The city of Bruma, located in the frosty Jerell mountains, my long trek through the wilderness comes to an end. Now I can finally sell off the stolen goods from the Imperial City and afterwards I’ll head off to Frostcrag Spire, a home which I somehow inherited while in the Imperial Prison.

Meet Ongar, the Thieves’ Guild fence for lowly recruits. I total amounted I fenced was over 500 gold, enough to make me eligible for special jobs for the Theives Guild.

Now that the golds have been sold off, Frostcrag Spire is next over yon mountain.

I was going to buy a horse but then these horses don’t seem particularly smart. Has nice balance though. I decide to walk instead.

After a few Deadra shrines and giant monsters, I come to the top of Frostcrag Spire. Below, I see the Imperial City off in the distance. I was disappointed to find out that there was no furnishing at all in the Spire! All the furniture was in the Imperial City! Now I have to trek all the way back! Lucky for me I found a magic portal that teleported me directly to the Mage’s Guild tower at the Imperial City.

Oh yea, I became the Arena Grand Champion by defeating the previous Champion in battle.

Waiting for my chance to break into the home of the shady contact, I spend the night just watching the door waiting for him to leave.

Hours later I break in to discovery his gravely secret. He’s a grave robber! The dirty shovel, the piles of bones and blood everywhere, the list of recently dead in the book! It all makes sense! Steal the goods and sell while making a profit! This must be stopped!

I catch Agarmir in the midst of digging up another grave but what’s this? IT’S A TRAP! Agarmir knew all along that I was coming! Is he some sort of physic or something?

No Matter, his head belongs to me now. I must go confront Thoronir about his stolen goods and force him to confess!

Good! Keep it that way. Do it again and I’ll have to behead you like all my enemies.

I’m tired of the Imperial City, lets head to Bruma. That’s where Onagar lives, the thieves guild merchant who will buy my stolen wares. I have no horse so I must trek their on foot.

The journey is dangerous as the roads are lined with abandoned forts, wild animals, and bandits.

The journey is taking longer than I expected. Only halfway to Bruma and I’ve already been attacked five times by bandits and wild animals! I stopped at Aleswell but it was empty! Aw well, time to continue my journeies.

GAH! It’s another bandit!

The sun has set, it’s time to go on a prowl in the Imperial City. I’ve already joined the Thieves Guild and now I just need some stolen goods to sell to Ongar in Burma before the guild will give me any special job. First off, I have a quest with Jensine to investigate Thorinir and his suspicious contact who seems to get Thorinir goods below market costs.

Meeting at night being covered by brushes? They are definitely up to no good. I follow the contact to his home and plan to break in during the day when he leaves. Now that part is done, I can go out and steal!

This is the Gilded Carafe, they sell stuff, what kind of stuff, I have no idea but their sign says Gilden, that means lots of gold right? Aw well, time to go in through the front door!

It was locked but with some carefuly handling of my lockpick, I was able to set all the pins in place to get into the store lobby.

All these candles? Fire hazard waiting to happen

Turns out the store is also the owner’s home! I sneak upstairs and I’m immediately awed by the collection of gold and silver on the bookshelf. This poor lady is going to wake up to some shock.

The loot I’ve stolen is marked with a red hand, this should fetch me around 100 gold in Burma, but I still need to steal more. For now, the sun is rising, I should go investigate that suspicious contact.

After a tiring escape from the Imperial Prison and sewers, I needed a good rest. I worked my way to the Waterfront district and was told that the Bloated Float would be a nice place to eat and get some rest.

The owner kinda creeped me out but he was offering a room for only 10 gold a night! I was tired and this was better than stealing a begger’s bed. Three hours later however….

WAIT! WHAT! WHY IS THIS SHIP OUT IN THE SEA?! My nice little nap gets interrupted by the sounds of the ocean and some guy knocking on my door!

Meet Lynch, he busted down my door and was quite unhappy to see me on board. I told him I was the ship’s cook, he didn’t like that one bit and I had no choice but to cut off his head.

It was horrible, I got blood all over my prison uniform! Above deck I found two more lackeys and after further attempts to convince them that I was just the ship’s cook who wanted no trouble, they told me their secrets and then tried to kill me! Once again I had to defend myself from these barbarians!

Now all that is left of the interrupters of my slumber was the ring leader, she was holding the owner hostage inside his room.

This is Selene and her “OH SNAP” face once she found out I bested her crew, discovered her plans, and her realization that she’s just no match for me.

Selene surrenders! But I’m still not satisfied. You ruined my nap, soiled my clothing, and all you gave me was a sword?! BEGONE!

I’m never sleeping in this boat ever again! The Bloated Float, not recommended!

I found some old oblivion screenshots I took back in 2006 on my 6600GT 128MB. It was my first video card I bought. Before the 6600GT I had a Riva TNT2 32MB.

