[insert awesome header image that will never happen]

Day 0: This is now a 30GB game

Unbelievable, playing this game more than 7(!) years after its release it can now be a completely different game. I spend two days on Oblivion Nexus getting mods and getting them to work.

The main advantage is that I can now play the game with higher quality textures and both HDR and AA. More importantly perhaps, hundreds of bugs have been squashed in unofficial patches. Increasing the overall game quality.

But lets not kid ourselves, the most crucial thing is that I now play my character with the cup-size I can most identify with. Seriously, I like that my character's face is made out of more than a handful of pixels but I wish I could do that without also having to decide what kind of pubic hair I want.

Funnily enough I found out where the main focus of the modding community lies when I tried to give the gentlemen better bodies as that caused all the characters in the game to have transparent eyes. No matter what I tried it just didn't work.

Also, I assume, mods are mainly made by 14 year old boys. I say that because 1: You can have boob and ass physics but no penis physics. 2: In the world of Oblivion mods boobs sub-D cup do not move. Luckily of course there is a mod for the mod for the mod that does take care of this.

I installed a lot of mods but in short I can now have a pretty lady running around in a pretty world where it rains and the rain makes you wet. When she runs her B cup sized boobs move but only when she is naked because every other female 'armor' has a gigantic push-up effect. Also I can have magic undies. Because there was a mod and I downloaded it and I installed it and then I needed to download another mod that made the boob physics work in the magic undies and then I wanted to delete the whole game again but at that point I thought it would probably be funnier if I kept it all and just write about it. So here we are. Please don't judge me.

Day 1: In Prison!

So will spoiler this because of incoming screenshots

Hello! This is me, I am a cute elf. I also made custom class that will probably make any pro-Oblivion player cringe. But I am getting ahead of myself. Because of all the mods I had a range of races to choose from. I picked this one because it apparently also has some racial ability that increases over time. I didn't actually read anything about it so that could end up a nice surprise!

The tutorial story of Oblivion is pretty straight forward, you learn to walk, jump and fight while Patrick Stewart tells you he dreams about you. There was also some talk of being the chosen one and some amulet but that seemed not that important.

I am really bad with the Giant Bomb editor, it looks great in the editor but becomes a mess when I post..

What did I tell you? A downside of having mods is that I started with 180/185 encumbrance. So I couldn't pick up any other armor unless I dropped something, I didn't want to drop something. So I play with this overpowered armor, I tell myself it is just for the tutorial and that I will switch over to regular armor to not be overpowered for the rest of the game but well.. You will see in the next few screenshots.

Screenshots! (Adding paragraphs seems to help)

Outside!

Once outside I can enjoy some of the other mods. I am still running around in my half-naked JRPG super armor so I decide it is time to hit the shops! I don't have a lot of gold but then again I don't actually need new armor or weapons, now do I?

Main story

So I am following the main story line for now, which involves me getting to some monk who knows where the last heir of the throne is. Also bad things may happen if the amulet does not get to this heir person.

When I get to this monk he tells me the heir is a priest living in a city which is nowhere near where I am now and that I need to go there right away. When I look at the map I see a mod is nearby so of course, first things first: Time to visit one of the mods.

This is a shop and a house next to it. It comes with a stable where I can put my horse so that is nice too. I can't afford anything in the store but it does come with a nice feature: A dressing room where you can try clothes on. How you ask? Simple: It all has an encumbrance of 50 (instead of the normal 0/1) so stealing it would be rather inconvenient. After trying some of the clothes on I go visit the house that comes with it.

Screenshots!

Travels continue!

So at this point I am travelling to find the heir because the emperor told me to do so. I have no idea where I came from or why I was in prison in the first place. I mean perhaps I do not even like the emperor. Anyway there was some rambling about 'Oblivion' and some dude who is the ruler of said 'Oblivion' but even the monk couldn't really tell me anything. On my way to the heir I get attacked by Trolls and my horse runs off.. So I have to walk the rest of the way. Where is that Ocarina when you need it?! When I approach the city I see that the trees surrounding the city are burned (strange) but then I come to a small camp with people (apparently from the city) that tell me that this isn't the best time and that they will be ok. BUT NOBODY ACTUALLY TELLS ME WHAT IS GOING ON... I decide to continue because this ain't helping and I find some armored dudes that tell me that if I want to go see the heir in the church I need to close the Oblivion gate (ok..) so I do. After that I kill some more enemies inside the city and then finally some NPC starts to tell me that the city got attacked and that this gate came out of nowhere. So this monk that supposedly knows it all can't tell me about Oblivion but these common folk aren't in the least surprised when a giant flaming portal to doom opens? Oh well. So I talk to the heir and apparently tell me that these evil creatures just destroyed a city for him. Really? That is my conclusion. And what they couldn't just open the church doors and kill the heir because? Why exactly? This story ain't starting off strong, that's for sure. So I go back to the monk to find the place under attack (of course). The evil people steal the amulet from the super duper secret room (of course) and now we need to go to another hidden secret place to hide the heir. Uhmm hello! The evil doers seem to know everything about the secret heir and the secret room where the secret amulet was hidden. Can someone please spell M-O-L-E? I swear I am going to kill everyone one of them when later one there is actually a mole and everyone is surprised of the existence of this traitor. I suspect this monk dude. Or maybe it is me. I played KOTOR and Heavy Rain. You never know what you are or what you do between cutscenes.

