Rediscovering Old Favorites

I took a small peek through my game library to find something to play the other day, to find something rather interesting: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Now, this game was created by Bethesda Softworks in 2008* for Xbox, PS3, and PC, and I have had the pleasure of playing all three versions and comparing/contrasting all the visual differences. Now, no one should be offended by what I'm about to type - it should be rather blatant, actually, and unnecessary to say - but I believe that the best looking of the three is most definitely the PC version. Of course, this all depends on hardware, and that's a thing for perhaps another time.

However, it's continued beauty graphically aside, Oblivion has also aged well in another area I particularly love to see games flourish in: story. Add to this that Bethesda managed to actually merge gameplay and storytelling seamlessly, much like BioWare and it's fantastic lineup of RPGs, and Oblivion makes for one of, if not THE best game of it's year.

As I said, Oblivion has actually aged gracefully in terms of graphical quality; it was well ahead of its time, in my opinion. Almost the entire world is rendered at once, with minimal loading times between certain few areas (and of course, going inside/outside houses and dungeons), achieved by caching some of the data into the hard drive of whatever systems drives that particular copy. So, it's beautiful AND fast to render, which always quite impressed me.

All things aside, Oblivion is a great game, and if you haven't played it, I highly recommend that you do. It's simply an awesome experience.

*Edit: I totally meant '07.

I Believe an Introduction is in Order Here.

Hey, everyone, I'm Richard. Or, probably better known to everyone else on the internet, Python862. I like a lot of things. I like to read, I like to write (more on this later), I like to play video games (again, more on this later), and, I like to shamelessly promote myself on blogs that likely won't see much traffic beyond myself comment-whoring.

Now, when I say I like to write, I mean that I really like to write. It's one of my all time favorite hobbies, and at some point or other, I hope to be published, just like any other aspiring author. What do I write? Fiction, usually high fantasy or something along the lines of fantasy. I even have quite a selection of stories based upon well known properties (you know it as fanfiction), which, conveniently enough, are all posted upon fanfiction-dot-net. You can probably guess the username. However, I've since drifted away from that and am now focusing entirely on original material. Some of which I hope to excerpt every now and again here on this very blog.

I also happened to mention that I enjoy gaming. I'd rate this right behind writing in terms of hobbies, and it would likely explain why I wrote fanfiction for the longest time. I've recently gotten over an addiction (yes, an addiction, for that's what it was) to World of Warcraft, and I feel better for it. So much wasted time, it sickens me. Regardless, I continue to play games on various systems, most notably Modern Warfare 2 (for both Xbox 360 and PS3 - I'm just lucky like that) and the Mass Effect series (much <3, BioWare). So, with that said, I'm quite likely to start off on some sort of tirade on one issue with gaming or another. Just don't get me started with games being an issue for children's mental health - that's always been a topic I've been hot about.

So that's me in a nutshell. I hope that whoever reads this will stick with me for what I hope will be a long, fun ride in the adventures of variety.

Be Happy, everyone.