Check out the very old school Escort Wing, a moddable Mac and PC action arcade game. Top down view, decent graphics, and lots of fan content available for it.

Oblivion is one of the finest videogames to be released in the last couple of years. It’s available on PC and Xbox360, and the gameplay is similar to games like Gothic/Gothic II, Ultima Underworld, and Oblivion’s predecessors in the Elder Scrolls series (Morrowind and so on). It’s an action RPG with first and 3rd person cameras and an (almost) unprecedented amount of freedom in terms of how you approach the game. There’s an epic plot you can choose to follow and solve, but at any point you can choose to ignore it and do your own thing, and there’s a huge variety of things to do – want to become the world’s greatest alchemist? Head of the Fighter, Mage or other more secretive guilds? Own a house? Hunt wild game in the woods and take their skin and meat? Explore the wilderness and investigate strange ruins and caverns? All of these are in there and tons more as well. The game’s graphics are spectacular and the audio, including spoken dialog for every character and every line in the game, is also mostly great, the only exception being some of the voice acting which is occasionally bad but never awful. The scope of the game is absolutely huge – there’s a huge landmass to explore which if you chose to walk across it in realtime would take you a couple of hours, and there are many cities and towns, each with a distinctive look and one that is itself huge.

The game’s flexibility extends to the character system as well. Want to be an armor clad tank bashing your way through your enemies? Fine. Prefer to be a stealthy assassin who prefers to sneak about and backstab, then dash back into the shadows? That’ll work. Perhaps a mage with devastating elemental spells is more your speed? No problem. Or maybe a summoner who counts on his minions to do his dirty work? How about an archer who relies on speed and devastating accuracy with a bow? It’s also in there, and again so is a ton more stuff. It’s really amazing how well the engine manages all this – all these approaches are viable and fun.

The combat engine is mostly great – it’s got a very satisfying feel to it, whether you’re bashing it out hand to hand, plinking away at a distance with spells or a bow, or dashing in and out in stealth mode. The one problem is that you often have allies and companions in your adventures and they invariably get in the way. This was especially bad for the character I solved the game with, a sort of Paladin type in heavy armor with some healing magic, who was constantly getting in fights with his allies after whacking them one time too many by accident in the heat of battle.

The plot’s a mixed bag but generally good – the first epic encounters in Kvatch blew me away, and the ending is absolutely fantastic, but there are some elements of drudgery along the way.

The game balancing system is as far as I know unique to this title and is also something of a mixed bag. Instead of the traditional RPG mechanic of opponents slowly being more difficult the further you make your way through the plot, everything in Oblivion scales dynamically with you. The good thing about this is that you’re generally never overwhelmed and you never have to go through a grind to raise your level in order to take on new challenges. The downside is that there’s not much incentive in terms of gameplay mechanics to explore anything beyond the main plot, and you also never get much of a sense of accomplishment like you would in games with a traditional balancing system (as in – you go to a new area, get your head handed to you, flee, spend some time leveling up, come back and whomp whatever was devastating you before, then cheer). It also leads to some oddities, as in like the common roadside bandits who occasionally accost you are equipped with artifacts of ultimate power by the end of the game, and it’s also tough to gauge the strength of opponents – is that a goblin over there, or an immortal vorpal goblin of ultimate doom? It’s tough to say in Oblivion. All in all it’s a mixed bag in this department. I didn’t hate it, and I could see the benefits, but by the end I had concluded I would have liked it better with a more traditional system.

The game’s also infinitely expandable and in only a month of release there are already literally hundreds of mods, including some that I would consider essential, and some from the game publisher themselves.

So – all in all I would recommend Oblivion to basically anyone who enjoys computer action and RPG games. It’s almost perfect, and the modders are already working away to perfect it. The ending is one of the finest RPG endings ever and well worth some of the drudgery you have to slog through to get there, and by and large it’s a fantastically fun experience. The one caveat would be – it’s a hardware hog in a major way. The engine is very tunable, but at a certain point turning down the options removes some of the magic of the experience. I have a pretty middle of the road gaming rig at this point and some of the ending battles where there were dozens of characters (spoiler alert – and a giant fricking god the size of the sears tower…ok maybe I exaggerate but when you’re playing and you’re desperately trying not to get stomped by him, tell me you don’t end up thinking the same thing!), my machine was slowed to single digit framerates. So – buy this game, unless you don’t think your machine can handle it – if that’s the case, get a new machine 😉

I’m already figuring I will replay the entire game in about a year, when an expansion pak or two is out and the modders have really tuned it to perfection – that’s how good it is. 5 stars from me, and right up there with Gothic II as one of the best games of this generation.

This was making the rounds a couple of weeks ago, back when I was so busy with the move to MA, the new job and so on, that I had no time to post it, but check out the flash-based Murloc RPG. Great graphics and decent old school side scrolling rpg gameplay. Free, easy to get into. If you’ve played WoW you know just how damned annoying the Murlocs are – now you can play as one.

Looking for something offbeat and maybe free to play? Check out the jayisgames.com weblog now and then, or add his feed to your aggregator. There’s a pretty steady stream of content and some excellent reviews of small, offbeat games to be found.

I’ve posted now and then about how other countries, asian countries especially, are completely kicking our butts when it comes to bandwidth. There are lots of side effects of this and one of them is the sheer number of online multiplayer games asian developers are producing – there’s already a whole generation of citizens, male and female, that are acclimated to playing games online with folks, and the game producers are developing all kinds of things to appeal to them. Some of them are getting translated to english as these asian developers try and crack the US market.

Here’s an example of on. I happened across a fun, free action rpg for pc set in wwII on the eastern front. Check out Blitz 1941. It’s a relatively small download at around 150 megs, signup takes only a minute, and the hardware requirements are very modest. The primary gameplay is basically capture and hold in european cities as you work with your teamates to capture them. If you sign up drop me a message so we can group – I’m a level 3 tank commander specializing in repair so far.