Affter a break in posts here I am again. Oddly enough I started a bunch of blogs posts but never finish. The story of my life I suppose. So since I last posted I beat Oblivion, but not Shivering Isles. Although I am sure I did not beat every quest within the regualar Oblivion part of the game I am satisfied with what I did do. My goal from the start was activly seek as many quests I could get and beat any ones I did find. I made a rule though that I would not use a strategy guide to find ones I did not find on my own. Although I do not always stick to this rule I generally live by excepting whatever I can get from a game on my own. This is not to say I do not use any help ever. I just like to feel like I tried enough on my own before resorting to outside help. Does this method a waste time? Sure. But unless a game is ridiculously hard I am not always bothered by the trying and failing, then learning from your mistakes. To each thier own of course but there are certainly lessons to be learned since you will encounter such situations in your actual life constantly. the bright side of the game is that it is just game and you can go back and correct it in most cases while you rarely have that luxury in real life. In other word no need to get too frustrated then if you have to play a little more. Often you in the end get much more satisfaction from figuring it out. Any ways it has been maybe like 4 week now since I last touched Oblivion though. Not sure why because when Initially started Shivering Isles I thought wow this great but for some reaon I hit a wall and haven't felt like investing time in right now, Fotunatly since the story in much more focused it should not be too hard to pick up and play at any point. An few notes opn the game. I stated before i was not using fast travel. I kept too that till around 320 hours in when I became a master of sneak and at that point all pretty much explored most of that map. I did not see everything of course but I felt I had seen enough and trust me if you have not played far through the game you will by virtue of doing the quest be travelling all over the place back and forth. It is fun to explore but you will want to get things going at some point most likely. Overall I enjoyed the game a lot. The most boring part to me was the closing of Oblivion gates. If you don't know there are far more on the map than you actually have close but you are required to shut a handful or so to complete some quests. The ending was cool though I never got to see it fully though in game since my game would crash at the same point every time. I ended up having to watch it youtube to see it uninterupted then had to use the console code to progress me through it.Luckily I had done the work though the section it would crash was all automated anyway so I didn't feel bad about having to this.

By the way just a note on how to play Elder Scrolls games as I often hear how people do intially love these games but get bored or overwhelmed. the best secret I can give is to not get caught up in the idea that you have to explore ever cave/ruins/ect.Trust me when I say this you will explore more than enough of these just by doing quests alone and although it will not be all of them if you really feel the need to go through everything keep iun mind the game is not over when you complete the main questline and you can always go back later. I think you will just find the game much more enjoyable if you stick to going to and doing things with a purpose. It is fun to explore these games especially when you first fire them up but if you keep doing that I think most people will get burned out before they ever actually do anything in the game.

I also recently broke my rule of playing too many games at once and started up both Bully and Alan Wake. Both I think are ok games and I would to see a Bully sequel to further rifine that idea but niether in my opinion are great. Alan Wake to me is only ok as I find it to be dull and very contrived and just kind of thrown together. It looks good and it plays well at least. If you like it, great I am just not getting the feeling I got from the older games of Silent Hill or Resident Evil. I like Bully and the fighting system is sort of cool though it does make my hand ache with all the darn fighting you have to do but I can't say I have enjoyed it better than any of the GTA's I played (Minus GTA 1/2 since the top down view made those a pain). Still though would like to see another made because I think there is a lot of content to draw from in both the high school level and the college should it go there. they also could have fun with it by taking it to other decades too similar to what they did with GTA which could be really cool I think. The biggest issue I could see with Rockstar with this type of game is that the kind of violence that takes place in school these days is not really a laughing matter. Rockstar is not one to shy from controversey of course but I do think there is difference when dealing with kids or shouldn't be doing for that matter vs. the dumb things adults do.

On to my new obession, boardgames. Yeah I said it. Now I know what you are saying , WTF? Now I am sure a lot people have played the norm like Monopoly, Sorry ect..I play those all the tme with my kid and they are fun but recently I dived into the more hardcore or lesser known ones and I am hooked. I guess it has something to do with the fact that boardgames have not abandoned the concept of thinking, making your move, seeing what happens and accepting it unlike a lot of today's video games. Also boardgames have not fallen under the marketing/corporate concept of trying to make a game for everyone. This post is already long though so I will starting getting into more detail about the games I got, which ones I have played of them so far, and which ones I like of them.