Oblivion Adventures Part 3: Durability and Destiny

Last time on Oblivion Adventures, smash-hit salesman Shush’Ogar struck scores of skeletons and sketchy sell-swords, taking tons of treasure to trek towards town, prompting a peaceful proprietor to propose probable paths of practicing proficient peddling. And afterwards...

Shush stepped outta de shop feelin pretty gud about all de sellin stuff he did. Shush were gettin lotsa shiny gold pieces for all de glowy stones he found. Shush wasn’t sure what to do wit all de gold doe. Den Shush had an idea. Cause see Shush’s clanky clothes got all banged up from all de skeletons an stuff, an it was real uncomfortable. So Shush found a buildin wit a picture of clanky clothes on it, an he went inside.

The shop in question, notable for looking exactly like every other shop in the imperial city.

Oblivion Adventures Part 2: Dungeons and Dealings

 

Last time we left our supposedly sneaky orc Shush’Ogar, he had stumbled out of jail, collected skulls, stumbled out of goblin caves, witnessed the assassination of an emperor, and stumbled out of a sewer. The moment when you walk out from the tutorial into the light of a wide-open world to explore is always great in Bethesda games. An interesting thing to note about Oblivion is that though you can go anywhere and do as you like at this point, the game starts you off pointed straight at a dungeon. Specifically, an ancient ruin named Vilverin.

There’s a sleeping bandit right out of view behind the wall. I know this dungeon uncomfortably well.

This dungeon was one of the first things I experienced playing an Elder Scrolls game, and I wager the same was true for many others. It’s a good introductory dungeon too, as it has a fair bit of variety and can make you an obscene amount of money for a level one character. As such, it’s been an unofficial tradition of mine to plunder the place as my first independent act with new characters. Now dungeons can be kind of same-y and lacking in unique commentary, so we’ll skip or summarize some in this play-through. But for at least this first one, I’ll make an exception.

On Oblivion Leveling

NOTE: This post is a game design interlude not directly connected to my written Let’s Play of Oblivion. If you don’t care about this sort of thing, you can skip it. But if you like painfully detailed discussions of in-game mechanics, gosh golly gee are you in for a treat.

So before we continue the adventures of Shush’Ogar, there’s something I need to address. In the first episode of this series, as well as future episodes, I’m trying to mix in discussions of game design along with humorous play-by-plays. This is all well and good for most things, as Oblivion has a lot of weird and amusing quirks to it. However, there is one subject in Oblivion that is too massive an issue. There’s one giant, messy problem with the game that I want to dedicate an entire post to properly discuss. This one thing, this near fatal flaw is my biggest issue with Oblivion. It bolsters many of the lesser problems in the game and is the number one reason I can't consider Oblivion the best Elder Scrolls game. So what could this flaw possibly be?

Today, we’re going to talk about leveling up in Oblivion.

Oblivion Adventures, Part 1

When it comes to what I do in my free time and even just the games I play, there’s a lot of content that never gets a proper blog post here. I understand that given my recent update rate, this information has gone from “kind of obvious assumption” to “something so clearly and blatantly apparent that all human children instinctively know it at birth”. But I want to make this clear all the same. I play all sorts of video games that I never see fit to write lengthy articles about. Typically this is some combination of having nothing interesting to say and/or the game being so popular and documented that everything I could say has been said.

An example of this phenomenon is Bethesda games. Bethesda is probably best known for The Elder Scrolls series; a succession of massive open-world action RPGs most recently featuring the extremely popular Skyrim. I’ve sunk many hundreds of hours into the company’s more recent games, starting with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Even though this game is the second most recent in the series it’s already almost a decade old. Bethesda made games before this, but they’ve generally been rated M and when I was younger I had what was less of a computer and more one of Charles Babbages new-fangled abacuses.

Zelda: The Minish Cap Review

After the expected amount of break time, we now return from being a blog exclusively about thinly-veiled satire to a blog exclusively about The Legend of Zelda. You may be wondering why I’m reviewing so many Zelda games lately. Have I perhaps elected to become some type of sage Zelda hermit, living alone out in the mountains where I do nothing but meditate, play Zelda games and look meaningfully at the morning sun through my grizzled beard? Well, no. I wouldn’t be complaining if someone paid me to do that, but no.

You see, I had been playing Four Swords Adventures for a while before the Youtube show Game Grumps reminded me of my past frustrations with Zelda 2. After completing these two games, I realized there was only one game out of all seventeen in the main series that I hadn’t played. I owned and had played every Zelda game except one: The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. Well, it turned out that The Minish Cap was available for purchase on the Wii U digital store, and I had a gift card for said digital store. So I hope you like these Zelda reviews, because I’m in too deep to NOT go over this game.

Genericide’s New Direction

We here at Genericide have been enthusiastic to bring you the best in gaming content the past few years. Today, we want to announce to you a bold new direction Genericide is embarking in to improve the site like you could never imagine. As of today, Genericide is shifting focus to be a better service of quality games content than ever before! We want to be your one-stop shop for all things video games, and are bringing the quality content to back it up!

Our team has been working round the clock on this new wave of streamlined content designed specifically for you. These changes will allow not only maintain that classic Genericide quality our viewers are used to experiencing, but a ton more epic news, columns and entertainment pieces than ever before! We’re so dedicated to this content push that our team has prepared a whole 10 new articles available for you right now! So kick back, relax, and enjoy the all-new, awesome content display we have here at Genericide Entertainment! Don’t forget to share these great new posts on social media!

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6 Mind-Blowingly Epic Fails Popular Games Today Make

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6 Tricks That Fool You into Thinking Consoles are Better than PC

Is Games Journalism Losing Its Integrity?

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These Classic Gaming Characters are So High Right Now

We all have those times when we need to relax, kick back and smoke some drugs. But video game characters are not supposed to smoke the drugs! That would be totally crazy and random, right? But it turns out they do smoke the drugs, which is what these images are about!