Elder scrolls four: Video game nostalgia Boogaloo

It’s always better to rehash the old rather than envisage a new way forward. I was born twenty something years ago, I have been king of video game blogger scene for two years, But for all these years I've never been the ruler of my own Memes. I had seen the gates of the Twitter DMs, beyond which no waking eye may see. Behold, in dankness a doom swoops the land. This is the 27th of last seed. The year of Macintosh 420. These are the closing days of the Third era... And the final hours of my life...

The review of oblivion i did two years ago was shit. Do you remember? No of course you don’t, it wasn’t worth remembering consigned to the dustbin of my low effort shitposts, which is most of them; but this one stands out as the epitome of everything wrong with the blogger king. Have i learn anything from it? Of course not, but am i still too emotionally immature to let the matter go? well it feels like you know me, me.

Our (tail) tale begins in the months leading up the release of Skyrimjobs, a good, dear, well loved friend of mine… well he’s alright i suppose, suggested I play oblivion and so in an act of generosity lent me copy. This was about the time my grades started to dip. Going in all I was told was to avoid levelling up if at all possible, a tantalising endorsement of the much loved classic game.

One might expect that in my curiosity I would defy this meta law and instead plummet myself into a miasma of power levelling fever. I however am a chronically incurious sort, hobbitish to a fault. A man whose lineage is longer than his list of deeds. so I played as a khajiit with a proficiency for jumping, or as I called him at the time a bing boing kitty cat. With levelling out of mind i just got stuck into the game running around swing my barbed shortsword at whatever red dot happened to appear on screen.
Or I would have, were i not in prison.

A slight complication; i was innocent, I knew that much but all the other prisoners insisted likewise which didn’t help my case. Eventually patrick stewart turned up and declared me to be the one from his dreams. Not one to question the whims of a clearly unhinged aging despot i followed along as the poor guy was shanked for failing to give his share of cigarettes or some such. In his dying moments he gave me the Amulet of (mcguffin) kings and claimed the world would be overrun by demons if I didn't get it to his illegitimate son.

I know monarchs and other rulers like to project the idea that the world will end without them but this felt a little on the nose, yet I had nothing else pencilled in for my afternoon, other than snorting heinous amounts of moon sugar until my snout looked like the dunes of elsweyr, so i escaped through a sewer fighting enlarged rats, i wonder if i got a bonus against then, given i was a cat?

The land of cyrodiil is a pretty little forest dotted over with patches of arable grassland, it habits are very much those of the classical medieval fantasy, with a fighters, mages and thieves guild all swanning about the place. After starting my way along the main quest line, via a quick chat with Sean bean (the bastard son of the king, therefore: Sean fitzroy) i quickly got immersed into the story... of a Cat who ignored the plight of the people in favour of ducking about. A Dickensian classic.

With a fresh face and battle in my heart I turned up to the doors of the fighters guild and tried to sign up, they said no. on the count of me being a murderer, they didn’t seem to know about my pre-prison crime(s) but I had, since leaving, given a couple of ne'er-do-well (people minding their own business) a rough shake down. This marks the start of my descent into the criminal underworld. I could have used my unhinged violence for the greater good but was deprived of the chance, disenfranchised and impoverished leading my desperate moon sugar craving ass to join the “dark brotherhood”

Unlike skyrim there is some thinking to do when planning a murder, often i would sit back at a distance and stalk my prey, learning their habits and trying to find a place to get them alone for a quick chat, with the tip of my knife. The guards are not easy to escape and provide a real deterrent against outright stabbings, especially when one is trapped at level 3. I soon learnt that one only levels up upon sleeping, hence i became the insomniac bing boing kitty cat: murderer of the accused: seeker of moon sugar: daddy of dragons: breaker of spleens. 

Then the entire plot of scar-face played out.

Enough tales of tails, let's swing over some broad points then go home? The voice acting is incredible, for even at the time it was generic and kind of shoddy. American accents roam the land with all the brazen indifference of the actual Americans. The Npc’s occtionally follow their scripts to do some truly weird shit that leads them to be murdered before your eyes. All the dungeons are copy pasted and weapons are quickly worn down to blunted sticks. A Dickensian classic.

This game however is good in spite of itself, it’s rough in places but that comes with was in 2006 a massively ambitious game, with that roughness comes the solidity of the old school RPG’s that are so hard to get into now: in that sense that game is like a cats barbed penis. Actually no, not that at all, that’s a blooming awful thing to write but I can't bring myself to write anything else in its place. I will end the review here to i can go throw up.

Barbed cat penis/10