Game Review - Numen: Contest of Heroes

Game Review - Numen: Contest of Heroes
Score +2/-7

Overview
Run around killing things. Large amount of grinding.
++ Graphics: The style of artwork and the lighting really enhance the overall look of the world. Overall a beautiful gaming environment. Textures are also very good.
- Character Development: Boring skills with boring animations. Some skills are clearly clones of each other given to the three classes (Warrior, Archer, Mage).
- Combat: Horrible concept as -- and even in the manual it says this -- it really depends on the exploit of not "pulling" (getting the attention of) too many enemies. On any difficulty this will be the case. The manual even says to use potion extensively, which further suggests a very flawed concept (or at least a bad mathematical model). In any other game this would be considered an exploit. In Numen, it is a necessary survival tactic.
- Combat: The manual tries to make it sound strategic, but really it comes down to button mashing skills while waiting for other skills to cooldown. You start with some skills that have very fast cooldowns, so you are just using those constantly.
- Combat: You have range and line of sight limitations, but the enemy does not. They can shoot through walls and other barriers, and have remarkably long range when you are fleeing. When they cannot path-find toward you or when they break off pursuit, they recover health very quickly, but you do not when you are fleeing. You can test this by trying to keep your distance from an enemy while shooting at them with a bow. Eventually the target will be too far from its starting location and turn back, and while it is running back to its original position, it will recover health at a great rate.
- Combat: You have range and line of sight limitations, but the enemy does not. They can shoot through walls and other barriers, and have remarkably long range when you are fleeing.
- Combat: Archers and Mages are advised to keep their distance, but this does not really work in practice. The range for attacks and powers is very short. Also, enemies will turn back to their starting position if they are too far away, and once they do, their health regenerates very quickly (your health never achieves that much regeneration speed when out of combat). They will also regenerate health very quickly if they are still trying to path-find their way to you. You can see this latter situation in practice by fighting the scorpions during the childhood tutorial phase. Stay high on the slopes. Often the scorpions will have to walk along the base of the hill until they find a shallow enough slope to crawl up. During this time, they often have very fast health regeneration.
- Pacing: Extremely boring pacing. Every new area has monsters typically much stronger than you. Even if you use the exploit of pulling only one enemy at a time, there will typically be a lot of running away and retrying fights until your level improves enough to handle them. This means each area typically starts with very boring grinding until you can handle it.

Game Review - The Sims Medieval and the Pirates and Nobles expansion

Game Review - The Sims Medieval and the Pirates and Nobles Expansion
Score +5/-10

Overview
Sims Medieval is basically a collection of short stories stretched out by performing repetitive tasks with the characters involved. Once you've played enough of the game, you will probably want to just skip the boring bits you've done a hundred times and cut right to advancing the story. Because some of the stories are actually really decent. It's too bad you have to play the game to see them.
The Pirates and Nobles expansion is worth getting just for the stories, which are quite good. If you are getting Sims Medieval already, it doesn't cost that much more.
+ Graphics: The world is sort of cartoony, but the heads and faces of the characters are really very good when grossly exaggerated facial expressions don't distort them into caricatures.
- Bugs: There are very annoying bugs or oversights on game mechanics, such as not enough feedback on why marriage isn't happening, or too many sims in the area, continually preventing you from talking to someone or using an item. Most of the time, the only thing you can do is to just keep clicking and trying over and over again until something works.
++- Roleplaying: The "quests" are basically short stories of out-of-the-ordinary events that happen to ordinary people. Like stopping the invasion of an evil wizard. Often what you do is pretty generic, like cooking or talking to people or buying something from a store. But just as often the quest is resolved with what is unique to the profession, like a priest giving sermons and blessings, or a blacksmith crafting special gear. Some of the stories are really rather good (if you like the level of seriousness or the type of humour), so playing through the stories isn't as bad as it sounds. A lot of critical action is "off screen" or just relayed to you in text to read, (such as your character disappearing from gameplay for several minutes because they are "hunting in the woods") and that can feel really unsatisfying.
- Roleplaying: Beyond the stories, there is no depth and no point to playing the heroes. For example, you increase the skill of your blacksmith so that they can craft legendary weapons and armor, but none of that is really important in gameplay. Often, whether a warrior hero has access to a boring sword or an epic sword matters very little because the quests aren't designed to really have any failure result or dependence on anything other than the heroes involved. For most of the quests, character development does not matter, which means there is a pointlessness to roleplaying.
-- Game Mechanics are Stupid: Quest performance has almost nothing to do with your skill or even the skill of your heroes. The individual quests are generally ludicrously easy. What you need to do to get the best performance (Platinum-level) is basically wait for the performance bar to reach Platinum. In short, wasting time gets you better performance. The short and very easy quests are therefore actually the hardest to get the best performance because you have to space out doing the quest steps so that you don't accidentally finish the quest before the quest performance meter is at Platinum.
- Game Slowdown: The more you play a kingdom, the more characters get added to it, either leftovers from a quest, or children of AI sims. All sims are constantly doing something whether on-screen or not, so the longer you play a kingdom, the more system load is generated. For this reason, if you have a weaker computer (not just the graphics card, but CPU), you might want to restart your kingdom when it gets overloaded, or just load a previous save so that you don't have to completely restart everything such as furnishing hero homes or levelling up heroes.
+- Outfits are quite broad in style. Some have crossover potential and some professions, such as the monarch, have a good array of choices. However, for many heroes there are only a couple of choices that are specific to their profession. A lot of clothes choices are generic, and better for professions with no iconic look, such as merchants. Because of this mix of circumstances and no usage constraints in random generation, using the random generation button often produces horrible results. Using default heroes would typically give you a reasonable iconic outfit, but you can't edit the rest of the hero (hair, head, body shape, traits).
+--- Home and Hero Decorating: Initially it is fun to decorate the home of your hero or dress them in various outfits, once that novelty wears off, there is very little to recommend it. You can unlock more items and outfits, but the effort required (playing through kingdom goals and getting achievements) is all out of proportion for what you get in return. You can change colours, but there are only so many actual clothes and furnishings to get.
For furniture and household items, even if there weren't a lot of furnishing choices, how the game plays conflicts with what to buy since there are very few pieces that give you a good game effect (stat bonus) so inevitably player will (for example) get that one particular bed that provides the best and fastest rest for your character; or the one style of oven or cookpot/chimney. Because that's the only one with the best bonus. Finally, you need to play the various kingdom ambitions to unlock more clothing and furnishings -- this in turn means that you are constantly starting from zero. Every time you start a kingdom, the old one, including all the work put into playing, acquiring money, and decorating, gets erased and you start all over again.
Minor decorative items appropriate to an area are actually NOT desirable to get, especially for heroes with small homes. Initially they cost money with you do not have. Also, they take up space which could be better used to fit other things. At the same time, they would have been nice to add for more ambiance.
Because the reward-to-effort ratio is extremely low considering the amount of effort required to unlock everything you can furnish homes and dress heroes with, we recommend you get some cheat mods and play the sandbox "An Eternal Kingdom" unlimited free play. You get access to the same quests/stories, and you can continually add to your kingdom so that you don't have to restart anything. Doing in this way also gives you a better sense of history and cumulative achievement for your kingdom. You get access to the same quests.
You *can* still sort-of do this with one of the kingdom ambitions, but without a cheat mod, you have to play through them all plus get various achievements just to unlock all outfits and furnishings. Also, you cannot earn Achievements during free sandbox play -- only before you have quit a Kingdom Ambition. Instead, I recommend you short-cut by getting a cheat to unlock everything, then focus on the quests/stories.