On the way to reclaim his house

You don’t argue with a guard

Seriously, he has a bigger sword

He even has a shield!

And now he’s just a floater in the lake

It’s a house! and the sky! and my character

This is what happens when you have mods that use different equipment slots to give you a hat/mask

Too much bloom?

Year, I think everything is too bright

It was only suppose to be a 3 hour nap!

So giddy he was with joy he could hardly contain himself

The Captain of the guard was in Utter Shock

Look is displeasure

People Can FLYYYY!

From the ground

The poor guard Captain got too close to the Sun

A small prayer before we break open this coffin

Silly Goblin

The sky is a nice shade of fire and hell

Life as a medic is harsh

One of the reasons I didn’t like playing medic is that you have to take the passenger seat in killing and doing objectives. Your goal in the game is to keep your team alive and support them in the push towards the objective. Sure you’ll be top of the scoreboard with assists and healing but you won’t be getting the satisfaction of a kill. The second reason I don’t like playing medic is that you are the bullseyes that everyone wants to kill. Getting close to an uber? Count on a crit rocket or a spy coming around your way. As other classes if I get killed, I don’t mind but with medic, it’s often when I’m past 75% in an uber charge that just got wasted and now I have to build it back up again. It’s just one of those laws of life where you count on something bad happening to you as you near the climax of joy.

Try surviving this without an Uber

What I found to make playing medic a much more enjoyable class for me to play is to be an offensive, or as other people call it, battle medic. If I see a large chance of myself being killed and I don’t have faith in the person I’m supporting to protect me, I’ll break off the healing beam and go for the kill with my saw. If I survive, my ubersaw gets a nice charge bonus, if I die, I would have died anyways so it’s better to die while trying than to die with the medigun pointed at the enemy. Other times, I just can’t resist the lure of an easy kill as there’s something satisfying about getting the drop on enemies and humiliating them with a kill.

Your medic is mine!

I don’t know if by being a battle medic I cause more harm to my team by dying instead of staying back and safe, but I do know it’s a lot more fun to run around causing distractions as the enemy try to hunt down an almost harmless medic. Lately though I’ve been moving away from medic. If I see there’s other good medics on the team, I’ll just stick to medic for the initial push out of the gates until I die. Sometimes however, we end up winning the round without me dying at all even with battle medic attacks on the enemy frontline.

The next time you play with me and I’m your medic, remember, if I see an easy kill, I’ll take it, even if I have to kill steal from you. If you’re the enemy, don’t think I’ll stick around with my medigun out waiting for you to kill me, I’ll go down trying to take you with me.

Moments later, we discover an all medic team only gets you to the second point

By the way, I use to prefer playing pyro back in the days, now there’s too many pyros running around not doing a good job of supporting the team so I decided to give heavy a try.

Burn baby burn

Here are some screenshots I took from a left 4 dead demo, video is here. [url]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vikg3NyE0N4[/url]

I had a blast at GDC and exploring the show floor. I only attended for two days but it was enough to explore what the show floor had to offer.

NeuroSky

One of the first products I saw was the NeuroSky monitor headset. They were showing off how it can read your brain waves and did a tech demo on what you could do. The one I tried had me focus my attention on one object making it explode and another had me relaxing to have a ball float up.

It was an interesting technology and the company stated that they were looking for developers to use their tech in games. The focus was in rehabilitation for people disabled by injuries as the machine will help the player learn how to control their brain waves. These brain waves could be used in mobility devices so instead of a user physically moving a part of their body, they can just think it and the appliance will move as if it’s part of the body.

www.Neurosky.com

The screen showing the Brain Waves

Making the Ball Float 

Me with the headset on

Boryokudan Rue

When I first glimpsed Boryokudan Rue, I immediately thought back to the adventure games of the 90s. The game is built on the Adventure Game Studio engine. What immediately stood out for me was the use of a cover system and gun fights. Adventure games I’ve played were always light in heart, had comedic violence, and no real enemies that could kill you. Just delay you or reset you to an earlier part of the level.

The level being showcased at GDC was the tutorial level and the character you play, Delta Six, is a experimental subject who has lost his memory and the tutorial serves as a way to teach you the basic movements. Once the scene got to the gun tutorial, I was hooked. The player goes into cover and you have to manually choose when to go out of cover and aim. Once you aim there is a quicktime like meter where you have to hit the right range to get the headshot or a regular body shot. I didn’t see what happened after but as I understand, eventually you must figure out how to get the gun and break out of your containment.

Below are links to the developer’s twitter and the development thread.

 http://twitter.com/thejburger

http://www.jburger.blogspot.com/

http://www.bigbluecup.com/yabb/index.php?topic=35594.0

Monaco

Monaco was the gem of the show for me. I got a brief 5 minute play of it but the game, event though it’s 9 months from release, it’s amazing. Monaco is a 4 player coop game where you and your 3 friends must steal a trophy and escape while avoiding guards with guns and bystanders who will report you on sight to the nearest guards. All you need is the movement keys, and your ability key. Interactions with doors, windows, and alarms can be done just by walking into it. Each character has a different ability such as shutting off alarms, instant lock picking, spy cameras, and sedatives for guards.

