More Skyrim addiction

150 hours so far. Can you belive that? I’ve been playing Skyrim for over 150 hours. And I checked UESP yesterday to discover that:

-> I’m only half way through the main story line;

-> I’m about 80% of the way through the Thieves Guild storyline;

-> I’ve done about 25% of the Daedric quests;

-> I haven’t started The Companions questline yet;

-> I haven’t started The Dark Brotherhood questline yet;

-> I haven’t started the Civil War questline yet; and

-> I haven’t gotten married yet.

I have no idea how many of the Miscellaneous quests I’ve done (or have left) and I’ve hit the magical Level 50, which is apparently where the game stops adjusting quests/enemies by level.

There just seems to be no end to this amazing game. The one problem I’m facing now is cash. I have so much gold that I can’t spend it all, and that’s having a negative effect on my gameplay.

Why? Because when I clear a dungeon or a keep, I have no motivation to search all the chests, or dead bodies, or cupboards, or even the “boss”. Everything I am finding these days is worth a fortune. I have set up my home in Solitude, and have the Speechcraft perks that allow me to sell any item to any merchant.

But even with the fletcher, blacksmith, Angeline’s Aromatics, Bits and Pieces and Radiant Raiment, I STILL can’t sell all my loot in one round. I’ve just chosen the perk where I can invest 500 gold into a business to increase the amount of gold available, but all this is doing is increasing my “savings” – and giving me nothing to spend the money on!

So what are YOU doing with all your money? I’ve been buying all the training I can find and have decorated my three houses as much as I can. I asked one guy at work what I should do and he suggested buying horses. LOL.

One thing I HAVE been doing for a bit of fun is collecting cabbages. I saw a screenshot of a guy who filled an Inn with cabbages, so I’ve started filling the servant’s room in Solitude with cabbages. It serves no purpose at all, but is funny to see.

But despite these small little gripes, Sykrim still is the most amazing game I think I’ve ever played. The graphics are amazing. I commented to my Fiance the other day that it would be amazing if HDTV could be as sharp as the graphics in this game.

And there’s never a shortage of fun things to do. Lately, I’ve been standing in the “market district” of Solitude, shooting hawks out of the sky. Apart from the awesome thrill of seeing a bird tumble to the ground after a fluke shot, it’s a great way to get the Hawk’s Beak and Hawk’s Feathers alchemy ingredients.

So tell me: What awesome and fun things are you up to in Skyrim?

Get some balls, Australia

I struggled with the title of this post for a while, because a lot of what I have to say is about religion and about Christmas. I’ve already done one Christmas post, Bah Humbug, but this one is different.

In America, they’d call me Patriotic. But here in Australia, I get tagged as Racist or Intolerant. Strange how you can end up with a good or a bad label, depending on your “audience”.

The basis of this post is about people from other countries who come to Australia. Let me point out that I have nothing against that. I KNOW that some people have come from aweful places. After all, I’ve been to Iraq and Afghanistan. I KNOW what these people live with day to day.

But what I DO object to is when these people come to MY country and then decide that I have to live by THEIR rules. Or that they are going to pretty much ignore the Australian way of life.

Muslims are the main antagonists here, which is an oxymoron in itself. Islam instills in its people strong family values and great hospitality. The term Jihad doesn’t even directly mean go out and kill the non-Islam. It’s just a name given to any act done for Allah. So, if you’re a fatty, and you decide to go on a huge diet to lose 50kg, THAT could be tagged as a Jihad.

And I also have no problem with these people (not just the Muslims) coming here and wanting to maintain their own religion, customs and traditions. Hell, if I moved to China, I’d still celebrate Australia Day and Christmas, regardless of what their country did. But here’s the difference: I WOULDN’T demand that China change their ways to accommodate ME, I would EXPECT to live by THEIR laws, and I would expect to have to learn a fair amount of Chinese.

In Australia, things are getting ridiculous. And I intend to be that grumpy old man, sitting on the porch with his shotgun until the very end, fighting this crap. Australia is a Christian nation. I’m not exactly Christian myself, but I live by the rules set down by my country. In Australia, we celebrate Christmas and Easter as the birth and death of Christ respectively.

But because of “minority” groups (and listen up Prime Minister – Islam won’t be a “minority” for much longer), we are not allowed to put up Christmas decorations in our shopping centres. Our primary schools have been directed that they are not allowed to celebrate Christmas or Easter at school. The kids don’t get to make decorations, or colour in pictures of Santa, or make a basket for the Easter Bunny to deposit his eggs.

