Rambling about Roaming

Got some time in with the old XBox recently.  By XBox, I mean the old one.  Tried out some stuff that I'd sorta been wanting to get back to.
 
First was GTA San Andreas.  After watching Red Dead Redemption trailers I sorta wanted to roam around and explore things a bit.  I felt at the time that GTA would be the best fit for that and, after a few experiments to figure out what the best of my saves was to use (ignored obligatory overweight save, and found a new game where I tried my best to go as far as I could with the minimum amount of missions), I started exploring.
 
The Nevada clone was still cut off at this point, but the San Francisco clone was open.  I spent most of my time looking for places to photograph, but wound up only finding ONE in the hours that I played it.  The best way that I've found for photo 'sploring is to just stand on top of a car and look through the camera the whole time, but I'd found that a good portion of the places I wound up naturally exploring had already had their pictures taken.  Looking through the photo gallery, I couldn't tell which were just nice photos and which were actual collection shots.  Wasn't very focused, I guess, but this whole minigame became a bit intolerable as a result.  
 
Eventually, the dead, un-enterable buildings sorta depressed me.  Played a few rounds of co-ops blow-up-X-cars-in-Y-minutes with my SO, and then gave up. 
 
Since then I've beem playing Morrowind.  It was a rough start, and I'm still having trouble, but I've hit a sort of groove, even if I'm exploiting the Creeper to the maximum, selling off all my loot at zero loss.  The main subplot that interested me in this game was the Abolitionist movement.  Ever since I found out about them, pretty much every game I've had since then has focused on making friends with them as fast as possible and freeing as many slaves as I can.  Unfortunately, the game treats it as a minor subplot, so often people I could be talking to about it don't have the dialog option to discuss it further, making advancement slow.  If I kill someone who has a key to the slaves' bracers, I wind up getting the "you have to load because you messed up our story" message, or the keys DON'T WORK.  Better yet, there are some bracers that have no keys at all.  It's as if they didn't think someone would want to try this.
 
Anyway, I've gotten to a point where the anti-slavery thing is actually working out, where I'm able to get people's trust a lot easier, but still the underground that ferries freed slaves is still a mystery to me.  Many of my old saves are a lot further along in this subplot but I've been having trouble with a lot of their log entry searches (that handy thing where you enter a keyword and it displays all discussed on a topic...  well, it's gone, probably for all the pre-GOTY edition saves).   I might be paying more attention in conversations, but it's gotten to the point where I just click through on every topic and click on any new topics that open up.  I don't really even read them anymore.  Many of them are the same answers from just about anyone...  I think it would be nice if it would highlight what was different, or put new topics in a different color, possibly at the bottom of the topics list.  Something to keep things a bit less tedious.
 
There's a lot I don't like about Morrowind, but I guess it's still rewarding when you reach a certain level of proficiency.  There's an acceleration when you start to get good enough that you can hold your own in combat where it actually gets fun, but I remember it soon getting to the point where I got too good.  Better than everything being the same level, though.
 
I finally found a mage who sells the spell Mark (which is disturbingly rare.  Since you need Mark to use Recall, you're pretty much forced to wander a lot and use temple-teleport spells until you stumble into someone who can teach you Mark). I'll probably play it again before too long, trying to further infiltrate a syndicate in order to free more captives, or maybe manumit more slaves by just paying for them and then freeing them.  I'm probably making this harder on myself than it needs to be, but since I never stumbled on this subplot with anything other than by free-roaming into it, I sorta wish they'd given this the same support that the other free-roaming stuff gets.
 
On a happy side note, we found out that the black button and the white button in Gladius have some really handy functions that we only figured out by checking the manual, namely an initiative order button that shows you who goes next for a certain number of gladiators, and one that helps you toggle your movement path (very handy).  It's too bad the tutorial never mentioned these, because otherwise the tutorial was pretty effective in teaching the game.  We never really needed the manual to play the game, but I guess we would have benefitted from reading it.  I wonder if there are many mainstream games that reward you for reading the manual anymore.