Today's thoughts

Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
I've been playing Elder Scrolls: Skyrim for the past few days and I'd like to dedicate this post to my newest nemesis, the Hagraven.  But before we get into that, I have a hard time whenever I play the types of games where you design your character right down to the little details like length of bridge of nose, and how angled I want his jaw to be. 

I'm all for the customization, but I could literally spend a week designing my guy if I really cared that much about it.  I selected a Wood Elf, because it just makes more sense in terms of what I usually like to do in most games, which is control animals, and frolic through the forest with a long range weapon.  But the Wood Elf male is extremely ugly, so I spent a better part of Sunday afternoon and evening trying to make him look human -- no easy task.

Being sneaky
In all games such as these, I always feel like aside from trying to win the main objective, my secondary goal is to try to attain ALL of the money in the entire game.  In order to do this, you have to level up your character to the point where I'm able to sneak around so well that I can steal anything I want, and then be able to barter well enough that I can sell items for more than I paid for them.  The idea, is to be able to pay people for services and then, wait til it's dark, and steal all the money I paid them back, and then do it again until I've exhausted their use.  Further, I need to be able to steal every item in a store, and sell it back to the store owner, then buy his good stuff that I can't steal, and then pickpocket him so I can get all my money back. 

If for whatever reason I'm unable to beat the game, I'd at least be satisfied that I stole and plundered to my heart's content. 

The Hagraven
Like pretty much any game I've ever played, my biggest weakness has always been forgetting to Save my game.  Yesterday, I traveled pretty much across half the "world" to get to this Hagraven, from which I needed some ingredient that I could use to save a really big tree in White Run, one of the towns.  Don't worry, this story gets better.  So I'm riding up to this big hill and I notice this weird looking old lady at the top.  Easy pickings for my "Jon", who is an expert archer. 

So I got off my horse, and me and Lydia (my bodyguard aka mule) go to work.  As I approach, I just see her head bobbing up and down so I just take a few shots with my trust bow and arrow, and then BLAMO!  A huge fireball hits me and takes me down to a sliver of health.  So I started running towards the hill, thinking I can cut off the angles so she can't hit me.  Wrong.  BLAMO!  If it weren't for me scarfing down a bunch of tomatoes and apples, I'd have been dead.  I quickly (without really thinking about it) I press F5 to save the game.  Big mistake.  BLAMO!  I'm dead.  So I press F9 to load, and when the game comes back up, BLAMO! F9, while pressing the run key.. BLAMO!  F9, while pressing the strafe key.... BLAMO!

Then I look up to see if I can load an earlier game.  The next most recent save game was from 5 hours ago.  Damn it.