But it gets worse. Kindergartens are no longer allowed to make a Nativity. You can’t have “Secret Santa” anymore, it has to be “Secret Friends” now. Incidentally, that all sounds a little suspicious to me! And I’ve even heard discussion that thay are changing BC & AD to something else (Old Period and New Period, I think), because of the “Christian” undertones of BC & AD.

And why is all this happening? Because Australia doesn’t want to upset the non-Christians who come here – many of whom do so illegally by the way.

To this I say that Australia needs to get some balls. Whatever happened to the Australia that used to kick arse, instead of kiss it? I SAY, if you don’t like our rules, get out. What would happen if I flew to Afghanistan, tried to get in without a visa, then used THEIR legal system to FORCE them to let me stay and THEN demanded that the people around me speak English and that Afghanistan stops worshipping Allah in public – because it offends me.

Would they send me home? Or would they just take me out the back and shoot me?

Australia is a great country. And it has been made up of immigrants since the first white man came here. You’ll find we’re actually quite tolerant of all people, but not those who come here and force their will on us. Australia follows America’s lead on a lot of things, but for some reason we refuse to adopt the “Fuck you” attitude of the Yanks.

I REFUSE to pander to these groups. I will continue to say “Secret Santa” and I will continue to live my life the AUSTRALIAN way. And if I ever hear an immigrant whinge that we don’t do things like back home, I will happily tell them to leave. In fact, I’d probably even throw them a few dollars to help pay for their flight.

If you’ve read my Bah Humbug post, you’ll know that I’m a pagan. That means, I follow a non-Christian religion. In that post, I discuss how closed-minded Christian religion can be, and how open the pagans are.

If I was the Minister for Education, rather than “close down” religion, I’d insist that they teach ALL religions. Let the schools continue to celebrate Christmas and Easter, but let’s teach the kids about Ramadan, Hanukkah, Vesākha and God-forbid: Paganism.

Christian religion touts “Love thy neighbour” and they insist that they way to World Peace is tolerance. And yet we are prohibited from teaching our kids about all the different religions in Australia. Surely, if we educate our kids and expose them all the religious events they are going to encounter in their later years, they will understand WHY other religions do what they do, and be tolerant of them.

So what do you think? Are you an Aussie with the same thoughts as me? Do you think I’m an idiot? Are you an immigrant, struggling to maintain your own identity? Tell me what you think

My name is Grumpyaussie and I’m a Skyrim addict

That’s right. I have a problem. And they say that the first step to getting over your problem is admitting you have one. Right? Well I don’t want to get over my addiction.

I’m a computer game player from WAAAAAAAAAY back. Remember the Commodore 64? What about the Atari? I was there. In fact, whenever I put on a DVD these days, I still find myself saying “Press play on tape”. If you’re not 30 year’s old or more, games on the Commodore 64 (which was a computer in the 1980′s) were sold on a cassette tape. When you wanted to play the game, the computer would tell you to: “Press play on tape”.

Haven’t things changed since then? I mean, we have the Wii, and the Playstation Move and XBox Kinect. The Commodore 64 used to take up to half an hour to load a big game. Now, you slip in a disk and before you know it, YOU are the controller.

What I like to see in a computer game is CHOICE. I tend to think outside the square, so I don’t like games where I have to do it THEIR way. I want to make my own decision about how I achieve the goal. And that’s where games like Skyrim excel.

Fable was a good contender against the Elder Scrolls series (of which, Skyrim is episode 5). I only got involved with Elder Scrolls at episode 4: Oblivion, and it sucked me in like a child at a sideshow. The world in these games is amazing. The games are actually designed to have open-ended play. And if you don’t want to follow (and complete) the main story, then that’s fine.

Skyrim was released internationally on 11 November, and since then I have clocked up a little over 100 hours of gameplay. Can you believe that? 100 HOURS! A lot of new games these days will offer 25 or MAYBE 30 hours of gameplay for your $100. And to make things even more amazing, I traded in some old games to buy Skyrim, and ended up paying $9 for it. NINE FUCKING DOLLARS. For 100 hours of gameplay, so far!

And the thing is, I am NO WAY NEAR finished this game. I think I’m about 20% of the way through the main story. The rest of my time has been spent doing………stuff. So if you’re not familiar with the game (or it’s predecessor), here’s how it works.

You play a character that is any one of about 6 or 7 different races. From human, to lizard-thing, to elf. At the start, you get to “design” your character by editting your face – everything from the shape of your head to how far apart your eyes are, how dark your skin is and what your hair looks like. Then you get to give your character a name.