The story now in images

The end for now..

On the way to the secret hideout we get attacked! We manage to kill the bandits but not before they put an arrow into my poor old horse..

To be continued!

(Can someone explain me how the editor works? Cause it will look great in the editor but than be completely messed up when I post. It seems that the width plays a big part of it because sometimes it will look good in the forums but not on the blog page..)

This post is a work in process but I need to save it because I need to store it cause I can't write on it for a while.

"To appeal to a modern audience" is perhaps the worst sentence in history. Unfortunately this sentence can be found most in my favorite hobby, videogames (For more about videogames visit giantbomb.com).

Or ruining classical master pieces.

I get the idea behind it but I just don't think it makes sense. I haven't played Call of Duty so I won't suddenly start playing Call of Duty 27, even though it might be a JRPG. I probably will know that it is a JRPG because of the aforementioned videogame website but I wouldn't if I were not such an enthusiast and that I believe is the purpose of "re-invention" to appeal to broader audiences who, up till now, have not had any interest in your game.

You want people to play your game, which is number XX in the series but by calling it "Obscure game 13" aren't you already alienating the people you want to reach from the start? Worse by changing the game you are more likely to alienate existing fans as well. So why not name it something else? No I do not mean "The Prince of Persia" (What are they going to do next? 'Prince of Persia: The Prince of Persia'?). But something else entirely.

To illustrate my frustration I want to go through some examples.

Simcity. A beloved franchise, the newest iteration was meant to 'appeal to a modern audience'. Existing fans were ready to build the biggest greatest city ever, to create a 1:1 representation of New York City. What they got was not what they expected. For all intense and purpose it had more similarities with "The Sims 3" than "Simcity 4". In the meanwhile, fans of "The Sims 3" were ignoring the latest addition to the franchise because they tried to play Simcity 4 and gave up after their fourth city was abandoned due to water pollution. Why not call it The Sims: City, from the producers of Simcity? Or be creative and call it Modern City "not really a simulation" game?

The Metroid game for the modern audience. Because Shadow Complex was such a failure. Really, what fans wanted was nothing more than Shadow Complex, replace the girl with a metroid. The enemies with space pirates and the dude for a blonde girl in a space suit. But no. The combat had to be improved, it had to appeal to a bigger crowd. Retro Studios did such a fantastic job so lets give it to the makers of Dead or Alive: Paradise.

How did this happen? What was wrong with pleasing the existing fanbase? Because I don't believe that the number of people that said "You know what I have never played a Metroid game but let me pick this up. The box does say it will go into the history of a character I know nothing about."

The Reason

No not that Hoobastank song. The reason of course is simple. A game costs a lot of money to develop and you want to make a little profit too. So you want your game to sell well. But does it mean it needs to sell 4.5 million to be a success? I don't believe so and some developers (ATLUS) develop great games and still have realistic sales targets. So why can so many developers/publishers not be happy with a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand copies sold? Why deny fans a game even though it probably be profitable, if only so slightly. "We might have only made $100,- but at least we made 30.000 people happy" will totally be the name of my future publishing company. But that is not even the reason, it is lack of creativity. How you might ask? Simple: There are already complete fan translations available. I am sure that who wrote it is fine with the company using it in exchange for say some nice game-related goodies. Hire a single professional to review the translation and your done for next to nothing.

Final notes

This blog post is totally my own opinion, feel free to leave yours.

Ryan Davis, 1979 - 2013. I saw it and immediately thought it was some stupid joke, how could it not be? But as I saw the article and my twitter feed I realized it was not a joke. It makes me incredibly sad that it is not a joke. Ryan more than once put a smile on my face when I was feeling sad and I am thankful for the hours upon hours of great stuff he did.