• A good list of mods can be found on ModTheSims. The specific one you want is to Unlock All Achievements.
• There are good console cheats for The Sims Medieval to get on with the game once you're tired of game mechanics and just want to play through the stories. 

Oblivion Mod Review - Claudia's Little Secret

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Claudia's Little Secret (ver: Gold Beta) Alternate Download Location
Score: +14/-4

Edit: Dec-28-2012 -- Oops! Looks like some text from another review got pasted into this one. Incorrect info has now been removed.

Summary: Plays like an adult movie, but a lot of gratuitous sex; however, it actually has a decent story and many interesting events.

Why Get This: Claudia's Little Secret is an Oblivion mod that gives you an extraordinarily different experience compared to just about every mod out there, and in so many ways. For its size, there is also an amazing amount of content, not just in quest length and number of quests, but story length and visuals. More so than any other mod I've played, this is absolutely one you MUST try.
It's worst part is the grammar and spelling, but compared to it's plusses, this is pretty minor and tolerable. Definitely get the walkthrough or you'll miss out on a lot that's hard to find. For additional support, go to the official forum.
++ Complex and interesting story and some parallel side stories involving NPCs.
+ Handles multiple characters well, with cutscenes to "what is happening in the meantime" events, adding to the broader story context.
++ Alternate endings, and very, very, good ending cutscenes.
++ An amazing amount of content and quests.
- Some quests and hidden quests are so obscure that you really need the walkthrough.
++ Tons of complex cutscenes, most of them quite interesting and plot-advancing, and really quite long. A huge amount of work has gone into this.
+- Sex scenes with good scripting so that for the most part it looks pretty decent. But there's way too much of it. Although that is part of the point of Claudia's Little Secret, at some point it becomes so predictable and tedious that you just want it to be over with so you can continue the story.
- Way too much overly buxom women. This is a design choice, and may appeal to some people, but too much of it makes it a bit too comical / silly.
++ Many quests are interesting without being combat oriented. There are so many that this deserves more than one point.
++ Some very interesting locations, with occasional stunning and/or epic visuals.

Game Review - WarTune

Score +3/-14
From the website: "Featuring three unique classes, single and multi-player dungeons, PvP arenas, competitive battlegrounds, thousand-player boss battles, a robust guild system, and… farming, Wartune combines some of your favorite features from multiple game genres. Whether you consider yourself a casual gamer or a hardcore veteran, Wartune will keep you coming back for more."

The English version of WarTune is presently a partially converted version from the Chinese version by 7th Road  It is fully playable, but the conversion is far from complete. Our review and series of tips covers the 1.45 update (2012-Nov-15):

• Basic Tips
• Tutorial
• Troops
• Daily Devotions
• Daily Quests
• Farming
• Plundering Cities
• Multiplayer Dungeons / Instances
• Solo Arena and Group Arena
• Battlegrounds
• Healer Mage Build

WarTune generally revolves around building up your character with stats and equipment, and like most MMO games there's a lot of gear you can get and upgrade. However, this also means that most of your time will be spent staring at your city or game interfaces rather than getting out in the game world. The game world is very limited as it is and 2.5D -- basically they are token places to look for special loot.

WarTune presently has significant complaints about certain player-versus-player systems such as their Battlegrounds team PvP where many players aren't truly participating but using an automated "Away From Keyboard" mode. Gameplay may never be changed as there has been no attempt to correct even glaring spelling mistakes after a major server update.

