If you’ve ever shopped at Amazon.com then you know that it tries to “suggestive sell” stuff while you’re shopping. While looking around for a new graphics card, I came upon this:
I have no idea how the history of Poland would enhance my enjoyment of of a GeForce graphics card. Maybe I’ve been using them wrong.
The best quest so far is the “Paranoia” quest in the town of Skingrad. It’s a true freeform quest. It doesn’t have much in the way of a story, but there are many outcomes and I played through it several times trying out all the different permutations. Spoilers follow.
A Wood Elf (the annoying shorty elves, as opposed to the tall and snooty High Elves) walks up to you and pleads with you to meet him behind the church at midnight. He has a proposition for you, but he wants to meet in secret.
Unlike other missions in the game, this one has a lot of possible outcomes besides “do it” and “don’t do it”. If you agree to help Glarthir, he will give you a job: He will task you with following one of the people who have been watching him, and seeing what they do when they are not spying on him. He wants to know who they are working for and who they report to. There are three people total, and each time you report back on the activities of one of them he’ll assign you the next.
The voice acting is hilarious. Glarthir takes himself and his struggle very seriously. The facial expression system in Oblivion is good, but it isn’t up to the task of keeping up with the voice actor’s performance here. He plays Glarthir with a manic enthusiasm that make these little conversations a lot of fun.
Following these people around for an entire day can be a bit time consuming (I’ve never bothered to clock it, but I’m betting a day in the game is 24 minutes long) and dull. These people are not watching him. They are harmless people who are unluckly enough to be neighbors with this nut. Their lives are simple and routine. They get up, go to work, have a bite to eat, talk with other people in town, and generally fail to be secretive or sinister in any way.
Each night you meet him behind the church and report on the activities of the day’s target. You can either lie and say they were watching him, or tell him the truth and say that they aren’t. Either way, he pays you a nice chunk of cash for your efforts. It should also be noted that you don’t need to follow these people at all. You can just show up at midnight and tell him whatever you like.
So far I’ve found several outcomes:
Hilarious. I wonder if there are any other outcomes I didn’t find?
After finally tricking Netflix into sending me a proper disc, I’m nearly done with Last Exile. Disc 6 is brutal. They are starting to kill off characters at an alarming rate. Maestro Delphine is a very good villain. Almost too good. I hate her so bad that my enjoyment of this series is now directly linked to how badly she dies at the end.
I’ve enjoyed this series so far, but all of that will be undone if she doesn’t die screaming.
While waiting for her (hopefully brutal) death, I can continue to enjoy the incredible visuals. Integrating CGI with drawn visuals has always been clumsy, but this series has done a remarkable job of blending the two together.
Time for some screengrabs!
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Last Exile: Discs 4 – 6”
I’ve hurried though Oblivion and reached the ending. The main campaign was actually quite short. I did it in bit and pieces between other quests, real life, and work, so I don’t have a solid picture of just how long it took. My guess is that it took around five hours to go through the core story. For a game with ~200 hours of gameplay, that’s a pretty small slice. The main campaign is a bit mundane, so I’m glad they didn’t stretch it out with a bunch of filler quests. (Morrowwind had this problem. The part where you got named Hortator of all of the great houses was a huge recursive mess of pointless sub-sub-sub quests.)
The story was nothing special, and the big bad guy wasn’t very interesting, although he could have been. For the curious, I came up with a rough summary. You don’t need to read this unless you’re curious. Just skip the boxed text to see my comments on the ending.
There are these sixteen gods, (called Daedra) each with their own plane of existance / reality. Each one has his own plane of “Oblivion”. One of them – a Daedra named Mehrune Dagon – fell victim to a sort of mutany. His servants rebelled and booted him out of his own world. These nine rebels were lesser gods, but with Dagon gone, they were the most powerful beings left. Somehow the world changed and ended up nice and green, and filled with Elves, Dwarves, Humans, etc. These nine rebels set themselves up as the nine divines, the main dieties of this world, which was renamed Tamriel. This is like finding out that the Earth is just another plane of hell that’s been given a drastic facelift.
