Role-Playing

The Dragon of Dojima's Looking a bit Paunchy

HIGH Playing baseball with kids on the beach.

LOW The slow trickle of new moves makes combat painfully stale.

WTF "You have learned the art of pole dancing."

Going by the reception of Nintendo's 3D update of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, there is much love for the Nintendo 64 classic even today. So it's not surprising that a group of very dedicated and talented fans got together to recreate that world in Minecraft.

Busywork: The Game

HIGH The fast-paced, flexible combat system and final boss.

LOW The mind-numbing, endless repetition.

WTF Is every daughter in the kingdom in some sort of peril?

Skyrim is a huge and uneven game, and I will be discussing many of its high points. In the spirit of getting the bad news out first, however, I want to discuss the game's secondary quest, concerning the civil war between the Imperial Legion and the Stormcloaks led by Jarl Ulfric of Windhelm. There is much to admire in the way this quest is set up, but as a world element and gameplay series it falls short in several respects.

Unicorns, Specters and Dragons, Oh My!

HIGH Completely overrunning the enemy with an army made up entirely of chimera and dragons.

LOW Dedicating 30 minutes to a stage, only to die and have to start all over from the beginning... AGAIN.

WTF Opalneria's gravity-defying boobs.

Games about Giant Robots Should be Fun, Right?

HIGH The opening video is gorgeous.

LOW Combat is simpler and more boring than it first appears.

WTF Yay! New chapter! Wait…I have to go back and do extra quests just to unlock the next part of the story?

Talk about Ending with a Bang...

HIGH The beautifully blasted, teetering architectural remnants.

LOW The difficulty level is significantly increased.

WTF The creatures in Courier's Mile can survive a direct nuke hit?

= ) ZZZ = )

HIGH The toaster who wants to burn the world in nuclear fire.

LOW Most missions are dishwater-dull fetchquests.

WTF Penis hands and penis feet.

While a little crude, this Skyrim mod is an oddly fitting tribute to the late Randy "Macho Man" Savage. Yeah!

I have a lot to say about The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and indeed I've already said some of it. Some of it has been said for me, for instance in Shamus Young's takedown of the Thieves' Guild quests, which after a promising start became too intolerable for me to bother completing. Uneven writing quality is almost a certainty in a game this large, though, and perhaps it was the Thieves' Guild's time, after being one of the best sidequests in Oblivion.