We played three Mages, the final one up to Level 40. Over the next few days, we'll present some tips for playing the game. For now, here are our initial impressions.
+ No shortage of things to do. Your time online can be busy for hours and at all hours of the day -- If you really want to spend that much time. If you actually like what you are doing in the game (essentially just inching your character forward to more gear and more power), then you may not mind the repetitiveness. You can even be logged in and not do anything, and your character could still be doing something (e.g., collecting Stamina points in the Altar of Ennoblement.)
- Incredible amount of time-consuming, boring, grinding. There are so many things to do each day, and the system encourages you to do almost all of them for maximum daily free stuff. However, it all takes time and none of it helps you advance in the storyline very much. If you play this game, don't expect to follow the story quickly past level 30 -- and that's not very much story at all. (On the other hand, if you keep playing such a badly designed game as WarTune, you're not really playing for the story. You're playing to make a powerful character for the Arena.)
+- Artwork is nice overall, but very limited in variety, and only special equipment shows up differently in-game.
+ Not a lot to learn and easy to learn it. You can get into the game right away.
-- Tons of grammatical and spelling mistakes that persist after weekly maintenance. Clearly no one is at home when it comes to Quality Assurance.
- Ludicrously unbalanced in various ways. For example, some of your highest daily experience point awards can come from (and I am not kidding) playing flash games like Whack-A-Mouse (mouse pops up, you hit it with a leg of ham) or QTE exercises (correctly press a sequence of arrow keys). A single short flash game can earn you more than a single player Campaign Dungeon run.
- Experience and rewards for doing inane things. For example, one of the tasks just about everyone does every day is speak in World Chat, because this advances a "Devotion" counter that gives you free stuff when you reach various point totals. Often, people don't have anything useful to say and type garbage.
- Accounts cannot be transferred to another server, or deleted. You only get one account per server. This means you must start over with a new community in a different server if you want to restart your character. This also means that at any one time, there may be hundreds of abandoned accounts on your server, and it's hard to say who's who.
- Not a lot to see. There aren't a lot of locations to visit, and once you hit level 25-30, it gets harder to gather proper resources and upgraded troops to access new maps. And new map are the only thing that changes the scenery. If you are there for the PvP arena, that's a different story. You'll probably not even care about the story except that you have to go through those motions every day to get the bonus experience, gold, and goods that come with doing more things.
-- Once access to Arena Insignias is available (by the Arena or Battlegrounds), players MUST participate or be left too far behind. Characters who quickly get sets dominate everywhere, and suddenly there is a large disparity in combat ability -- those who have the Arena Sets, and those who don't. Further, the Arena is only open to those with a minimum entry level, so newcomers who are late get crushed by those who have already gone and gotten their powerful set items. It's a system where the rich get richer faster and the poor get left further and further behind.
It's also a situation which causes people to abandon older servers and go to the newest ones, where they rush to get to the Arena to keep their head above water. And here's where the money's made: At the new server, they then spend money to accelerate levelling with "VIP" status, and quickly race to the top and stay comfortably there.
The Arena is supposed to match teams by Battle Rating, but often there aren't enough teams, and the weakest teams can easily be paired against vastly stronger ones several times. There are some strange teams that are likely "bots" (AI-controlled characters) but they don't show up enough, and are likely more of an error-catching feature where one team disappears while being matched with another (e.g., connection lost). If they had more bot teams, the situation could be somewhat remedied, but the developers are probably too busy translating content to do so.
The 1.45 update (2012-Nov-15) made things even worse by quintupling the rewards. Newcomers will get Insignias faster (5 instead of 1), but the already strong players will get them even faster by winning (15 instead of 3), allowing them to pick up whole sets as soon as they qualify by rank and level. Unless you want to entirely stay out of the Arena and Battlegrounds and keep your city on a very low level world map so your city doesn't get plundered all the time, you will want to abandon this game even before you begin. If you do want to try to be competitive, you will HAVE to do ALL the major Daily Events, on top of the regular activities to keep levelling up and buying things like Guild Skills and collecting Astrals.

-- The Battlegrounds is also notoriously badly designed. In addition to the same problem with the Arena, the Battlegrounds are also the only place where characters can fight each other for Honor Points, which are collected to attain ranks such as Private, Champion, Elite Champion, etc... Without these ranks, you cannot use the better Arena gear. This creates a culture where strong characters attack weak ones constantly, even if it means their team loses the Battleground event (collecting points by collecting crystals) overall. Many people simply show up and do nothing (go "AFK" or Away From Keyboard). They stay in the starting area and can't be attacked, but don't participate either. Even if their team loses, they still get 30 Arena Insignias and some Honor Points just for showing up (the winning team gets 80 and more Honor). It's less effort than having to defend yourself against grossly overpowered opponents. The Battlegrounds are divided into a level 30-39 arena and a level 40+ arena, but even with a 10 level span, the difference between characters with sets and those without is already too high.

The 1.45 update made things worse by reducing the speed of characters with carts, which makes it more useless for weak characters to do anything other than AFK, since they are now more vulnerable to being chased by characters who care only about Honor Points and fighting. They introduced a calculation that gives more Honor when defeating stronger opponents, but that is a scenario unlikely to occur anyway when there are weaker ones to be farmed.

-- Guild Wars. The 1.45 patch introduced Guild Wars, and top guilds can haul literally hundreds -- there were reports of over 800 Insignias and Honor -- for a win. The rich just get richer and the rift between strong and weak players keeps growing wider. They could have mitigated this Monty Haul effect (which pencil-and-paper roleplaying game companies and players realized over 30 years ago) by reducing the rewards and overlapping the event with, say, BattleGrounds. By overlapping the event, they can pull overpowered players from the BattleGrounds and put them in a different arena (Guild Wars) where they could possibly be better matched. Further, they can swap one type of insignia and Honor reward with another slightly more rewarding one. Instead, the developers chose to make all events available to everyone, with the result that even a huge 800+ reward was not enough incentive for people to quit BattleGrounds where they dominated anyway, for a measly 30-80 Insignia and maybe 10%-20% of the honor gain IF they almost exclusively fought for Honor.

Oblivion Mod Review - Reclaiming Sancre Tor

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Reclaiming Sancre Tor (ver 1.0.5)
Score: +3/-3

Summary: Major Blades faction expansion.

Why Get This: You like long quests involving running around and the Blades.

This mod sounds very promising, but the early game is extremely boring and with poor design choices. Could not continue because of a quest bug (?) and in any case lost confidence in the modder, in much the same way as I gave up on Golden Crest.
+ Major expansion to the Sancre Tor area. Full town and extensive Blades HQ.
+ Good use of dialogue overall.
+ Some portions of quests interesting, if implausible.
- Time-wasting base layout. There's an incredible amount of running around to get to the barracks and the training area and outside. Seriously: Get a teleport mod (like Advanced Mark and Recall) if you play this mod..

-- Implausible and stupidly time-wasting quests at the start.

