360

Oh dear.

I was trying to prove that it’s possible to kill people for no reason and get no bounty for doing so. So I snuck into a house in Bravil and slaughtered the woman I found inside eating breakfast.

I then went out and talked to a guard, who didn’t arrest me. And my stats screen showed no bounty. So, the perfect crime.

I wasn’t going to save after this, not being the murdering type. But the game had autosaved when I left the dead woman’s house and my last maunal save was right before the tricky bit of a mission I did a while ago.

So I’m stuck as a murderer. Oh well, I might as well embrace my new calling. There’s a man called Rufio…

I finished the Thieves Guild missions last night.

The final two were excellent. The penultimate mission I used lateral thinking to get past and the final mission was all about the sneaking.

Fantastic stuff.

I’m not sure whether I should be feeling like a cheat or congratulating myself on my cunning and skill.

I did a mission a couple of nights ago that was pretty much beyond my capabilities. Enemies that I could just about kill one-on-one, but more than one and I was dead.

No spoilers, but it was just a “get item and get out mission”, though, so I found a way.

First up, part of the mission involved swimming through an underground passage. Just after it I ran into some horrible great bastard with a great big sword and eyes like a hawk. I ran. He followed me back to the underwater passage.

He followed me into it.

He didn’t follow me out. I used a Detect Life spell and couldn’t see him. So I gingerly edged forwards as slowly as I could with a diminishing oxygen bar and found his corpse floating by the ceiling. Seems he needs to breathe, too.

So the next few minutes involved me waving at enemies and then running away and diving into the water laughing to myself as they followed. Killed a couple more that way, but after that the enemies wouldn’t follow me back that far.

So I ran past them. I ran and I ran and got to the end, where the item I needed to steal was. Up some stairs, hammering my heal spell, a huge leap over a massive gap, into a room, picked up the item I needed, leapt on to a desk, back over the heads of the enemies that had followed me in and all the way back through the “dungeon” and out into the open air.

All that practice jumping over the rooftops of Brauma and the Waterfront paid off.

After that it was an easy matter to find my way back to my contact. I was torn between feeling cunning and cool (and some of that jumping was just excellent) in a Zorro type way and feeling like I’d somehow done it “wrong” and should have killed all the enemies like in a normal RPG. Even the “boss” was still alive, probably wondering what the hell had just happened.

But my very, very favourite so far was stealing an item from someone’s bedroom while they were asleep and then causally picking up an apple from their fruit bowl on the way to the door. I just felt so much like a movie-style cheeky kind of rogue.

I fell asleep on the train on the way home from London and dreamt about Oblivion. And I’m dreaming about it every night.

After a total of thirty hours or so it feels almost exactly like Morrowind to me. Do like the way the combat model means it’s possible to win fights that there’d have been no way to win in Morrowind.

In fact, it’s better than Morrowind in almost every way. I like the way Morrowind’s map filled in, Oblivion doesn’t do that on the main map. That’s an incredibly petty complaint, mind.

The other thing is that I liked Morrowind’s alien landscape and wildlife. So far in Morrowind I’ve just seen deer, horses, dogs and sheep as non-enemy animals. Not quite the same as giant flying jellyfish things.

I bought a horse today, finally. Almost cried when it died after riding it a bit too hard over some mountains. I normally fast-travel to places when doing quests, but this time I decided to ride over the mountains at night while it was snowing. Beautiful, until I got my horse to gallop down a steep slope and it fell out from under me and crashed all the way down, twisting in an utterly sickening fashion. Poor thing. We were only about fifty yards from my destination, too.

Also bought a house from somone. Cheap… but, er… needed some work done… There’s no way I’m giving spoilers for that quest. You’ll have fun.

The quests are just getting better and better, actually. And they’re all side quests.

One day I might even do some of the story stuff, maybe.

It’s… half past midnight…

On a week night.

How did that happen?