Skyrim

I'm not sure where to even begin. How do you? That's part of the obstacle: the mental hurdle of knowing - simply being aware - that you are going to have this game spinning at home, and you are going to lose dozens of hours of your life. It's inevitable. Since playing Oblivion I've feared the sequel; I put over 120 hours into the fourth Elder Scrolls game, and I anticipate spending even more with Skyrim, the fifth in the series.

So far, I'm easily on track. In fact, if you look at my "epic" run of Fallout 3 hovering around 80 hours over five or six weeks, the 32 hours I've invested in the first seven days since release I'm quite on track to hit some number that I don't care to calculate. Quite simply I should surpass Fallout 3 within the week or two, and most likely Oblivion a few weeks after that. It's scary: how is this possible? What makes it all click? It doesn't matter, and I'm not going to explore this. Just accept the fact that this happens, and if you choose to play, it will happen to you to. For all of us non-drug users, I would imagine this is as close to chemical addiction that we're going to get to.

Indeed, I pre-ordered the game, picked it up and began playing almost immediately. My sister asked if I would babysit my niece Friday night. I told her it was Skyrim release day, like that should mean something. She responds by asking when the movie starts, thinking that perhaps I could just go to a later showing. Little did she know the weight of the situation. I would pick up my niece from daycare, go to EB and pick up my copy of the collector's edition. My niece didn't care that the box was so gigantic, and that it contained a foot-tall dragon "statue" inside. She wanted to see me play it, but I knew how futile something like that would be: I knew the intro would be long, dramatic and boring to a five year old. It would have to wait. My sister would get home, then I head home after and just around midnight, I have the game unboxed and installing on the drive. I would begin playing.

For the remainder of the weekend, I couldn't stop. It was exactly what I expected to happen, but even then, I'm not sure I was prepared. How could you be? How can anyone? It's practically unfair what they do to us. Infinite quests? Are you serious? I enjoy going through a list of quests to do, completing them and moving on. In this game when you return from a quest, that same person has another waiting for you. Most of the time I'm not sure if these are "main" quests or not, although after so many hours it's fairly evident that any mundane fetch quests are part of this "radiant quest" system. There's so much to do and so much to explore it's overwhelming, and the only way to approach things is systematically. So that's where I go from there: find an entry point, quest it out, get some achievements and move on. Stop talking to random strangers because everybody has something they want you to do.

Has it been fun? It has, for the most part. Playing for extended periods of time is physically exhausting. You get tired of the repetition and when you want to quit, that's when you find yourself in a dungeon that never ends. You have to take breaks, or else you will go mad. When I originally played Oblivion I don't recall having so much free time. It took months to do what I anticipate will only take weeks here.