And now for something completely different

A Game Rant . . . .

Is it just me, or is Oblivion just a little too much open ended and beautifully large? At first, I was like everyone else, enamored with the wide open world and multiple main (and inumerable side) quest lines. Running around the pixelated universerse picking up ninroot and looking under every rock and behind every tree for the perfect ingredient to make a potion. I'd run back to my house to store this or that, then off to the mages guild to learn spells and steal things (cause you know I was also working the Thieves guild angle), all while on my way to my next big hit (literally as an up and comer in the Dark Brotherhood).

Then one day, while reaching for the Oblivion disk to put it in for a quick run around, I realized, that there is no such thing as a quick session of Oblivion. The game by its very nature requires a substantial investment in time just to sit down. I found myself multi-tasking and looking at my Quest to-do list and having to make shopping (spell ingredient) lists and . . . . . . . . All of a sudden, things were way to close to my "real life". Then the kicker, I looked at my time spent in the game (98+ hrs at that point) and began to caculate what I could have done with that time, including sleep (which I have somehow given up by that time), hang out with my girlfriend and/or dogs, get a part-time job. The game had become a job in itself. This little reality check resulted in me selling the game and moving on to Gears of War and Rainbow Six Vegas and about a dozen other games that I had barely touched up to that point. Games that I could put in and get some quick multi-player in without having to undergo sleep deprivation. Now my lack of sleep is due to excitement about the game, not a result of an overbooked date planner in an artificial world.

So I have decided, RPGs are fine, as long as I don't have to go all World of Warcraft meets South Park running all over multiple island chains just to pick up some errant weeds to make a potion or cure my virpyrism (still don't know how I got that one). As long as I don't have to disapear into Oblivion to escape for a few moments.

And in case anyone needs to see what I was missing, here is a picture of my girl and my dogs, relaxing in the sun in P-town, Mass. Now I ask you, what is more enticiing, hanging out with these three, or chasing some errant painter though a mystical canvas, dodging paint trolls searching for the Magical Paint Brush? Oblivion Indeed!