• During the escort quest, if you ask the captain to take the lead, he WALKS. It takes forever. You could instead scout the end location, choose to take the lead, and Fast Travel there. Duh. Why even bother making this a quest?
• Early training quests are OK in concept, but the actual things you need to do waste your valuable time as a person (not your character's in-game time -- the real time you spend playing the game). In other words, pacing and quest planning is terrible.
• You are asked to find skill books. Presumably other Blades before you have been tasked the same, so why can't you just ask them, instead of running around to find the correct villager to talk to, in order to get a referral to talk to someone else (and why the middleman?). And for one of the persons you need to find, it turns out he's a pathetic alcoholic who keeps rebuffing your attempts to speak with him. Why am I helping these losers when there are more critical, life-saving quests?
• Once you find the skill books, you are told to read them and then you are tested on them in sparring. Only in the first book does the sparring session have anything marginally related to the book you find. The rest -- I have no idea what I'm supposed to do after reading the texts. Apparently the sparring session just goes on and on until you gain a level somewhere (?), which can be an extremely long time if your skills are high and you use a levelling slowdown mod like the one built into Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul.

This mod would have been nice if it didn't depend so much on the Main Quest being finished first. It could have been split into two parts: The training part based out of Cloud Ruler Temple as soon as Jauffre offers you a position with the Blades. You are probably still a newbie at that point and the Blades training would have been very appropriate to the character's inexperience. You can then be summoned later to do the rest of the quests once Sancre Tor is recovered.

Oblivion Mod Review - Origin of the Mages Guild

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Origin of the Mages Guild (ver 7.3.1)
Score: +2/-2

Summary: Mages Guild expansion.

Why Get This: Expand the Mages Guild services.

Mostly what you will interact with is new rooms in the Mages Guild and Arcane University. There's a lot of stuff to see, but barely anything interesting to do. There is a vampire lair that is basically a long dungeon crawl ending in powerful loot and made irritating by lore dumps to justify its existence.
+ A LOT of cosmetic content for the Mages Guild, including a lot of common sense things like magic classes and more spell vendors in the Arcane University. Unfortunately, it is mostly cosmetic. Interesting to see but you may hardly use it.
+ Some nice common-sense things happen to the Mages Guild after you become Archmage, like re-opening the Bruma Mages Guild.
- Rather heavy-handed with the info/lore dumps. However, if you are a lore fan then you may find a lot of this rather interesting.
- Some of the quests after you become Archmage are inane -- like running around to find candidates for the Council of Mages. You are the Archmage. You are probably also the Champion of Cyrodiil. Why are you doing gofer work? Send a lackey! (You in fact do get an Assistant, but can you send her? No.) All the quests prior to being Archmage are far more interesting than any quest this mod offers.

Oblivion Mod Review - The Duelists

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - The Duelists (ver 0.96)
Score: +2/-2

Summary: One-on-one fights with high-level characters.

Why Get This: You like running into fights with tough characters.

This mod sprinkles characters throughout vanilla locations that can provoke or be provoked into duels.
+ Fights have some dialogue or scripting to them. Some are simple but others have a bit more story. The overall experience is that each is an encounter, rather than just another fight with a hostile NPC in the wilds.
+ Smooth integration into the game world. They generally blend into the general populace. If you've never played Oblivion before, you wouldn't even know it. Unfortunately, the duelists are meant for high to very high level characters and you are advised not to install this mod until much later. Most of the duels require talking to someone first, however.
- Uses some quest characters and intercepts their dialogue so that this mod's dialogue comes first. May or may not break quests. Chancellor Ocato referring to you as the Champion of Cyrodiil before you finish the Main Quest is probably the most obvious error here.
- Some fights are crazily overpowered, like a level 75 vampire. However, by level 15, if not 20+, you generally have a lot of weapon, spell, and potion options available to you and if you take time to assemble your resources, you are probably even more crazily overpowered. Still, this could have used levelling.

Oblivion Mod Review: Knights of the Nine: Revelation

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Knights of the Nine: Revelation (ver 1.1.5)
Score: +8/-0

Summary: Excellent story/quest mod. Lore friendly.

Why Get This: Great story with good action and pacing.

This mod greatly extends the Knights of the Nine DLC with an additional long adventure, a new and larger headquarters for the Knights of the Nine, and cosmetic options for the Crusader's Relics.
The summary of the story is that you get to relive the events that ultimately lead to the formation of the Knights of the Nine.
Needs a special uninstaller mod to remove from your game. Otherwise, some changes may screw things up.
++ Ambitious and interesting storyline.
++ Well-scripted and very interesting quests.
+ New, interesting worldspace.
+ Voiceovers.
+ Good pacing. Very little unnecessary action -- you are a hero, so you are assigned heroic things to do.
+ Good companion management. They have important roles to play in the story, but they don't get in the way of stuff that only you can do. You are always at the centre of the action.

Oblivion Mod Review - Vampire Hunting: Order of the Virtuous Blood

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Vampire Hunting - Order of the Virtuous Blood (ver 3.0)
Score: +4/-2

Summary: Dungeon crawl with story wrapper. Treasures and abilities as rewards. Great risk of vanilla Oblivion NPCs getting killed.

Why Get This: Kill Vampires for treasure and reward.

WARNING: Random vampire attacks in cities can kill off NPCs that don't have Essential status.
In general, vanilla Oblivion sets many NPCs to "Essential", especially if they are involved in the Main Quest. But not all of them are set this way, and they can be killed off at any time.
You might not miss much, or if they have already played their role you might not miss anything at all. However, in vanilla Oblivion, if you do every quest, you will have interacted with everyone and gone everywhere. Because NPCs can get killed by unimportant randomly generated vampires in towns, you risk breaking quests or not receiving certain quests.
It is best to have a savegame you can revert to before installing this mod.

