In Morrowind you couldn't throw a stone without hitting some ancient wizard, and Cyrodiil's guild of mages has a chapter house on every corner.
But Skyrim?
Wizards are a rare, unappreciated breed up in the north.
Court magicians are barely tolerated and the only legitimate center of learning for us erudite Hufflepuff-types is a decaying academy hanging from the edge of a cliff on the edge of the map.
And that's where I'm going! Screw epic dragon battles. I wanna read ancient tomes in some moldy, old library. How awesome is that?
I guess I could've taken a coach, but a true adventurer travels the countryside on foot.
It's more epic that way.
When a game asks, "How big of a beard do you want?"
Then the only proper answer is, "How big do they get?"
You know how some people like to make their character look exactly like themselves? Well, I decided to create a character that will look exactly like me after I'm finished playing Skyrim.
In case you couldn't tell by how awesome he looks, my dude is a wizard. I don't bother with swords and crap. I don't even strap on any armor. I just crawl out of bed, throw on a robe, and that's all I need to scare the shit out of the local bandits, because when I lift up my hand, people die.
Holy crap Skyrim. Gonna play it. Who knows how long. Maybe it'll suck. Probably not.
I've stocked the pantry with food. I've mothballed all projects. I've even scheduled an oil change early tomorrow, which is on the way to Gamestop, so I don't have to worry about my car a week from now when I'll be lucky if I'm not wearing a catheter.
Skyrim is coming out really, really soon. All pretense of holding onto my shit is gone. I have no shit.
This mouth-frothing level of anticipation has only happened for me two other times:
My first oh-shit-I-must-have-this-game-now psychotic breakdown was for The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. When this game was delayed for a few months I was inconsolable. At one point my mom told me that there was a truckers' strike and that's why Toys 'R Us didn't have the game yet. I still don't know if that actually happened or if she was just looking for some way to shut me up.
The second was Final Fantasy 3(FF6, if that's your thing, but we both know what was written on the fucking box). I had this tiny preview of the game in Nintendo Power that I would literally fawn over for hours. When the game finally released and I had a copy, my life should've been perfect, but I had two stupid brothers with equally distinguished taste in video games.
We all dreaded that stupid egg timer we kept on top of the television, but it was the only way we maintained any order in the house. By the end of the first day, we'd played the game a measly two hours each. Just enough to whet our appetite. Just enough to let us realize that all of the hype we'd built up for this game didn't even come close to justifying how good it was.
I'd just played the best game ever, I only played it for two hours, and now I was supposed to go to bed?
I'll admit, I got greedy, but there wasn't a chance in hell of me sleeping that night, and if my brothers were capable of slumbering when Final Fucking Fantasy 3 was sitting in the house then didn't that prove that I deserved to play the game more than they did?
Nobody knew I was up all night. Nobody, that is, but Final Fantasy 3, which logs every second of playtime and displays it right on the file selection screen.
When everyone woke up and realized that I was hours ahead of the pack, I wasn't allowed to play for the entire day. It was horrible.
But I had no idea the son of a bitch also had a solid grasp on game design.
Seriously, when I started watching this video I looked at the twenty minute timer and thought to myself, "There's no way this dude is going to spend twenty whole minutes talking about Megaman."
And then he does. And I was humbled.
And I found another, which is just as good:
To anyone who isn't a game developer, this stuff is probably going to come off as pretty boring, and even if you are a gamedev then you might find Arin's style to be annoying.
But to the three guys left, pay close attention because this dude really knows what he's talking about.
I hate to admit it, but I learned more from watching these videos than I ever did during a legitimate class on game design.
I ran into a traffic jam while commuting home. About ten minutes into the jam I scooted past a sign that said, "Left lane closed in half a mile, merge right."
So most everyone was merging to the right. Or trying to. This was a two-lane highway, and while I'm sure other states are guilty of this (I'm going to single PA out, anyways, because even PennDOT says to do this), when Pennsylvanians see a "merge left/right" sign they don't wait until the road actually becomes a single lane to begin merging but instead they immediately force themselves into a single lane of drivers, even if that means for the closing lane to just stop completely and wait for an opening. In light traffic, sure, this works great; but in heavy traffic this isn't the ideal way to merge.
But I'm not writing about how to do things the right way. I'm writing about how Pennsylvanians do things their way, and it's sort of an unwritten rule to absolutely fuck over the closing lane, so you can bet that the second I saw that sign I joined the herd before a vigilante sixteen-wheeler leaped out in front of me and braked hard, which is a tactic they use around here because they're all fucking psychos.
About a quarter-mile after the last sign I pass another one. It reads, "Right lane closed in half a mile, merge left."
So now everyone is confused. You've got some drivers trying to merge left, others trying to merge right, but most of them are convinced that they're in the correct lane and that they're entitled to the right of way and need to do their best to keep the other lane from merging into theirs. Just imagine a traffic jam, only everyone is twice as angry and frustrated as normal. It was fucking dangerous.
After about fifteen more minutes of tense stop-and-go, the traffic begins to clear up and I get to accelerate out of the mess.
There was no lane closure. No construction crews. Nothing but those two signs.
What the hell is wrong with game developers?
You couldn't just have an elf or a barbarian running around a dungeon, battling orcs? You had to go with a naked boy who uses his tears to kill mongoloids?
Video games are so edgy.
(Isaac is part of the latest humble bundle, in case you were needing a fix for a really good roguelike) ((And Newgrounds offers a demo))
