After many attempts to like this game, my initial instinct was the right one... DON'T touch it... ever... again...

User Rating: 2.1 | The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind XBOX
I played this game for the first time about a year or so ago. I rented it from Blockbuster. I took it home and was looking forward to the "100+" hours of gameplay and adventure the box duped you into getting excited about. When I put in the game and got to the beginning... I couldn't believe my eyes. In front of me was the ugliest looking gray Vulcan I have ever seen. (That wasn't a Vulcan? Must have been Romulan then...) Then the guard comes... and he's just as hideous if not worse than Spock. Not only that, you're tromping around this boat's innards in FIRST person... umm, no. First person mode belongs in FPSs, not RPGs. Not to worry though... after you go through an assortment of equally unattractive individuals, you'll be able to switch to 3rd person mode. YIKES!! And you thought everyone else was horrid... but look at YOU!! I couldn't tell if my character was running or walking... the animation was more like C-3PO walking over hot coals with a corn cob where the sun doesn't shine. To add to my plummeting enthusiasm and opinion of Morrowind, I was forced to read endless, boring gibberish just to figure out what I was supposed to be doing. Where's the voice overs? You get one line when you approach the person, and one when you leave, and its like for the rest, they hand you a piece of paper. Sometimes the paper will have "key words", in which case if you make the careless mistake to indulge them in the highlighted word, they hand you another piece of paper to lull you to sleep with. After 2 hours of "walking" around the first town (still clueless as to where to go, what I should be doing in this grotesque world), I took it out of my XBOX, took it to Blockbuster, said it was defective, and got another game in exchange.

At one point, I decided I'd give the Game of the Year version a whirl, only to take it back in the same state of frustration and agony as the previous time. And recently, since I'd been reading a lot about it on the Gamespot XBOX forums, I decided to give it one last chance. And again, I wasted $8 at Blockbuster. That's the last time I'll let "fanboys" tempt me again. Although it did help me to regain enough prospective to do this review. For instance, the controls are horrible. Obviously this game was never meant to be ported from the PC. I hate to beat this dead cow, but the graphics aren't even up to par with the Playstation 1. Another reason not to port it over... besides, with mods available online (I assume), you can probably make it look a lot more inviting than the disgusting world displayed in the XBOX version. Then there's the hyped up selling point of having a completely "open ended" world... I remember one Gamespot member who said something to the effect of not many games can claim that it takes approximately an entire hour to walk across the world map. In an environment this revolting, who'd want to shlep through one town, much less the entire map?! And I can't think of ANY game I'd want to travel for a whole hour to reach my destination.

Everything about this game reeks. My only hope is that they corrected all those issues in Oblivion. Perhaps this time I'll borrow it from a friend and save myself $8. Some people say this game requires a lot of patience to get the most out of the Morrowind experience. If it takes that much patience, then they should note that on the back of the box: "This game is very ugly, boring, and has been known to cause brain damage and cure insomnia. Purchase from the bargain bin at your own risk."