I won’t give away the storyline, but what I will do is say that in Skyrim, there is pretty much NOTHING you can’t do. Except have sex. And that’s my pet hate in video games these days, but I won’t talk about that now. If you want to hear my thoughts on that, leave a comment.

In Skyrim, you can create your own weapons out of the following types of material: leather, iron, steel, ebony, glass, elven steel, dwarven steel, dragon scales or dragon bones.

You do this at a blacksmith. They have a forge where you can create the items, a grindstone to sharpen and improve your weapons, a tanning rack where you can turn all the animal hides you’ve found into leather, and a workbench where you can improve any armour that you’ve made.

You can also create potions. At the beginning, you don’t know any of the magical properties of any of the ingredients. You have to start mixing them all together and gradually you will learn what magical effects they have. You can even EAT all of the ingredients, to help learn their effects.

And the best thing? Most of the ingredients you use to make potions are found in the game world. Everything from those damn Mountain Flowers, to bees, lichen, moss, butterfly wings, mudcrab claws, hawk beaks and ice-wraith teeth.

You can also hire – or be provided with – someone to help you out. They work really well as a pack mule to carry all your gear, but they also help you out in battles.

You can just wander around the wilderness, discovering caves, mines, forts, dragons, giants or towns. You can buy a house in each town and deck it out with all the latest furniture. You can spend your time just working on potions or making weapons and armour to improve your skills, or you can go dragon hunting.

And as you wander around the towns and get to know people, they will ask for your help. One of the menus keeps a list of your outstanding quests, and there’s miscellaneous ones as well. Everything from taking a note from one person to another to killing a dragon that’s been pissing off the local Jarl (aka regional leader), or clearing out a castle or cave where bandits live.

But Skyrim has it’s flaws. And anyone with a few brain cells would expect that. You can’t create a world like there is in this game without a few things going wrong. There’s plenty of webpages whinging and bitching about how shit Skyrim is because of all these little glitches. But I say to these people: Get over yourselves.

Sure, there’s some legit stuff. It sounds pretty minor and a bit nerdy on here, but I assure you, they are incredibly frustrating. Things like if you locate a quest item BEFORE you meet the person who tells you to START  the quest, then you might not be able to complete the quest. There’s also the odd lock-up (mainly on PS3 after four hours of continuous play) and the crappiest maps that ever lived.

And then there’s things that are really just tweaks. The game itself is awesome, but when a game gets all the BIG things right, you start looking at the little things. Like why can’t I mark the map myself when I find something interesting? Why can’t I rename a potion? Why can’t I tell my companion to STOP STANDING IN THE FUCKING DOORWAY!!!!!!!!!!!! Or why can’t I just ask a local where I go to sell my potions?

But that’s not to say that the game doesn’t already have a lot of these little things already. When you turn a normal sword into one that drains the magic of your enemy, you can name it anything you want. I have a fur hat that I gave an alchemy enchantment. So I called it “Hat that makes potions stronger” haha. Yes, I’m a child.

But it’s the REALLY little things that make this game what it is. Early on in the game, I was attacked by a group of people hired to kill me. Naturally, I slew them all (insert evil laugh here) and then looted their bodies. But then, the locals started walking up to the bodies and saying “Ooh, a dead body. I wonder what happened”.

You can even get married in Skyrim. And not to the ONE non-player character (NPC) that the game makers decided you should marry. There are literally about 20 NPCs that you can marry. And Skyrim is progressive. Same-sex marriages are allowed. You can even marry some of the people who will accompany you on quests.

The gameplay is also pretty awesome, but after 100 hours, I still struggle with some of the controls. I play on Xbox, and Skyrim’s predecessor, Oblivion, had amazingly intuitive controls. Skyrim does not. Did you hear that Bethesda? Skyrim DOES NOT have intuitive controls. And it sucks. When you’re being attacked by a dragon and need to grab your shield at the same time as drink a health potion, it gets hard.

Which reminded me of another awesome aspect of Skyrim. The world interacts with itself ALL THE TIME. You can be wandering around the world and find other animals and NPCs locked in battle with each other. Just recently, I was approaching a bandit camp that I had previously cleared. As I got closer, I heard a dragon overhead, so I froze and pulled out my bow.

But the dragon wasn’t after ME. I followed it’s stream of fire and saw that the dragon was attacking the bandits in the camp. I joined in, thinking the bandits would help make light work of the dragon, but when the dragon flew off to circle around, the bandits turned their attention to me. But the funny thing is, as the dragon came back to ground level, the bandits started attacking the dragon again!

