PixlBit

I bought a couple games online during Black Friday and I ended up quite happy. I got new copies of Skyrim and Dishonored for $25 a piece. It was the only opportunity I had to get those two games. Dishonored is brand new and has been at 60 like normal and surprisingly even Skyrim has been close to full price even now a year after launch. So I got both of those for less than the full price of just one of them, I thought that was neat and gave me the chance to own some games I was really wanting to play. It's been a long time and I haven't talked about it in several months but I was one of the people holding out for the Skyrim ultimate edition with all the fixins but I got tired of waiting lol. It was only $25 so it was a nice deal, and plus for now I'll get tons of gameplay out of the core stories, guilds, side quests, and random exploration. If I end up really loving Skyrim I'll just buy the eventual ultimate edition anyways for all the DLC. After all, I have all the vanilla and complete editions of Morrowind and Oblivion too. I bet Skyrim ultimate will be released sometime mid or late next year.

It sucks Rob got sick and couldn't make it back, I hope he's feeling better. I was sick over this weekend and was in bed most of the time either sleeping or watching marathons of How The Universe Works. Before I got sick though I was playing lots of Dishonored and enjoying it quite a bit. Not so much the story or any of the characters (I haven't taken to either in general), but mostly the level design, visuals, and the horror genre thrill that the Creepers and rat swarms add to the game. I never thought I'd be scared of packs of rats but Arkane got me to feel that fear, and the Creepers are interesting zombie types that give me chills. I've been spending a few hours in every level of the game so far, even though most of them could be completed in 20 minutes or less it seems. Even once I figure out how to complete a level I avoid finishing just so I can find guards to choke out, search every room, discover all the paths, and trying to understand the logic of the level designers.

Onto holiday gaming memories, I have quite a few because for me gaming has always been tied closely to the holidays. As a kid I was very fortunate and privileged that over the years my parents bought me some consoles on various occasions or a game for whatever console I was playing at the time. My most cherished holiday gaming memory of all was in 2000 when my parents got me the collector's edition of Majora's Mask. It expanded my love for games and became my favorite Zelda game, by far my favorite sequel to a game ever. For context, a year or more before that I played Ocarina of Time and I was so engaged in the Zelda mythology solving puzzles and feeling like I was saving the world I would tell my parents all about it. My mom always encouraged me to read stories about Joan of Arc as well as King Arthur so I loved mythology or tales of heroism from a young age. Zelda was the first time I ever felt like I was able to be a hero or interact with a beautiful mythology instead of just read about it. I cried once Ocarina ended, the credits roll, and they take you all around Hyrule to show you all the races in peace as the music plays.

So when Majora's Mask came along, my parents had an idea of how much Zelda meant to me. I was growing up year by year and Majora's Mask was exactly the type of sequel I needed as a developing kid. It was more dense, had more complicated gameplay and different story, it was tonally darker, and was able to challenge my developing emotional intelligence and problem solving in ways that school and society never did. Getting Majora's Mask was definitely my favorite holiday gaming memory.

I think getting Skyrim for 25 bucks means you still win. Even if you add in the DLC you want you're still looking at less than the full price of the game initially. Hopefully they've stamped out most of the bugs by now, too.

I was really happy I got it for that price. I've been playing it for several hours now, I'm just a couple missions into the main quest, and several missions into the Companions guild (fighter's guild) and I haven't had any bug problems. When the game first loads there's a 20mb patch lol, so I bet there's a bunch of fixes in all of that. The truth is I won't know what it was like to play the buggy game at launch, just like I won't know what it's like to play Mass Effect 3 without all the DLC and extra ending content. Once I finally play ME3 it will be with the new stuff and I won't have any clue what was launch content and what is new.

I'm really in love with it, so far it's every bit as engrossing as I expect an Elder Scrolls game to be. It's like everything they've been working towards, it seems like the best Elder Scrolls to date with the lessons learned from Morrowind and Oblivion. The thing I love most about Skyrim is all the Morrowind flavor it has in the music and in the naming of things. It's different from Oblivion in a lot of good ways. The world feels more alive and you come across interesting things from time to time that you would never see in Morrowind or Oblivion. Last night I was doing a quest for the Companions and the sky was full of bright Aurora Borealis, it stopped me in my tracks and I had to admire it for a while. Then the next morning I'm wandering around in the arctic tundra listening to the nice orchestral soundtrack in the background, sneaking around and sniping deer with my bow so I could harvest their hides, craft them into leather so I can upgrade my light armor, but then I hear a dragon bellow from miles away. I immediately start scanning the skies and once I see it I start running for some ruins to hide for my life. The dragons sometimes miss you and continue flying around the world doing what they do, and sometimes you're not so lucky.

That dragon unfortunately saw me and swooped down to attack. There were some imperial guards in the little ruins using it as a watchtower. It turned into a crazy, unplanned, cinematic battle. Then an hour later in another quest I descended into a visually distinct valley full of hot springs and geysers, sneaking around avoiding confrontation, and ended up underground interacting with a huge magical tree in a cave. Then I come out from the cave and there's two dragons flying around the land. I avoided them by sneaking through the trees and keeping out of sight. The dragons got into fights with other animals and I got to watch their escapades unfold as I sneaked through the yellowstone park-esk place and escaped the area without getting spotted or murdered by the dragons. It was just cool, other games don't do this stuff. This is why I love Elder Scrolls games. The art design is beautiful, I definitely like Skyrim province's geography and vistas more than Morrowind or Oblivion.