up by grenades, drowned in a river and get caught trying to revive your good for nothing friends while the ever shrinking blue ring bares down squeezing mic spamming gun toting psychopaths into a tight enclosed space and offering them virtual points to slay one another.
It’s like a prisoner's dilemma where the prisoners are all utterly ape shit.


Why do they bother to add vehicles and not bother with horse? 5/10
OH SHIT! I forgot to mention the miniskirts, actually the less said the better.