So Stevey’s latest blog post is on games. And since I always do everything Stevey tells me (he’s a smart man and I read fast so I don’t mind his rambling style), I decided I should play Oblivion.

The post itself is about Grand Theft Auto. But there is a set of games I that I have decided not to play, and GTA is one of them. In GTA’s case, it was the visceral feeling of betrayal I got when I realised that Vice City sensationalises everything that was wrong with the city where I was born. It was not fun as a kid to watch the police chase a guy around my neighbourhood on foot. Trust me it wasn’t. So, for me, GTA has giant connotations of NOT FUN all over it.

But enough about that. After finishing GTA4, Stevey went back to replay Oblivion again—he says it is still The Best Game. And ever since enjoying Final Fantasy 12’s MMO-inspired American stylings, I thought I might try an American RPG. So, curious, I went looking and found an Elder Scrolls Wiki. Here I found out that Morrowind was the previous entry in the series. I remember Morrowind from my college days when Nathan Thomack, my roommate, bought it for his new computer (more powerful than an XBox!). I was really impressed by the music and not too tickled by the amount of time he spent running around whacking rats with a mace. He whacked rats in dungeons, hillsides, swamps and Aztec temples. I saw him run away from a glowing skeleton once but mostly it was just rats.

Well-rendered rats, I might add as an aside. The screen shots of Morrowind still compare favourably with those of Oblivion, bearing in mind that (1) most XBoxen were not rendering in anything like HD and (2) when an Orc is attacking you, you don’t have time to appreciate fine detail, and that’s about all Oblivion adds, with a maybe a few more trees on the horizon. I think Nintendo is right that, for normal people, the graphics war ended shortly after the turn of the century. (Also, I noticed that in Oblivion people still spend a lot of time whacking animals with maces.)

More importantly, this Elder Scrolls wiki linked to the now-free (gratis, non libre) Elder Scrolls: Arena, the first of the four Elder Scrolls games. Since I wasn’t sure how much rat-whacking I could take, I thought this would be a good opportunity for a preview. The first version of a game is usually pretty rough but the basics often don’t change much over the course of series.

I made it eight hours in, a little over halfway through retrieving the first of eight staves. Or pieces of staff. I didn’t listen too carefully, so it may have been something else that got split into eight pieces. As promised, the world is huge and open. As far as I can tell, you can go anywhere any time and just sort of do your own thing instead of trying to finish the game.

The problem is that, besides the main quest, there are only about four things to do, mostly because all the places are the same. Essentially, Arena gives you quantity over quality. There must be more than a hundred huge cities, each with several randomly-generated dungeons outside and endlessly-helpful citizens inside. There are even little villages spotted over the countryside that is attached to each city. But since everything is randomly generated, all you do is stop the nearest citizen and ask directions to the nearest inn or nearest quest. There’s no reason to care about a particular one of anything.

There is definitely a learning curve—the first three hours of the eight I spent just peeking outside the first city, running to a nearby dungeon and shooting a couple of rats (I cleverly opted to be an archer instead of a mace-wielder.) After gaining a couple of levels, I decided to walk to the next province. Twenty minutes later, I found out that running in one direction for a long time doesn’t work. You have to open the world map, cleverly disguised as as shift-clicking the local map. I also figured out how to pick up loot and identify enchanted items and read the inverted armour class specs.

So if you just want to do some basic dungeon-crawling in all three glorious dimensions (note: Z is restricted to low/medium/high), Arena works pretty well. It’s surprisingly addictive—maybe something to do with the level of strategy required to survive the harsh dungeon environs. I haven’t seen that level of strategy in a Japanese RPG since Final Fantasy 5.*

Anyway, it was good enough that I’m planning to play Oblivion at some point. Right now I don’t have a machine to play it on, short of installing Bootcamp and rebooting all the time. So I’m looking at a three-way choice here: Windows, XBox and PS3. I really don’t want to buy a PC to play new games on, even newish ones—the amount of trouble with DRM and Windows is not something I want to get into. As for the XBox and PS3…Both Microsoft and Sony are slimy giant companies. But Sony doesn’t usually make shoddy products. Evil, yes. But not shoddy like Microsoft does. So I’ll probably wait for a precipitous price drop on the Playstation.

On a completely different note, the constant right-clicking required to shoot rats with arrows finally encouraged me to switch back to my old Microsoft Intellimouse. I still like the Apple-style whole-shell click, but the Mighty Mouse’s wheel is just too fragile and the left/right-click touch sensitivity never worked properly. I’ve gotten used to only clicking the left half of the Microsoft mouse in a relatively short time. And it looks like with some XML hacking I can get Leopard to recognise the other buttons on the mouse without installing some evil MS drivers.

*Though to be honest, I kind of like the interactive-movie type of game. Also, Final Fantasy X’s PS2 graphics look amazing after a week of Arena.