He will be missed greatly and I cannot imagine how it must be for those close to them. I wish them all the strength in these hard times. He was taken much too soon and I cannot fathom why. Maybe God needed someone to host his weekly podcast.

But it will be archived!

Some things must be experienced live, like the moon landing or Giant Bomb E3 Live Shows.

So with the latest Sim City not being my thing, even server problems withstanding, small cities and this make me steer away from it. So originally I was going to play Sim City 2000 on recommendation from @fisk0 and others. However I needed to kill some time today and decided to walk into the local second hand store. Where, among a huge load of stuff I can't believe people actually had in their houses once, I found a box of cd-rom games. Yes that is CD-ROM. In that box I found 7 games I decided to take with me. Hotel Tycoon, Star Wars: Republic Commando, Dune 2000 and these:

So now I'm going to play these games, with the additional objective to play all Sim ??? games from Maxis. Luckily it isn't like I have other things to do or a huge backlog of games. Or that StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm arrived yesterday.

Blog plan: Let's play a series: Sim Games: Part I : Sim Tower

Because a title can never have enough colons.

So my plan is to play a series of games, like Fable I - III and see how a series has changed through the years. Now Sim games don't really follow that pattern but Star Craft does. Since I change the game I am currently playing faster than Taylor Swift goes through boyfriends I will give no guarantee that this will actually happen.

I still need to figure out how to do the million and one things I want to do in a day and also have time to play games.

So with the Ultimate Edition coming out and Dragon Age 2 in pre-order. I decided that it was a good time to prepare for the arrival of DA2 by playing through Dragon Age with the savegame I wanted. I have played through the game once with a male human noble but I wasn't really happy with all of my choices. 
 
So I started playing, due to time constraints I was only able to finish Leliana's Song and Darkspawn Chronicles before DA2 hit my doormat. crap. 
So that is now staring at me. I want to play it really, but I do want to have my savegame imported. So not in another 100 hours of game time/. Worse as I started my journey as a female human noble this time, I noticed all the other options. Part of me craves for an evil blood magic infused world domination together with Morrigan. So I also started an evil path with a male elven mage.  
 
But then I realised that I hadn't done any dwarven stories or the elven forest start. Looking at the possible endings on wikia. I probably need to play this game another 3 times to truly experience it all! For a total of 5 games with about 100 hours per adventure. Luckily I don't need to do that today. 
 
My plan is to finish the "good" line and go on to DA2 with that save. Finish that than go back to DA:O to finish the evil line and go in to DA2 with that. Finally somewhere I need to do those other origin stories and maybe a bit of the game as well. Of course there will be DLC and a DA3 which means I'll be repeating this entire ordeal in about 2 years from now...
 
Luckily Mass Effect 3 isn't out yet. Since I need to do Mass Effect 2 with all the DLC as well. Just waiting for that announcement of the ultimate edition of that. Which will surely come. 
 
Bioware knows how to keep me occupied.  
 
P.S. You might want to ask; "But what about those games you bought during the Steam Sale?" Yeah. I still need to finish those too. Oh and the God of War trilogy and Demon Souls and Fable3 and, and and and... Can we not have any new games for about a year or so? Oh and in that year it only rains and there is no work to be done.

It's the final day and though I had some big developer packages on my list I decided not to buy them. Enough is enough. I now have 197 games according to Steam, this luckily does include some DLC packages, it's still a lot. Moreover I have finished about 20 of them. So if you look at it, I have more than enough games to play. And this is only Steam. Anyway, New Years resolution to finish all games in my current Steam list! 
 

As the new year begins, the end draws near for the Steam sale. 
 
Today two things interest me: 
 

 
 
 
  

 
 

 

So first of all a very happy new year to you all, your friends and families. May it be a beautiful year where darkness brightens up. 
 
Now for VIDEOGAMES. Ah as of this writing I have 10 games in my (virtual) shopping trolley. Yes day 12 is for me personally the best day so far. Some of these games are not for everyone and one of them is actually kind of bad if you look at the rest of the series. 
 
But first of a very good entry: 
 

  

Empire & Napoleon Total War - Game of the Year Edition

  

 
 

Far Cry 2: Fortune Edition 

Non-scripted artificial intelligence

 

Command and Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight 

  

 
 

Supreme Commander 2

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Flight Control HD 

 
 
  

 
 

Star Wars Jedi Knight Collection 

 
 
 
  

 
 

Guardians of Graxia + Map Pack 

 
 
  

 
 

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (Loyalty Promo)

Christmas has come and gone. As did my birthday (yay!). So little time to do these.  However I did buy some games:

 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Yeah, this was a no-brainer.