If one character gets killed, another just has to walk over and revive them. This proves tricky however if the dead buddy happens to be in the line of sight of a guard. What the players need to do is either sedate him with the yellow character or distract him by having the guard chase another player. Teamwork is an absolute in order to survive and reach the end in this game. This is one game I’m looking forward to.

http://www.facebook.com/MonacoIsMine

http://twitter.com/MonacoIsMine

3d Games at GDC

The 3d games at GDC did not impress me. For one, the 3d glasses did not fit over my eye glasses. The games didn’t really look special with 3d on and it didn’t really pop out at me. The 3d effects suffer from the small pc monitor sizes and the distance to the monitors. The ones I tried had you 5-6 feet away from the monitor and the 3d was contained within the monitors unlike in the movie theatres. The problem I think likes with the fact that in theatres, the screen fill sup your entire field of view so everything you see is in 3d while on the show floor, you had the environment to contend with.

I don’t think 3d games will be big until people get larger screens into their homes to fill up their view. Also, the glasses never sat right on my nose and some of them I had to hold in place in front of my eyeglasses.

Overall, GDC was a nice experience. I think I’ll go back again for 2011 and might pay for the higher priced passes so I can attend the summits.

Wooyay. Now what?

When I started off with Rainbow Six as my first first person shooter on the PC, I had no inkling of this game mechanic called "respawn." When you died in the game, you had to wait until the end of the match. Depending on the map and type of players, it could take one minute to the end or in some cases, 20 minutes. This is where I learned about patience as all the dead players talked amongst themselves and watched as their last teammates get lost within the map and keep passing by each other without noticing. There would be talks about nice shots, tactics, and general everyday life during these afterdeath waiting periods.

As I continued my first person shooting career, I moved onto Delta Force series which introduced me to elements such as medics, spawn camping, and most importantly, the "Press Spacebar to respawn or wait for a medic" popup. I was amazed at the idea of being able to be brought back to life and how it made so much sense to me. The Delta Force series is about large groups of people battling other large groups of people while in Rainbow Six it was just your squad vs another squad with limited numbers on a small contained area and not a battlefield. Essentially, on the battlefield between factions, the leaders would not just send in some small unit, they would send their army to battle it out and continue to send in reinforcements so that the battle can be won.

I continued my FPS career through the years and when I hit Team Fortress 2, that was the first time I came across people complaining about respawning. "Respawns are TOOOOOOOOO LOONNGGG!!!!!," "Valve should balance the game for instant respawns, it makes the game better!" "Respawn timers were put in because Valve is too lazy to make good maps!" were the arguments I heard against timers.

It just doesn’t make any sense for me. Respawn time is there for you to observe your team, learn from their movements and strategy on where to go, what to do, and to celebrate awesome kills that people perform. Respawn time is also the perfect time to get up, stretch, relax, or use the bathroom. In an Arstechnica article I read, (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/02/study-fps-deaths-provide-sweet-relief-to-victims.ars) , there was a study into the effects of killing and dying in the videogame, "James Bond 007: Nightfire," and the study showed that with each kill a person got without dying, their stress increased while being killed gave them relief. I would say this mirrors my response in every shooter I play. When I kill another player, it adds to my kill streak, I become fixated on keeping my kill streak high and staying alive. I become even more paranoid of everyone around me, and I notice this happen to other players as well. As their kill streaks increase, they retreat out of battle faster and faster in fear of losing their awesome streak.

I always value each one of my deaths in any multiplayer game. I think back about my actions and how I would have handled it differently instead of staying stuck in the past about what should have or could have happen. I imagine the new scenario and practice it so I can change my timing. One example I would use is with the airblast on the pyro. With the Demo/Soldier update, I have dramatically increased my airblast reflection rates after many deaths and trying to understand when each soldier fires their load off and what is the best time to reflect.

Personally, I hate instant respawn in all first person shooter style games. For one, it doesn’t give me any sense of consequence for doing a foolish action that gets me killed and the game just says “It’s ok, now get back out there and do it again and again. ”I always feel like there is this pressure on me to move as fast as I can as soon as I spawn and I keep my body and senses in the "fight or flight" mode for an extended period of time. The body thinks there’s a threat everywhere, your heart starts beating, chemicals start filling your body and your brain shuts off non-vital processes of your body. Eventually, your body will deteriorate from this heightened state of alert and now things become more serious as video games start having a detrimental effect on your body.

To my readers, what kind of respawn mechanics do you like? Instant vs timer?

Games with one life are also fine