So almost unbelievably, I’m posting again, after a gap of (checks the site) 6 weeks :O. What happened?
Ok, in chronological sequence:
1. Oblivion – TES IV sucked almost 3 weeks of my life. Mostly in figuring out how to get it to play on my laptop (Many thanks to asp and his awesome Oldblivion). Once I had finally figured out the configuration settings that would get me a stable, playable framerates (You’d be surprised how playable TES IV is even at 6 fps 
), I wound up spending a mess of time figuring out all the mods I should have in the game. Hence, many hours spent over at TESS
2. My laptop’s hard drive crashed. A complete, unrecoverable crash. The BIOS couldn’t see the Hard drive kind of crash. 
(. Since I operate mostly from my client’s offices, I never had a network drive to back stuff up onto, so 3 years of offical and personal data is now trapped in my old hard drive (More than 3 years actually, I had email archives and downloads from my college days on it as well )
I’m still hoping I get my data back, though there was quite a ruckus in my office over the price of getting the contents recovered in Singapore. So it’s gone to India and I await further news on it.
It took me forever to recover from this, simply because I had to scour the Net again for installers for all my favourite software. It took me a while just to remember what were all the programs I had installed!
I’ve got myself an external hard disk now (200GB, USB2.0) and am using Second Copy to back up all my stuff. I did play around with SyncBackSE initially, but it wasn’t reliable enough for me (using Windows scheduler to trigger the backup jobs really put me off).
3.Work – obviously losing all my data put a major crimp on my productivity. Once I had my laptop back, there was a metric fuck ton of work to catch up on. Just as I was getting my head back above water, I was asked to travel my company HQ in Bangalore for a conference.
So I’m back in Singapore now, recovering from my Bangalore trip (more on that in a little while) and picking up the threads of my blog 
.
PS: Many thanks to Richie – his gentle questioning forced me off my lazy ass and back on this blog
Unfortunately I can’t provide a link for this post, since this is a review that appeared in a newspaper.
A local newspaper called “Today” published a review of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion yesterday and I think it easily qualifies as the dumbest review of a RPG ever written.
It started off well enough saying “Once in a blue moon, there comes along one game that seems to get almost everything right”.. Completely true I’d say
A paragraph in it says “the potential greatness of the Elder Scrolls is evident right from the start (sic) You can customise just about everything – from the class, face features, hair, skin colour and even the jaw-to-face ratio”. Okay, first of all, any goddamn RPG or MMO these days offers incredible customization of the player character (World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, GTA:SA and so on). Note that the reviewer hasn’t said anything about the actual different races the player can choose as part of the review of character creation.
After this, there is a brief intro to the initial part of the game, the reviewer talks about the game graphics, side-quests, a brief mention of the voice acting (whose? the player’s? the NPCs?). Abruptly, he mentions “the game will even recommendd a new player class for you after observing how you play”. First up, what is this sentence doing after talking about graphics? Next, why isn’t this part of the paragraph on the initial part of the game?
A brief discussion on improved combat follows and then praise for the replay value (here briefly, the several races a player can choose are mentioned – 80% of the way into the review and only briefly). There is some criticism of the loading times of the game, which is fairly true.
Before I come to my favourite part of the review, let’s review what not’s been talked about so far shall we:
- What’s better in Oblivion compared to Morrowind?
- The fantastic NPCs of Oblivion
- The Mage Brotherhood, which is sort of the main point of the game.
- The main point of the game! Yes ladies and gentleman, the entire review hasn’t mentioned what is Oblivion, or the Hell Gates at all!
And now for my absolute favorite part of the review – this line “In addition, there is no multiplayer option”. At first I thought maybe the reviewer was joking, like gamespot did in its review. But then I look down at the game summary, and in the Cons for the game, it’s there again – No multiplayer option. WTF? I mean WTF???? Does this reviewer even know what a typical RPG is?? Or is he some pimply faced youth, whose idea of a “great game” is Halo on the Xbox where he can smack-talk and indulge in modem standby, while believing himself to be the L33T gamer who can pass judgement on every game that crosses his desk?
I understand that newspapers have restrictions on length of articles which would force the reviewer to skip certain points, but honestly, I think Oblivion would have been better served not being reviewed by this newspaper than being subjected to this mockery of a review :-X
No multiplayer..god :-&
I have been remiss in posting stuff to my blog these last few days – the reason being, I have been spending the little free time I get to post on researching Oblivion.
I am thoroughly obsessed with this game now – it’s amazing looks and truly immersive role play experience. I will be getting my hands on the game early next week, but what I’ve been researching is – how to get it to play on my laptop and the mods I’d like to install once I get the game.
My laptop barely qualifies to play the game with it’s current specs:
- AMD Turion ML-30 1.6Ghz
- 640 MB RAM (That odd number is a long story)
- Radeon Express 200 Integrated Graphics with 128MB RAM
Mostly, it’s the integrated graphics card that’s the killer. So I have been checking out the Oldblivion forums to understand what I’d need to do to get the game to run. It appears the game will run with Oldblivion installed on my laptop, but right now I have no idea how good it will be.
Other mods I’m thinking about right now are also aimed at prettying up the environment on lower end PCs such as the Natural Environment Mod and the improved water textures mod.
Okay, time to file some links in del.icio.us