Elder Scrolls: Skyrim

Technically I'm still playing it, but I've concluded the two main quest lines for the game, and explored a large portion of the world, and I like it. It feels like Bethesda found a good blend of Morrowind and Oblivion, making you work a bit for your victories, without making them impossible to achieve.

Graphically, it looks great on my PC, runs pretty well after some tweaking of configuration files, and doesn't suffer from the loading times that the console (360) version does. Though the trade-off is crashing, which either happens a lot, or very infrequently depending on who you ask.

As far as the audio side of things go it sounds great, and just about everything is captured in a way that makes it feel very real and believable. Except for the voice acting... and it's not that any of the voice acting is bad (overall it's quite good) but the variety that Bethesda kept mentioning just isn't there. It still sounds like there are four people doing all the voices for all the characters in the game, and if you ignore major plot lines, you won't get to hear any of the big-name actors they cast.

Anyone who plays and enjoys Bethesda games will now that none of these things compare to the gameplay side of things, where you can do anything you want, and be anything you like, running rampant through their giant open world, terrorizing wildlife and commoners alike.

Skyrim pretty much delivers this without any problem, you can be one of multiple races that generally look way, way, way better than in any of the previous Elder Scrolls games, and deck them out with all kinds of clothes, armor, and weaponry to turn yourself into an avatar of mighty, dragon-slaying awesomeness. Though it doesn't give you insane level dress-up game complexity that Morrowind did, where you could wear pants, shirts and belts under your greaves, pauldrons, chestpiece, boots, and gauntlets. But then Skyrim doesn't dump you in the middle of a giant ash-desert without any way to find your objectives. So you lose some, you win some right?

If I had one major gripe however, it would be that the stories told in the plots are lacking that punch that makes them engrossing or engaging. Character development is almost missing entirely, and I wish they would spend more time making me give a damn about the characters they plunk down in front of me. Also... I would like to be able to kill the characters that manage to piss me off, Bethesda. No fair getting me to dislike a character, then deny me the ability to slay them and take all their stuff.

Bottom line: Worth the full price.

Assassins Creed: Revelations

Assassins Creed is one of those franchises that I really like, and don't mind having lots of titles to play. I liked Altair, the loose-cannon assassin who gets his crap together and gets himself on track, and I liked Ezio the roguish assassin who goes from revenge to duty as his motivator to be a renaissance action hero.

I've even enjoyed all of the games they've put out, even if Brotherhood should have been more of an expansion/DLC pack and was probably the weakest overall entry. The single player city renovation, assassin recruiting, and guild management side-games were fun, if a bit light on content to really get into. The multiplayer had a lot of promise, and was lots of fun for at least a little while.

How is this relevant to Revelations? Well, Revelations is basically Brotherhood, in Constantinople. You still do the renovation thing, purchasing healers, smiths, bookstores, and tailors who are only there to sell you things, and tell you how little they think of you. No, really... every merchant is shocked that you can afford to buy their wares, even though you were the man who put their shop there in the first place! 

You also do the whole recruiting, training, mission-assigning thing from Brotherhood, where you collect a bunch of downtrodden peasants, random criminals with hearts-of-gold, and so on, sending them off to far off places to do things for money and experience, and the chance to level up and be slightly less expendable. Not that they are that expendable this time around... where the Templar forces could kill a handful of your assassins in Brotherhood, they are almost unstoppable to the point that I've yet to have one die ever, even if wildly outnumbered and surrounded.

You also have bomb building, side-missions, item collecting, and Den Defense, which is basically tower defense, but with assassins fighting Byzantine holdovers marching under the Templar banner. I know, it's kind of absurd, but this is Assassins Creed: Revelations, where you play a man reliving the memories of his ancestor... reliving the memories of his ancestor. I'm not even kidding, that happens several times. It's great, and I loved, but it's absurd when you think about it too hard.

Anyway, if I'm going to gripe about anything in this game, it's that the extra content like the Brotherhood challenge maps, and race courses are missing, which I quite liked. Also, it's missing some of the challenge, and massive battles. In all the previous AC games you could count on being surrounded by upwards of fifty armed, jeering, angry soldiers who would try to hack you to little-bitty-assassin bits. Apparently they just don't have that kind of manpower anymore. Maybe Ezio's just killed too many people across the last three games.

However, all the new gadgets, moves, and bombs do make terrorizing what guards there are infinitely entertaining.

Story-wise it's good, and it wraps up Ezio's story arch, reveals some more stuff about the ongoing plot, develops Desmond a bit more, and sets up the next game to be about him. Probably. Who knows anymore. Maybe Desmond's story is just being relived by one of his descendants. Yeah, I wouldn't put it past Ubisoft to do something like that.

As for the multiplayer: it seems like Ubisoft has figured out how to make it work, and it's pretty entertaining.

Bottom line: Worth the full price.

Need For Speed: The Run

I want to like NFS: The Run, I have played and enjoyed most of, if not all of the NFS games that have come out in the last decade. However, The Run does a few things wrong that make me angry, and I mean legitimately angry at the game. To the point that I'm not playing to enjoy myself, but to stick it to the game. That's right, I begin holding a grudge against the title. This kind of thing is probably not healthy.

It's not the car handling, or the graphics, sound, story, or anything like that. For the most part it looks good, sounds good, and the story is interesting enough to keep me playing the singleplayer races... however, there are two things it does that turn me into a frothing font of rage, swearing under my breath at the game as I play it.

The first offense is that the track design, while interesting and challenging is too damn narrow. If you go off the asphalt and onto the curb of a city street, it resets you. If your tail end swings out over the sheer drop of a cliff, threatening to drag your shiny hand-made Italian supercar into a canyon... it resets you.

In concept this is fine, I go veering off a mountainside, or into a thicket at excess of a hundred miles an hour, my racing career is effectively done for... but if my drift is a bit too wide, and I slip onto the shoulder of the highway, or touch one of the holographic track boundaries, I would like to be given a little grace period to recover my car, and redeem myself, not be reset to the last checkpoint I hit, forcing me to redo the last section of the race all over again.

Hell, I could even stand that if I didn't have a finite number of resets that, once gone, cause me to forfeit the race entirely... forcing me to restart it from the very beginning. This leads me into the second offense Need For Speed: The Run commits: This game will make you wait.

Get reset, and you have to wait 5-10 seconds for it to reset, fail a race and not only do you have to agree to start the race over (choosing 'No' just leaves you on the loss screen) you're forced to wait for the game to load the whole track over from the beginning, with any cut scenes (unskippable!) playing before you're dumped back behind the steering wheel. If you do win, which is not impossible, you're left with a slow-mo view of your car that lasts just a touch too long, and an Experience Point tally screen that could really be faster, especially when you level up and it wants to show you all the cool things it gave you. This is all made worse because you can't mash a button to speed things up. You have to wait, and bear in mind, installing the game to the 360's hard drive doesn't do much for load times.

Also... it's bad enough that when I get the chance to switch cars, not only do I lose several seconds of race-time as my opponents get ahead of me (before the race pauses) I then have to wait for the car images to load, then wait for the game to kick me back into the race. If things were a bit more seamless, and smooth I doubt I'd have any problems.

Ultimately NFS: The Run feels like something that I'd really love if the track boundaries weren't so constricting, and time spent waiting for the game to load, reset or move on wasn't so extreme.

I haven't touched multiplayer yet, and I somehow doubt I will.

Honestly, if you want a better racing game, get the earlier title Hot Pursuit. I can honestly say I enjoyed it far, far more than what I've seen of The Run, and it'll be cheaper to boot.

Bottom line: Not worth full price.