Saturday 11 January 2014

Day 19: A terrible accident

I awake cold, confused and alone.  During the night, visions of flame and lightning flashed through my head, a voice called out offering me support and comfort from no identifiable source.

So the schizophrenia hasn't improved yet.  Very well.

I find myself dressed in rags and with a note in my hand.  As my eyes focus, I notice a man stood over me.  He asks my name.  I ask for assistance with defeating my old foe, the written word.  He reads the letter back to me:

"Hallo old friend!
So yeah, turns out that I thought I'd enabled cloud saving before I deleted Skyrim to make enough room on my hard drive to play some other games.  So I'm sorry, 169 hours of your exploits have been deleted.  Hope that's okay.

Your friend and manipulator,
Sparky"

This means very little to me.  I will return to Proudspire Manor immediately, gather my wits, seek out this "Sparky" and demand an explanation.

---

So yeah, that's my Skyrim save deleted.  So let's try something else.  Familiar but new.  Let's be racist and a public nuisance in Morrowind!


Oh GOD, what happened to your face?!

Is this what orcs looked like?  'cause it looks more like a goblin got smacked upside the head with the puberty stick and started working out.  I think I actually prefer this.


Humans look a bit weird in Morrowind.  Note the enlarged cranium.  I think they may all be psychic.  Not many people are talking to me in this world, they just throw text boxes at me so I guess they're projecting their dialogue directly into my brain.  Well, I guess that was pretty common before, all kinds of gods forced me to think thoughts that I didn't want to so why should anything have changed?


I took a shot of this guy because he has the most amazing hair.  And I grew up in the age of Pat Sharp's mullet, I can tell you all kinds of things about hairstyles.

This man shall henceforth be know as Rolando Macehead and he is my new best friend.


'kay, so we make a guy.  Right.  This is all... all numbers and words.  I'll be making another Sword and Board Nord Lord because I didn't like Skyrim's magic system much and don't want to partake too much of that poncy elf hand-light fighting this time around.


Wow, to say this was released in 2002 and the textures on the people look a bit dodgy, the actual world of Morrowind is super nice to look at.  It's giving me a little motion sickness and the world has a draw distance of like 30 centimeters but it's very pretty!

'kay, so apparently it's time to talk to the census man before I do anything else.  See, they do this so they can get you on their system and track you.  It's one of the ways that "the man" likes to suppress your individualism.  God damn it, I'm a free man!  I am not a number!  To hell with your questions, friendly and approachable census man, I forge my own path!  I'm gonna make the best class ever and nobody else will be able to take it!


YEAH!  And now I get to describe it.  Alrighty then.


Okay, done.  That looks basically perfect.  I specialise in stabbing things, making things and breaking into things with a minor in running the hell away from things I fail to stab or break into.  But not things I make.  Not unless I can enchant my swords to get up and run around the land on little legs, chopping things for me.

God, I hope that's an option.  It'd be like the Sorcerer's Apprentice but with more bloodshed.  And the Sorcerer wouldn't be able to stop me because even Yensid is pretty powerless when there's a claymore in his spine.

I need a star sign now?  Is... that relevant to basically anything?  We're not in the age of aquarius or whatever yet, I'm sure, so I can't don a peace medallion and use my star sign as a dating mechanism.  And I'm pretty sure that Dragonbjorn doesn't date people, anyway.  He just kinda... stares at them until they agree to do what he wants them to.

Let's just add sexual predator to the list of his crimes, then.  This is great!  I've just barely completed my registration with the empire and already I've discovered something horrible about Dragonbjorn!  And since he's just an extension of my own personality and the moral choices I decide to make during the course of play, I'm wondering if perhaps...

Let's just abandon that train of thought now.  I'm starting to feel a little dirty.


Let's go with the Lady, then. In Morrowind, Hephaestus can be a girl.  I was born under the sign of the maiden of stabbing things.

So things went well.  Discovered I could get skill points by jumping so now I'm going to look like a child who's been drinking from a flagon of e numbers.  I found an elf who was sad that his ring had been stolen.  "It's your own fault for being an elf" wasn't a dialogue choice so I gave him back his stupid ring.  I then found a man in the shop who told me to steal from said elf.  Naturally I did and his ring was in the hiding place.

This is the best game.

However, I'm just going to point something out.  If you're upset about the local militia rolling you for protection money and you want to hide your goods, do not hide them in a hollow stump in the middle of a very conspicuous swamp in the middle of a town with no other interesting features.  I mean, I was looking in that stump even before you'd hidden your lembas and watercress sandwiches there.  I'm surprised it wasn't full of poetry on the emotions of the trees and the beauty of the morning dew as it mingles with the tears you cry because the world doesn't understand what it means to be so unbelievably sensitive.

There was some money in there too.  Whatever.

So I took a taxi to a new place. I don't remember what it was called, but having a taxi is handy.


Except that in Morrowind, people use giant bugs as taxis which are driven by poking their internal organs until they go the way you want them to.

God, that's actually revolting.  And how did someone figure out that you can even do that?  I bet it was a dwarf.  They're into weird impractical things like this.  They're sort of sadistic too so I wouldn't be surprised.

Thought for the day
Having all the conversations be in text makes it much harder to skip the backstory.  That's good, I find all this "Our land was forged in the fires of war by Emperor Tiberius Septim the 17th, noble leader of the house of Septim, rulers of the hold of Blackfistendell" stuff a bit dry.  All the people seem to be saying the same thing a lot, though.

It's like they're robots or I'm in some kind of weird cultist commune.

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