So all of the mortal inhabitants of Tamriel are, in fact, just squatters. The world is really just another plane of Oblivion, and the Nine Divines aren’t really as powerful as they make themselves out to be. In reality they are the Nine Usurpers, and the reason that they don’t interact with the world very often isn’t because they are mysterious, stand-offish gods, but because they don’t really have that much power. Of course nobody knows this. People accept the world and the Divines and just assume this is the way things should be.
The plot of the game is that one guy – Mankar Cameron – figures this out and starts taking steps to try to let Mehrune Dagon back in. He works to undo the safeguards that have been put in place that keep Dagon out. The Emperor and his bloodline are part of this spell or forcefield or whatever, so Mankar has to kill the Emperor (voiced by Patrick Stewart) and all his sons. He pulls it off, and the throne is empty – there is no rightful heir. The magic begins to unravel, and Oblivion gates open up here and there. Monsters start coming out and attacking the people. One of the major cities is sacked.
It turns out the Emperor had an Illegitimate son, Martin, years ago. He’s now grown and his true lineage was kept secret from nearly everyone, including Martin himself, who believes he is the son of a farmer. Most of the plot involves rescuing Martin (voiced by Sean Bean) and reestablishing the magic that has been keeping Dagon out of this world.
(Emperor Martin. Ha! That’s like Emperor Fred.)
Fine. Whatever. The Elder Scolls pantheon and mythos never really captured my attention. It’s big, complex, and hard to follow. It’s like reading the cliff notes from the Sillmarillion without Lord of the Rings to back it up. I’ve never learned more than I needed in order to make out the plot of whatever game I’m playing.
Anyway…
I finally reach Mankar Cameron so I can put a stop to his plans. I was really looking forward to talking to this guy. In Morrowwind, you get to have a nice long chat with the main bad guy at the end, and it ranks as one of the most satifying conversations I’ve ever had in a video game. Not so with Oblivion. Mankar Cameron monlogues for a while and explains most of the stuff I outlined above, but you never get that chance to sit down and chat with him. He never really tries to pursuade you or explain his cause to you. You just wait for him to shut up and then make with the fighting.
This could have been the highlight of the game. Once you meet Cameron you find him to be sadistic, a little crazy, and overconfident. It would have been far better if he’d given his reasons for what he was doing, and explained what he thought was going to happen if his plans worked out. It would have been great if – like the villian in Morrowwind – he had turned around and asked the player a few questions about what was motivating them to oppose him. He could have been deep and interesting, and instead he was just another cardboard bastard you have to put down on your way to the end of the game. More than all the technology flaws and bugs and gamebalance issues, this is my biggest lament about the game, because this is where the game could have really stood out as something interesting.
I’ve seen a mod for Oblivion that removes the main quest: No martin, no amulet, no Oblivion gates. You just appear in one of the coastal towns as a traveler and are free to enjoy the rest of the game. This actually sounds pretty fun, although the fact that someone saw a need for it at all illustrates how weak the campaign is compared to the rest of the game.
Ah well. At least it’s short.
I don’t have TV, but I’ve been hearing rumblings here and there about the new Mac ads. They come off as more of an insult to non-Mac users than an appeal to buy a particular product. Sigh.
Back in the mid / early 90’s, Apple had a brilliant ad. It showed Mom and Dad setting up the new family PC on Christmas eve. Dad was squinting at the sceen, and I think Mom was puzzling over the manual. The gist of it was something like this:
DAD: Not enough high memory?
MOM: Check the autoexec dot bat?
DAD: Maybe we’re using the wrong config dot sys.
(beat)
MOM: Maybe we’re using the wrong computer.
This was the only time Apple has ever had a real advertisement that was an honest attempt to appeal to PC users. It illustrated an issue which tomented users in the early 90’s. It was an infuriating problem and a complete mystsery to the user as to why they needed to tell the computer how to organize memory usage. Wasn’t that, you know, the computer’s job? This ad took an exsisting weakness and exploited it.