+ This large mod is a sort of compilation of various vampire hunting quests. Tons of quests here.
+ Some interesting and not overpowered rewards, including Abilities. However, some of this involves Fortify Skill, which is treated by the game as a permanent skill increase when implemented as an Ability.
+ A lot of dialogue and backstory makes the missions more than just dungeon crawls, though not by much. Still, better than simply getting sent on a dungeon crawl.
+ Good effort to make the bosses different and interesting.
-- Huge risk of NPCs getting killed at random. You can avoid some of this by simply not going to town while playing this mod, but there's still no guarantee.

I recommend playing this mod, then uninstalling it. The best reward to keep is probably the Abilities. You can recreate them in a small mod of your own making using the construction set. If you do so, I recommend you make them Enchantments on clothing items assigned to no body part.

Oblivion Mod Review - Famous Battles of Cyrodiil

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Famous Battles of Cyrodiil (ver 1.0 Final)
Score: +1/-3

Summary: Combat scenarios with limited gear.

Why Get This: You want short battles with limited gear instead of your usual uber loadout.

The concept is interesting, but the scenarios fall far short (in part due to engine/scripting limitations), the story is nonsensical, and the ad copy is utter rubbish. "Save a doomed city from certain destruction at the hands of Mehrunes Dagon"? Uh, no. You don't even make it past the throne room.
+ Interesting lore-based concept. The missions would actually be interesting if they could be scripted better.
- Missions are implausible and play out in an uninteresting way.
- Badly thought out mission design. We'll talk about each mission below. WARNING: SPOILERS.
- Nonsense story that doesn't make sense. You see the diorama maker too...? It sounds like you want to make sense of what happened to Kvatch. Somewhere it becomes saving the model-maker's daughter who probably died there. Then magically he can transport you into miniature worlds. But he's just a toymaker for Azura's sake. Sheesh. Example: Reading a book about one of the famous battles of Cyrodiil leads you to imagine what it must have been like, then cut to the action as your "imagination".

Mission Critiques:
Mission 1: Commando squad infiltrates a facility to capture enemy commanders.

• As with all missions, you start stripped of your usual gear. There's nothing wrong with this, but REMEMBER TO UNEQUIP QUEST ITEMS. If you don't and they are forcibly unequipped, you will end up with permanent enchantments and will be unable to equip the item when it is returned to you.
• At the start of the mission, one of the squad members stealth-kills a sentry with a single firebolt. You are then placed in charge of the mission. Everyone is in Imperial Legion armor. This sets the tone for the mission: Stealth and stealth kills where necessary so the facility isn't alerted. However, if you play this mission at mid-low levels or higher, this mission becomes stupid (not hard, just stupid). Here's why:
• You can swap your gear for something quieter, but you can't tell your noisy, clanking, squadmates to stay behind. Invariably they will alert the enemy. For a stealth mission, none of them are properly equipped to be stealthy. Duh.
• This is supposed to be a stealth mission, but if the enemy has too high a Health for you to quickly take down, then you will end up in melee for possibly upwards of a minute while you and your squad hack down the enemy. Noisily. Why can't that unnamed soldier take point and drop everyone with his magical one-hit-kill firebolt? Duh. Instead we are left with a highly implausible stealth mission. It takes a very specialized character build to stealth-kill enemies once their health reaches a certain threshold. If you don't have an appropriate character, this mission will just end up being you and squad hacking one to three enemies to death in melee -- completely destroying the whole stealth-mission concept.
• You can't change anyone's gear, so it's a melee free for all with your squad mates. In the fast-paced combat of Oblivion, it is insanely easy to hit your allies, especially when they are all jammed in melee. Three hits and they turn on you. You must then kill them because they are not marked Essential (an Essential character goes unconscious and wakes up with hostility reset and no longer immediately hostile even if you've "killed" them dozens of times).

Mission 2: Follow a scout through the jungle to find the enemy

• You don't really get to choose to do anything here. It's linear. You look for the scout that's run ahead of you. You run through clumps of enemies that you must fight.
• You can speak with your allies, but they either say nothing or tell you to be stealthy. But they won't sneak along with you so they get found and you all have to fight.
• It is later revealed that the "purpose" of the mission is to teach you that alliances can't be counted on. We don't actually get to use that information, and in any case we just stumble into it.
• The enemy wears red, we wear blue. There was an opportunity for an in-disguise mission here, maybe to expose the traitor or find the enemy commander, but that wasn't used.

Mission 3: Rally troops to counterattack the enemy.

• It is later revealed that the "purpose" of this mission is to teach you to command troops. Except your "command" of them is to run petty errands for them. Duh.
• One of the missions involves dragging a corpse back. Due to how dragging works in Oblivion, this is easily the most tedious if not outright impossible mission.
• If you are stuck, use the console to resurrect the corpse. Go back to the quest giver and use moveto player on the now-living corpse to move them into place. Finally use kill on the resurrected soldier to turn him into a corpse again (i.e., kill him). He should be close enough to where he needs to be for you to get a quest update for retrieving his body.

Mission 4: Follow a necromancer to kill the Elder Council.

• The most boring mission. The necromancer is marked Essential and the other three skeletal minions (in my play-through) were level 14 and with just under 2,500 Health -- Yes, just under two thousand, five hundred Health points. You basically just let them handle everything.
• The "purpose" of this mission was to show you evil. It would be much more interesting if the Elder Council members actually begged for their lives and you had to choose a dialogue option to kill them.

Mission 5: Defend the throne room during the Daedra attack on Kvatch.

• You arrive in civilian clothes and no other gear. You're not even a soldier. But for some reason you are immediately promoted and given command. Duh.
• The most promising mission that ended up being the most disappointing because it's bugged: You have to give orders to 6 people: 5 soldiers and the Count of Kvatch. For once, it looked like you could set up a nice killzone and have NPCs obediently supporting you. But no...
• You only get to have 5 conversations with the soldiers. If you talk to one twice to try to change their orders, that still counts toward your total. After all 5, you can't talk to anyone else.
• They don't necessarily obey your orders. For example, the two archers always fall back.
• There are two lines: The front barricade near the door, and a second line nearer the centre of the room.
• Soldiers with only melee weapons in the first line immediately abandon their position and mix it up in melee, so they are now in the line of fire of yourself or anyone that might hope to be shooting. Duh.
• When the daedra come, the second line won't move. Archers and magi there are apparently too far away to detect the enemy and shoot. Duh.
• If you are actually good enough to survive the final wave and keep at least one of the NPCs alive, the game is stuck. Everyone needs to die in the final wave involving Dremora.