And that’s not all! About half way through the battle, a giant joined in! Once again, everyone joined forces to fight the dragon, but once it was out of range, everyone started attacking each other again! It was funny and awesome at the same time. But things didn’t end well. The dragon was just about dead, so I rushed in for a melee attack, only to have the dragon grab me in it’s mouth, thrash me around and discard me like yesterday’s newspaper.

But you know what? I wasn’t mad. There was no rage quit. How can you be mad at an epic battle like that? It was truly amazing to see and to be a part of. Just another reason I love Skyrim.

So, yes. My name is Grumpyaussie, and I’m an addict.

Have you heard about my charity?

That’s right readers, I’m thinking of starting my own charity. It’s not to cure cancer – we have enough organisations working on that one. And it’s not to help starving children – again, there’s plenty already out there.

MY charity will be there to help those in need every day. They’re the people you see down the shops every day. They could be your neighbour, your workmate or even someone in your family.

And the biggest problem is that these poor souls don’t even realise they have a problem. I think maybe their friends and loved ones are a little hesitant to tell these people that they need help.

You know these people. And I know that when you see them, you wished you could help – and now you can. You don’t need to send me any money – I don’t want it. What I am going to need is…..mirrors. Yes, mirrors. And LOTS of them.

And with those mirrors, I can help those poor individuals out there who don’t yet own one. C’mon, you know what I’m talking about. That size 24 girl who thought she would like good in a denim mini skirt and crop top. Or that guy who’s wearing a pink singlet top with his fluorescent yellow board shorts.

And what about that girl that OBVIOUSLY got dressed in the dark. She’s wearing her favourite top, her favourite skirt or shorts and her favourite shoes. It’s just SUCH a pity that none of those items match.

If ONLY these people had a mirror. Then they could check themselves before they leave the house and maybe realise: “Hang on a sec. What was I thinking?”. If my charity helps only one of these people per month, it will be a success. Don’t you agree??

So if you support my charity idea, leave a comment or send me a message. I’ve told my workmates about my theory and they’re behind me 100%. And tell me what you think. Do you agree that only Asian girls can get away with wearing denim shorts over black tights? And really, even THEY only JUST get away with it, don’t they?

Bah Humbug

That’s right, I’m talking about Christmas. Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas. I love the time off work, I love eating and drinking too much and I love seeing the kids open presents and have more fun than any kid should have in one day.

But what I DON’T love is the crowds. I’ve noticed that since returning from my overseas deployments, I only have a small tolerance for crowds and for people’s self-centred, bullshit behaviour. People who just stop walking while you’re behind them, or people who stand in doorways and chat on their phone, so nobody can get past.

A few years back, I wrote to Santa and asked him to contact me. I told him that we needed to talk about his visit each year, and after a few weeks of waiting, I got an e-mail from him. Naturally, he used a dodgy e-mail address, probably in the fear that I’d reveal his official e-mail address to the world.

But we got cyber-chatting about the presents he brings and how much work I have to go through to buy the presents that I give to my kids. I told him that I have to fight the crowds for hours, whether I’m buying one little present, or ten big ones. So I made him an offer, and I think that what we’ve settled on actually benefits both of us.

Santa only brings my kids one present each now – and it’s not the BIG present. You know, the bike, or the trampoline or the iPod/Pad/Touch device. My theory is that, sure Santa has a busy job visiting everyone and dropping off presents, but HE doesn’t have to fight the Westfield crowds, does he?

His response to my offer came a little too quickly, and it kind of had me thinking that maybe he would like this offer from more parents. After all, it will cut back on the number of presents the elves need to make, and it dramatically cuts down the time the big guy needs to spend at each house.

But it’s not like I leave Santa out in the cold. No pun intended there, especially since Christmas in Australia is HOT HOT HOT. He did comment that he still wanted to live in my kids’ hearts, so the agreement is that the gift he leaves is a good one – just not the best one.

Unfortunately, one year the two of us did need quite a bit of back-and-forth co-ordinating Christmas, since my kids were asking for some pretty cool stuff. But we talked it out and came to a good agreement.

So don’t be afraid. If you hate the crowds as much as I do, then maybe it’s time to get a little more kudos from your kids. Have a chat with Santa and come to the same agreement as I have. My kids adjusted pretty quickly, and still love getting their gift from Santa. But at least now, when they get something like a bike, it’s ME that gets the credit.