Did a 43.7-hour Skyrim run over Labor Day weekend, but I was in the comfort of my own home, had plenty of food and drink at the ready, and have the common sense required to know that if my body's telling me "cut this out or I quit", to go to sleep!

My character must've appeared drunk to the NPCs, as I'd nod off for a few seconds and snap back to attention with my character running in place against a wall, but I beat the main quest and a good chunk of the side material (including resolving the civil war in favor of the Imperials) in one sitting.

Hurrah for Traveller's Tales! A couple hundred million ought to go a long way toward making their future games even better than the already-awesome Lego Star Wars!

The great thing about GTA3 was that character. Like other great open-world games that followed (most notably Morrowind and Oblivion), that character became whoever and whatever the player wanted him to be, and that sense of ownership over the protagonist made, in my view, GTA3 superior to Vice City and San Andreas. A great choice by Gamespot, long overdue for induction.

Running your game at the native resolution of your monitor if you have an LCD is a great way to maximize the frame rate---if the card doesn't have to scale the image to the display it helps a lot. Even if you've got a card with more than enough power to handle the scaling (like an 8800GTX), you'll notice that there's a lot less input lag running at that native rez. My four-month-old midrange Dell plays Oblivion like a champ thanks to a lot of stuff that this article covers.

What's with the mysterious drop on Oblivion whenever the 4GB ReadyBoost is added? The overall tests on that game don't look impressive, and I've already got 2GB in my three-month-old Dell XPS 410 system and two wide-open slots for another 2GB once nVidia works the bugs out of the Vista drivers. I'm thinking that my original upgrade plan (get the discs through Dell's "express upgrade" scheme, park them on a shelf, install Vista sometime between next spring and never) will hold up fine.

Plain and simple, the PS3 doesn't impress me. Neither do the 360 or the Wii for that matter. In their efforts to take gaming to a broader mainstream audience, they've generally neglected things like strong AI, replayable single-player content, and other things that us antisocial folks who just want to sit down and get away from our social obligations need. There's a reason I play Oblivion and not WoW; there's a reason my PS2 has a memory card full of franchises from various sports games that go back for decades of virtual time. Give us singleplayer escapists something to do and I might consider dropping the absurd wad of cash on a next-gen console.

The complete lack of truly destructible environments in Oblivion. If I hit something flammable with a fire spell, I want it to catch fire. Maybe with Elder Scrolls VIII when everything requires an eight-core processor and 16GB of video RAM.

My collection of stuff that is actually cool is fairly limited, but here goes: 1. Rome: Total War (PC) 2. Katamari Damacy (PS2) 3. Gran Turismo 4 (PS2) 4. Final Fantasy Tactics (PS---and it's a first-edition bought at release, not the much more common Greatest Hits version) 5. Civilization II (PC, and the amazing thing is that it actually runs on modern machines)

I've missed quite a few if only because my tastes are strange, but here are the five biggest: 1. World of Warcraft (PC) 2. Starcraft (PC) 3. Perfect Dark (N64) 4. Shogun: Total War (PC---although I'm going to pick this up as part of the Eras collection once I land a new job) 5. The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion (PC---another one that's on the "future" list when I get a better comp.)