Oblivion Mod Review - Golden Crest

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - The Golden Crest - A Major Pirate Quest (ver 1.20a)
Score: +2/-5

Summary: Supposedly you play as a pirate. Supposedly.

Why Get This: Wasting time. Might be better later, but I didn't want to waste more time.

This mod initially starts out with some promise with some interesting quests, but quickly becomes awful. For a "pirate quest", you spend an inordinate amount of time on land doing quests that could have shown up in any other mod. There is even a quest where the questgiver clearly states that they wouldn't normally do that sort of task. Further, a couple of early quests involve so much wasted time that you are clearly taking a risk with the modder's design philosophy if you want to persist with this mod.
+ Some interesting quests and situations.
+ Good use of dialogue overall.
-- For a "pirate quest", you spend a lot of time on land. You do a lot of utterly un-pirate things, like set up a mining operation, hanging out in an inland pub, and looking for a bounty hunter deep in caves. Where the heck is the pirate stuff?
- When you first join the pirate crew, you are given a shirt and pants which looks like a lower-class labourer outfit. Except it's for sailors. And it's heavily ENCHANTED. WTF? And none of the other crew are using it. Hmm... "Inexplicable" and "implausible" are words that come to mind.
- Incredible time-wasting linear quest that is not optional and not very pirate-like at all -- "A Sister's Love". There is a journal entry that reads:

• "I found a list of people who have bounties on their heads. It seems that Mal gro-Shick [the person you need to find] is a bounty hunter, a good one judging by the names and locations on this list. If I want to track down Mal I will have to follow the list and go from cave to cave. When I find somebody from this list that still draws breath I should wait at that location for Mal to arrive. The first location on this list is..."

Naturally, you go through a couple of duds -- already-dead persons -- but not until you've gone through several monster-infested dungeons. All to come to a dead end. WTF? If I wanted to do aimless monster-killing in vanilla Oblivion dungeons, I don't have to download a mod to do that.

- More incredible time-wasting with another non-optional quest: Quest, "The Straight Arrow". The quest update pop-up reads:

• "I've tried speaking to a few of the regulars but they refused to talk to me. Vitisha was right, they dislike talking to passing travelers. I need to make them realize that I want to become one of them, a regular. I have a plan that just might work. I should come round every day for the next few days and spend a few hours here, without leaving through the door until those few hours are up. Hopefully, after a few days they might notice me and start talking with me. [Pressing T and waiting or sleeping doesn't count]."

So basically, the modder wants you to walk your character into the inn, then leave Oblivion running and idle for god knows how long while you, the player (not, not your character) go do something *other* than watch the screen while your character does absolutely nothing interesting. WTF?
When this quest showed up, I uninstalled the mod. I can't trust a modder who gives you such ludicrous quests. Who knows what other rubbish you'll need to do later even if you waste your time jumping through this hoop.

Oblivion Mod Review - Sexy Maid of Chorrol

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Sexy Maid of Chorrol (ver 3.2 and crossover with Claudia's Little Secret and HentaiMania 2)
Score: +3/-1

Summary: Short quests, voyeuristic adult content, home expansion.

Why Get This: Humourous quests, masturbating maids for your home in Chorrol (no, really). Significant crossover if you also have Claudia's Little Secret installed.

This is a mod that feels larger and longer than it really is. For actual pornographic interaction, Sexy Maid of falls short of the newer and more sophisticated sexual-content resources and mods but at least there's a story here.

• Definitely get Growlf's Universal Skeleton NIF if you don't already have it. Otherwise there might be issues with stretched textures.
• The basement expansion to your Chorrol home sits in the same place as the teleporter for the Basement for COBL.

+ Humour to the quests.The humour is weak but doesn't sink to cheap and tasteless despite this being a mod with adult content.
+ More than just having quests that don't emphasize killing, the quests here actually immerse you more in the mod and give you more backstory. Too bad there are very few quests.
+ You can choose one a custom race for the maids instead of being stuck with the somewhat ugly Oblivion defaults.
- Unless you get the crossover quest with Claudia's Little Secret, there's no sex with the maids. The crossover quest there is somewhat boring, though, and you can more easily get sexual interaction just about everywhere with something like the basic Lovers Biko. Even with the crossover, you need to get the maid to follow you through a magic portal, then take a long walk to a pedestal, and press the button there -- it's tedious. With Lovers Biko, you just press the "L" key a couple of times.

The additional content from the Claudia's Little Secret crossover also includes a long story filled with sexual encounters. Pornography being so varied, some of this content could become too intense / tasteless / vulgar for you. Fortunately, the story is told in stages, so you can abort at any time and choose not to hear the rest.

Oblivion Mod Review - Giskard's Tales from the Tomb

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Giskard's Tales from the Tomb (ver 1.3)
Score: +2/-1

Summary: Dungeon crawl, character home, companions.

Why Get This: Bug-free dungeon crawl.

This mod starts off with promise of an intriguing experience but ends disappointingly as a pretty basic dungeon crawl. There are elements here that suggest it could have been much more interesting, but weren't followed up on. For example, there is a journal that talks about having to decapitate someone to prevent them from rising as undead, but you don't actually have to do that here. Would have made for a more interesting experience than a straight dungeon crawl with basically two different types of enemy grunts.

The quest starts out with historical Elder Scrolls lore-based data, but that turned out to be disappointingly token as well. At some point, just before you get access to the Reman Fort you are to investigate, you are basically handed the whole story. Whatever sense of mystery that was built up in the early stages of the quest is disappointingly dropped.

The story didn't entirely add up for me, but I would be more concerned about it if it hadn't been so token.
There's also what appears to be a very separate and unrelated Dwemer underground facility nearby. More dungeon crawling, only more aimless. Also FPS intensive on the second level.

