Again, though, we’re not just told that Mundus operates under a certain (very different from our own) set of physical laws: we see it. We visit various realms of Oblivion. We interact with Aedra and Daedra alike. And we’re not the only ones: the Mages’ Guild, the Psijic Order, various Aedric and Daedric cults have…

Maybe Skyrim is just SO advanced it only LOOKS like its not!

It’s not presented that way. The civilization of Tamriel should not be read as a bunch of ignorant savages: they are a highly advanced, learned society that just happens to exist in a world ruled by a fundamentally different set of physical laws. This isn’t, in other words, myth created to explain the unknown: it’s a…

That only works for the Elder Scrolls games if you choose to ignore the lore, though. Since at least Daggerfall, Bethesda has been very clear that we’re not supposed to be reading all the magi-babble as myth: it’s very much a demonstrable, lived-in reality within the context of the games. Nirn (the planet in the TES…

No, Argonians are descended from sentient trees. And the astronomical problems go further than Nirn having more moons than Earth: canonically, the “stars” that we see in the Elder Scrolls games aren’t anything that we would recognize as stars. Instead of being gigantic balls of fusion-powered hydrogen and helium,…

The Elder Scrolls games don’t take place in anything resembling our universe, though. For one thing, there are no stars as we know them: what look like stars in the games are actually holes in reality to other planes of existence.

I’m not even convinced that they can coexist in the same continuity. The cosmology and physics of the Elder Scrolls universe are weird. Nirn (the planet on which the continent of Tamriel sits) exists in a cosmos that doesn’t contain any stars as we would know them: canonically, the sun and every “star” in the night…

There’s already a mod that disables the protagonist voice, actually.

IMO, it probably would have been a lost cause even if Square had stuck it out with Nintendo. The programming work that would have been necessary to iron out the bugs in the Japanese release and get it certified for release by Nintendo of America were considerable, and the clock was ticking for the Super Nintendo. It’s…

The screenshots and videos I’ve seen are giving me the same kind of “trying too hard to be cool” vibe as FMV games from the early 1990s. I can’t decide yet if that makes me like the game more or less.

They clearly weren’t trying to “follow” the video games. The movie was a reimagining of the first game (borrowing a handful of concepts from later games): it literally cannot exist in the same universe as the games, even if it hadn’t changed around the town itself. If you went into the theater expecting a direct…

I don’t hate the movies. And, perhaps sadly, they’re probably the best game-to-movie adaptations I can think of off-hand. And while the games are easily better, I can’t fault the filmmakers for going in a different direction for the films. For one thing, the actual nature of the town is revealed fairly slowly over the…

The games weren’t, but the movies were. The game version of Silent Hill is a still-thriving resort town with an unfortunate history that some visitors happen to experience as a literal hell on earth. The movies went in a very different direction, depicting it as a now-abandoned blue collar mining town. I’d actually…

Yeah, Centralia was mostly bulldozed once the state started getting serious about encouraging people to maybe not keep living on top of a never-ending coal fire. All that’s left is some disintegrating highway and the houses of the few holdouts who really don’t want tourists gaping at them.

Charles Martinet is a very nice man... but I’ve honestly never gotten comfortable with his Mario voice. I’m a firm believer that Mario should have a ridiculous Brooklyn accent, not a ridiculous Italian accent.

Yeah, he pops up every now and then in other video game voice acting roles. He did the voice of Paarthunax in Skyrim, for instance.

If by “edits” you mean completely different stages that only broadly adhere to the same setting (world 1-2 is still underground, etc.), then yes.

On the subject of the on-disc songs from previous games, Harmonix has previously stated that an import feature will be available. It’s just not ready for the game’s launch.

It only ever appeared in Daggerfall, where, since we are talking about a late 1990s DOS-based game, it looked like pretty much every other city in the game: green grass, dark grey stone buildings, and pine trees.

The same way Wile E. Coyote is still alive: cartoon physics.