I have no idea how that ad campaign fared, but it made me want to run out and buy a Mac right then.
But all of their other ads – including the infamous 1984 ad – have been appeals to style and attitude. Steve Jobs still thinks he’s selling soft drinks, or cars, or athletic footwear. “Buy this product and you will be one of the smart / beautiful / stylish people”. That’s fine for lots of products, but my Mom isn’t going to shell out an extra $1,000 for a computer with the same features she has right now.
I have friends with PC’s that are clunky and useless because of all of the spyware, adware, and malware they’ve accumulated. The thing never works right. It’s confusing to use. Apple could woo these people by promising them that life is easier on the Mac side. (Is it? I dunno. But that’s what advertising is for!) Some of those people might shell out the extra cash if they think it would lead to a better computing experience.
Apple really needs to take their own advice: Think different guys. Do you want to sell computers or run an elitist social club?
Even though I use a PC, I like alternatives out there that demonstrate that an OS can be stable and secure. It keeps Microsoft’s nose to the marketshare grindstone. Linux is more of a threat in this regard than Mac, but Mac isn’t even trying. Hipster 20-somethings already own a computer, so these ads will either make them feel good about the Mac they already own, or insult them. Is this how you sell things? No, it isn’t.
I’m convinced that the PC weak spot is the proverbial moms and grandmas out there. Baby boomers are a huge market segment, and they have more money than teens and college students. They own PC’s that suck, and could be pursuaded to switch if Apple tried talking to them. A guy nearing retirement isn’t going to buy a computer because some self-absorbed prat in a turtleneck tells him it will make him cool. Apple could go after these people and make a real comeback with market share, but they can’t because they are incapable of thinking different.
My name might be rare, but I’m betting for most of you this isn’t the first place you heard it.
There was a computer game for the Atari and Commodore 64 8-bit computer systems called Shamus, which came out in 1984. It could be described as “the thinking man’s Berzerk”, but only if he isn’t thinking too hard.
In 1973 Burt Reynolds starred in a movie titled “Shamus”, where he played a private detective. “Shamus” used to be slang for detective way back when, probably due to the fact that many of them were Irish immigrants, and many of those would have been named Shamus. There is an even more obscure 1959 movie of the same name.
In The Big Lebowski, The Dude meets a private detective who has mistaken The Dude for a fellow private detective, and they have this conversation:
Da Fino, Private Snoop: I’m a Brother Seamus!
The Dude: A Brother Seamus? What… like an Irish monk?
Da Fino, Private Snoop: …What the f**k are you talking about?
In Back to the Future III, Marty travels back in time and meets his ancestor, Seamus McFly.
I have no idea how you could ever put this information to use, but there it is.
Wonderduck asks:
The game has a minimum spec of 2Ghz with 512Mb RAM, and a recommended spec of 3Ghz and 1GB of RAM. I have the latter, and I’m sure all of my problems stem from the weak Gfx card I’m using.
I’m using a GeForce FX 5500, and Oblivion does not like it. From surfing around trying to solve my various issues with Oblivion, I gather that the whole FX chipset is pretty much a lost cause as far as this game is concerned. It can run Doom fine. It can run other taxing games and still look good, but Oblivion malfunctions badly without the user-made patch in place.
Current graphics cards fall into two broad categories for me: Far too dated and way too expensive. Anything that won’t be obsolete by the end of the year is going to set you back more than $100, and I have a hard time putting down that much cash for a single component. The way PC prices have been falling, the price of the card is now a really big portion of the cost of the system, and it will be the first part to be obsolete. A year from now that card will probably still have enough memory and raw power, but new chipsets with new functionality will have come out and games will be targeted at those chipsets.
I’ve seen the game looking good on the NVIDIA 6800 series, so if I do upgrade that’s probably what I’ll get.
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
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What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
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Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
T w e n t y S i d e d