The dungeons are not levelled. Level 50 bosses.
+ Player home where you can choose the population to a certain extent. Mostly you end up with a choice of companions and a convenient way to outfit them. If you want companions without too much overhead, then you can try this mod.
+ Decent voiceovers.
- The staff you get at the fort could use some cosmetic work. Even the female altmer dancer you get has the crude an ugly squarish face that comes with Oblivion. Sheesh. This just makes you look elsewhere for companions, and there's no shortage of player homes.

There tends to be integration from other projects, so there's the possibility that this mod will receive an expansion or crossover content. For now, however, there's not much here to see or that you can't get better elsewhere.

Oblivion Mod Review - Heart of the Dead

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - The Heart of the Dead (ver 6.5)
Score: +8/-1

Summary: Excellent quest and encounters. Possible companion afterwards.

Why Get This: Good quest, interesting puzzles and environments.

This is a long adventure that is DLC-quality in story and scripting.
++ Very good voiceovers, with the exception of the Kat character, which had to use pieced-together voiceovers and therefore sounds kind of odd.
+- Companions that actually do things in the story instead of just following you around. Dialog and romance is very token, however (although the romance itself can play a part in the story if you choose to pursue it; and helps decide which companion you end up with after the story).
+ Some very interesting locations, especially at the start of the story. More dungeon-crawl later on, however.
+ Some very interesting scripted events and animations that enhance the experience instead of just being vanity/show-off scripting exercises.
+ A really decent story with good plot points. No huge text dump of information -- good mix of story progress combined with dialogues, clues and other getting-background-information events gives this quest good pacing alongside giving you backstory to better realize the scope of your involement.
+ A really good escalating ending that takes you step by step to a more dramatic ending each time you think you're at "the end".
+ Some quests have various alternative solutions and you aren't always following a very narrowly defined sequence of events to advance the story. This avoids a common frustration with some mods, especially those that combine do-my-specific-sequence-of-events with no-quest-markers.

Oblivion Mod Review - Bartholm

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Bartholm (ver 7.0)
Score: +3/-3

Summary: Worldspace and a lot of quests.

Why Get This: Quests.

There's a lot of content and quests here, but not a lot of it is really worth playing through.
+ New town. Slartholm isn't that interesting, however.
+ A lot of quests for characters of almost all levels. Only a couple of good ones, however. Probably only the Foreign Legion quest to clear the Moarmer (some good fight setups here) and the murder mystery on Slartholm are worthwhile. Even then, the murder quest is quite flawed and could have used more dialogue to enhance the investigative aspects.
+- Voiceovers. Unfortunately, mostly they are either horrid, annoying, or revoiced lines from vanilla Oblivion.
-- Shamelessly cloned content from vanilla Oblivion, such as the Bartholm Arena, where not only the layout and people are obviously only cosmetically changed if at all, but the sequence of fights is more or less cloned as well, down to the fighter with the magic dagger, the multi-character fights, and the mage with protection from magic. Plus the badly voiced arena announcer. Don't waste your time here.

Oblivion Mod Review - Viconia DeVir - The Underdark Saga

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Viconia DeVir - The Underdark Saga (ver 1.2)
Score: +2/-9

Summary: Companion. Buggy linear quest.

Why Get This: Companion.

This mod somehow hopes to recapture the interest and engagement in the character from the classic Baldur's Gate games, which included a long romance with the dark elf Viconia in Baldur's Gate II.
One of the big problems with this premise is that there is much less investment in companions in Oblivion. In Baldur's Gate II, you could control your companions as if they were a character completely under your control. There was much more tactical control and strategic options, especially with a spellcaster like Viconia.
In Oblivion, companions are typically more troublesome than useful. They typically blow your stealth, get lost, fall off cliffs, etc... They are generally useful only as distractions while you do the killing because the Oblivion AI automatically prioritizes them higher as threats. For this reason, companions are generally set to "Essential" (i.e., not killable, but you can knock them unconscious temporarily), and most companion mods will have a teleport-to-player feature to help them catch up because no creature other than the player can jump to negotiate obstacles, and because they get lost or stuck so easily.
For all these reasons, companions are generally more of a hassle than they're worth.
+ You get a fairly advanced companion with her own horse and straightforward control options through dialogue.
+- Good voiceovers. But they rarely match the subtitles. WTF?
- Part 2 involves a lot of events where the scripting is apparently very fragile. You have to do things in a very precise way sometimes or you will have broken the quest and cannot continue. A walkthrough is pretty much necessary to know when you've accidentally done something wrong.
- Some quests are very easily broken. For example, there are three entrances to the Underdark, but you MUST use the one entrance where the modder has scripted all events to occur. Only there's really nothing telling you that you must do it that way. You can't skip those events, but the story doesn't move to a chokepoint where you have to encounter them.
- She keeps sheathing her weapon and walking away in the middle of combat. The author admits that this has been fixed as much as possible, so don't expect this issue will ever go away.
- It takes about two months worth of linear dialog -- you get one talk with Viconia per day to advance the romance -- to get to the end of part 1. It's also really easy to see what you're supposed to say. You can "roleplay" and give her a snarky response, but that just penalizes you by forcing you to wait another day before getting closer to the quest events that aren't just a talk. Obviously you are playing along with the romance, otherwise you wouldn't bother downloading this mod; but it's really rather boring because we generally haven't built up the same attachment to the character.
In Baldur's Gate II, you really wanted Viconia around because she's powerful and useful -- and she was that way because you could closely control her and use her tactically. Also, there was a balancing act between her, Jaheira, and Aerie since pursing a romance with any one could alienate the others and cause you to lose them from your party -- the possible presence of the other two, and your investment in them, complicated and increased the engagement with Viconia.
In this Oblivion mod, there's just Viconia. And she (and companions in general) are so irritating to have around that you will probably end up not caring if she falls in combat because she's not killable. Besides, if she does fall in combat, you then don't have to worry about restraining yourself when using area effect magic.
TIP: Get a bullet-time mod like the one included in GQ Conveniences when using companions to help you avoid hitting them.
- Part 2 is incredibly boring because of all the running around through vast areas of the Underdark. It just breaks up the momentum/pacing of the story. Everyone and their pet spider is teleporting except you -- Can't they give you a magic item or something? Or get something like the recall-to-shrine spells from Morrowind. The Arcane University can research a Wish spell for Viconia, but they can't research a teleport? Plus, navigation is hard enough in the Underdark. Why can't Viconia actually help you find your way with waypoint quest markers or something like that?
- Finale of part 2 turned out to be broken. Lolth wouldn't show up. I just gave up at that point. You can try a third-party mod that fixes it that was written over a year ago for the merged story version of the mod, or try the separate files version.
- There are a lot of dialogs, but they are very contrived and lame. Some quests are extremely lame, such as the rescue-the-priestess mission where you basically just let Viconia do the talking. The priestess that needs to be rescued then appears out of nowhere and promptly teleports out to safety (!). You then have to leave by killing the single guard in the small prison -- the same guard you were warned against killing because something might look fishy. WTF?
- For the final fight, you are given a supersword scripted to kill 3200 Health spiders (that's not a typo) in the temple of Lolth in one hit. Uh... Why not just reduce the health of the spiders? Especially when your supersword won't work the same way on the priestesses or the smaller spiders with less than a tenth of that Health score.

