I RP as myself, i.e. a wasteful and mostly entitled American who won't pick up anything that isn't worth its weight in gold/the blood of child laborers. It solves a lot of burden/weight issues.

This is why I simply don't play with companions. The system is so crappy, I have zero interest in having them around. Now, a co-op (one person) Skyrim? Yes. That would be awesome.

They lost me after W@W. I like that one and I like MW1, and I still play them every once in a blue moon. I mean, I still shuffled on to buy MW2 and Black Ops like a consumerist zombie, but I didn't really enjoy them nearly as much as other shooters.

I started playing TES: Arena on the old DOS Box a week ago - which is on Bethesda's TES site, by the way, for free - and it had an old-school DRM question in it. I'm so glad that the game's DRM was spell costs in the manual - whew!

Unless my memory's betraying me (which is possible), I actually had a copy of that Spiderman game on the old floppy disc format. The 3 1/2 inch discs were around at that point, which is why I'm still confused about how I managed to get a hold of that disc, but this one was legitimately floppy - and, therefore,…

If we're on a nostalgia, get-off-my-lawn binge: DOS command prompts. Kids can click on "icons" to "launch" their games. It's like it doesn't even matter what the file path is any more...

You explain the bug jar conspiracy in one of these expansions. You do it now, Todd Howard.

I think this might come somewhat backwards in terms of talking about what we could call the authorial end of gaming and what we could call the audience end. On the audience end, you have gameplay, which is the primary method through which the audience is capable of understanding the author's intent. On the authorial…

So, how's about I tie my $60 to a weather balloon and tell EA/Bioware that that's how they're getting my money...

Amen. A-men. I want my cracks in the wall, I want my exact same puzzle-solved music, and I want my exact same plot line. The fact of the matter is that the game mechanics have evolved over the years, while maintaining an overall interlinked (no pun intended) canon. The idea that we should change a series that promotes…

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Missing the idea of a story re-told in various intertextual iterations is potentially one of the most intellectually reactionary notions I've seen when it comes to video game analysis. By this logic, we may as well condemn all and any series involving sequels with shared plots and themes. The Zelda…

I'm not willing to admit how many hours I've put into Civilization games since Civ 2 (I never got a copy of the original Civ), but I will say that not many of those hours have gone into multiplayer. I played at least one game with a friend of mine for Civ 4, and it actually ran pretty smoothly and worked well. It…

You're going to start developing a French and Indian War game here in a second if you're not careful, and then you'll lose the interest of the masses real quick... well, and the French/Francophiles at Ubisoft. (A French and Indian War or even a Black Hawk War game would be kinda awesome, though.)

I feel vindicated with my New Vegas purchase a few weeks ago. I told myself 1) I won't buy it day-one because it'll have too many bugs and 2) I bet I can hold off and get it cheap later. Albeit less than month from the release of the full DLC-included version, I got a $10 new copy from Best Buy. Same thing with FFXIII.

Haha - well, Portal 2 was certainly one of my exceptions to the rule. I didn't quite pay full price (there was some discount available), but it was a day-one purchase for sure. But, I still need to close out a couple games, and then I'll probably start on my real backlog... which requires starting on games from the…

I hear ya on the backlog issue. I might take a break from buying new games this year and focus solely on playing through things I've been meaning to finally go through. The only day-of release on that list I'm eyeing is Journey. I've otherwise given up on paying $60 for a game that's likely going to gather dust for…

Agreed. The AI's hell-bent on destroying all humans. I legitimately believe that Sid Meier will play an invaluable role in the development of Skynet.

The oddity is that I'm actually "stuck" on Brotherhood right now. I have Revelations, but haven't gotten to the single-player yet because I haven't played through Brotherhood yet. (Kinda awkward...)

You gotta get a hold of Civ 4. It's like night-and-day how much better it is. Civ 4 was far from perfect, but it took most of the good features from Civ 3 and improved noticeably on them. Civ 5 looked too closely at Civ Revolutions, which stripped it of the rising (but well-managed) complexity of Civ 4. The game's…

My first playthrough of a Civ 5 game was with the Romans, and I thought, "eh, this is missing some features, but I'll save judgment for a little while longer." I tried it again with the Americans and immediately realized that I'd been swindled out of my money.