This is your brain on Skyrim

As you may have deduced, I gave in and bought Skyrim – it's every bit the time sink I knew it would be and I'm definitely enjoying it. Far more than Oblivion; the challenges are fair, character progression is well balanced and the perks all offer noticeable and measurable effects on your abilities.

My character stumbled off into the woods after following what's his name to his sister's house, looking for a golden claw or something, went the wrong way, got lost and attacked by wolves. Fortunately necessity breeds ingenuity… and by that I mean I figured out how to work the menus and realized my guy had some spells to throw around. I also learned how to use the compass and setting current goals/destinations. I returned to the village and went in the RIGHT direction, fought my way through some ruins and found my first shout attack. Loaded down several times past my capacity to carry things, I slowly made my way back to the village to sell my loot and complete my first official quest.

After that I made my way North to talk to some kind of provincial leader or something… On my way in there was a giant or something tromping around – threw some fire and lightning at it from a safe distance and it went down… thrilled with myself I ran to go loot, but discovered I actually did nothing, it was hunters or something – the female among them openly mocked me, then told me to go join the Companions if I wanted to hunt with them. Screw you, lady!

I reported to the… Jarl(?) and was assigned to help the arrogant court wizard. I was sent on a side quest that was completed immediately as I already looted the hell out of the ruin I was supposed to go to previously. After that I found myself embroiled in my first real fight with a dragon – this was sheer awesome on toast, there is nothing easy about taking down one of these things, at least not right now for me. Succeeding, however, is a great feeling.

Despite my elation, my struggles were rather obvious – clearly I needed to improve some things. I decided to give the companions a try after all, they let me in - and to test my fighting skills I had to go to their courtyard and fight with one of their higher ranking members. He promptly mocked my lighting and fire and I was forced to wield a sword I fortunately had in my inventory, holding onto it because it was enchanted and wanted to sell it to a trader who would pay closer to the value. I passed his little test and was then sent on a few menial errands. Go punch a guy over here, take that guys sword to get it sharpened. Bah.

I went to the mage in the Jarls fortress to see if he could train me. It turns out he's not just arrogant, but a huge jerk whom I will return to later to kill. Regardless, he said to go to the college way the **** up north.

So I did.

Now that I'm at Hogwarts, my list of "really dangerous **** to do" has gotten a lot longer. Pretty much immediately, I was shoved head first into another ruin wherein I was fighting off more zombies than could be counted, only to find something no one has ever seen before – obviously it should be up to me to find out everything about it. Naturally the ONE book I need was stolen, so I'm sent south across a frozen Tundra just SILLY with ice wolves and dragons more than happy to eat me if I happen to not want to make it.

Several save/death/reloads later I made it to my destination, where I met a flame atronach - after more save/death/reloading, I finally figured out how to dual cast. This helped quite a bit, especially with the damage bonus granted by a perk in the destruction skill. From there, I once again get to dig around in an underground ruin, looking for these damn books. The dungeon this book thief has set up is rife with what I can only assume are his sex-slave vampire chicks he keeps locked in cages and butchered surgery test subjects, left open and rotting on tables. Basically, I think I'm looking for Jack the Ripper, the one from the Johnny Depp movie most likely.

I decided to save and go to bed there. Nonetheless – I obviously have Skyrim on the brain, and I'll probably have this affliction for the foreseeable future.