Oblivion Mod Review - The Underdark

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Underdark (ver 1.1)
Score: +2/-5

Summary: Very large worldspace. Annoying to navigate.

Why Get This: Run around a lot. Kill things sometimes.

This is a large and promising mod that is obviously meant to give you a Dungeons & Dragons Underdark experience. However, the overall difficulties in actually finding anywhere interesting to go make this mod very annoying and a time-waster.
+ Huge worldspace to explore.
+ Quite a few quests that don't emphasize killing or simple "Fedex" style delivery/fetching.
- Irritating autoload feature for area transitions. This makes actually finding area transitions hard as area transitions in vanilla Oblivion are marked with doors on your map.
- No fast-travel map markers, which are important to locate landmarks and to avoid tedious running around. And this mod uses large worldspaces with a heck of a lot of running around.

- Ridiculous Health inflation on creatures. Driders, for example have 85 health per level. A mere level 10 drider therefore has 850! Nowhere as bad as Deathtrap Dungeon's thousands-of-Health, though.
- Vast, repetitive landscapes with not a lot of interesting sites.

- Mostly all that there is to do is kill. Pretty much everything is hostile to you.

Oblivion Mod Review - BladeSong

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - BladeSong (ver 1)
Score: +2/-0

Summary: Romance mod, companion mod. Short quest.

Why Get This: Very nicely done short quest.

If you can get past severe disappointment after the extremely misleading mod advert that promises a heck of a lot more than the mod delivers ("Take part in an epic adventure that slowly unfolds over time and journey across the lands of Cyrodiil to discover new locations and entirely new distant lands.") then this is a nice short adventure. You also have to buy in to the romance part to really make it work.

Read the uninstallation instructions carefully! This mod significantly changes vanilla Oblivions NPCs in Aleswell and replaces them with dead clones. There is a script included to undo changes.
+ Good pacing with some nice plot twists. A bit heavy-handed on the romance, though. Could have used more quests to build attachment to the key NPC.
+ Nicely done story with interesting quests that aren't focussed on just killing X to get Y (except the war at the end).

Oblivion Mod Review - Skyrim Ruins, Tombs, and Creatures in Bruma

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Skyrim Ruins, Tombs, and Creatures in Bruma (ver 1)
Score: +0/-2

Summary: Extra dungeons and tiny worldspaces to explore.

Why Get This: Kill things that looks like they came from TES V: Skyrim.

There is no quest to tie in anything here. You need to find the entrances to reach the small worldspaces. There's some attempt to make the worldspaces different and interesting from the rest of Cyrodiil, but there's not much to see. It doesn't really add anything to your game beyond some cosmetically different gear.
-- Hairless mammoths that skip around like deer. No, I'm not kidding.

Oblivion Mod Review - Gates to Aesgaard Episode 1

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Gates To Aesgaard Episode 1 (ver 1)
Score: +1/-3

Summary: Linear dungeon crawl with "horror" atmosphere.

Why Get This: Dungeon crawl. Some interesting visuals.

This starts out as a promising story-driven mod with "horror" atmosphere, but quickly becomes boring and aimless. Initially you are treated to some backstory, but once you find Ashen Rose's corpse and her final journal update, the gameplay switches to just finding keys in small locations. The "horror" theme drops off sharply and you end up in mundane locations fighting undead.
+ Good attempt at "horror" theme locations very early in the mod.
- Too much immersion/atmosphere breaking. For example, there's an illogical-nightmare feel to the early locations which might have stood on its own just fine, except it was sadly made implausible by Ashen Rose's journal entries which suggest that the location has occupants and purpose -- some method to the madness, as it were. This itself is hinted at by some of the locations you can access (such as a large dining room / throne room). However, there is no cohesion to the place, no sense of purpose. Even the characters you encounter there are simply standing around doing nothing except waiting to be encountered so they can be hostile.
Another example: There's a portal that is labelled as a location 800 years in the past. I'm supposed to know this information? How? Once I'm through the portal, there's nothing obvious to tell me the location is 800 years in the past.
- Boring and aimless once the story elements disappear. Just another dungeon crawl. Going around killing things does not necessarily make a good mod. There's no shortage of things to kill everywhere in Tamriel in vanilla locations and there are far more interesting dungeon crawls around. The enemies here are either vanilla (skeletons, zombies, ghosts, wraiths) or just cosmetically different regular creatures (mages and fighters with a custom head model).
- Implausible clumps of supplies like several healing potions planted right before the exit door. Couldn't they have distributed these more? Or done something else less in-your-face, such as provide alchemy ingredients and apparatus strewn about over several early levels?