Closing the Gates of Oblivion

Last tuesday I went to best buy and picked up Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for the Xbox 360. I was a big fan of Elder Scrolls III (ES3) and I had even higher expectations for this one. I would of liked to have gotten it for the computer in order to be able to download mods and stuff later on after I had beaten the game. But my computer as of right now can hardly surf the net and play music at the same time, so I felt that even running the game at its lowest settings would not do it justice.

I've always made Thief characters because frankly, I love stealing shit. Back in ES3 basically all I did was explore new places and try to break in and steal as much stuff as possible. I would also kill people so I could use their house as a stash for my loot. Since most merchants did not carry enough gold to pay a fair price for the items I was finding. I started ES3 by delivering a letter to this guy which started the main story line. Before giving me my next assignment however, he told me to go out and get some expierience. Technically alls I had to do was walk out the door and then come back in. However I walked out the door and never came back. I never even touched the main story line. I just did quests for the 3 guilds I was in and the House that I belonged too. Doing that and stealing as much as possible was a full time job. Plus it was hard to keep track of quests you received since everything was written in this journal as it happend and as you got into it, there were so many pages that it was very hard to find old quests. Oblivion has fixed that.

I've played Oblivion for about 30 hours this week. The graphics are great and I'm finding myself doing the same thing again. I did the first mission for the main quest but when going to do the second I got owned by the guys there and decided that I should go out and do more stuf before returning to fight there. Well I later found out that enemies scale to your level so it doesn't matter what level you are, there still going to give you a tough time. However by playing more you will have better weapons and better spells that could be more effective against them, so I guess that does provide an advantage. But I'm a thief so when it comes to melee combat I'm not the greatest.

I like the way that you can teleport to any place that you have discovered or any big city right away. Its not technically teleporting because it calculates how long it would fo taken you to walk there and just speeds up the time. Makes it easy to go across the map. I have joined most of the Guilds and I'm doing opening level missions for them. I noticed that my quest list keeps getting bigger and bigger. Each time I try to go out and do one I get side tracked by finding a new cave or house which I must explore. Then I get all this loot so I can't hold it all and I have to try and sell it and go back and get what I left. Yet, when selling my Mercantile skill is not too high yet so I only get like 50-70% of the fair value for it, so I have a hard time selling a lot o things. I just recently bought this dump of a house since its the only one I could afford so far. I furnished it withe some storage so I can start dumping my expensive loot there. I normally would just use sombody elses house to stash my loot. Since I have keys to many dead characters houses, I could go in anytime I want. I read somwhere though that if you store stuff in a house that is not yours, it might not be there next time. I'm not sure if that applies to houses thats owners have died. I decided not to take the chance.

I mentioned earlier that they fixed the journal/quest thing in Oblivion. Now they sort quests by "completed, quests(forget offical name but its just a list of quests you have), and active quests. You can scroll through a list of quests that you have and can make any one of them your active quest by the push of a button. Then you will get guidance on the compass as to where you should be heading. Also most quests have many parts to them, like maybe a list of 4 things that you've found out about while trying to complete the quest. These are not shown until you make it your active quest, then you see the whole list of all the information you have on this quests thus far, which cleans up the main quest list nicley and allows you to catch up on what you have already done in case its been awhile.

I also jump all the time to get my Acrobat skill up. I can jump insanley high and change directions in midair. I also learned the dodge ability from having high Acrobatic skills. Jumping looks pretty bad though when watching it in 3rd person. First person is proably the best way to play most of this game.

So as my quest list continues to grow and as I find better and better items, I think I will try doing part of the main quest again. However, I plan on doing as much of the game as I can, but thats proably going to take like 200 hours, I also will need to play Guild Wars. I don't have enough time to play both right now, but this summer...

A Not So Perfect Market?

Now there is such a thing as supply and demand in this economy. I will not elaborate more on this subject because I'm sure it is well known. Anyway, a place such as eBay allows --in theory--the creation of a "perfect" marketplace where millions of transactions bring every item to an equilibrium price. I know that I research products on eBay to see what the "fair market price" is for something before I decide to buy it at a retailer. However, occasionally the market acts irrationally. My point is this. Sometimes (more often than one would think), sombody pays too much for something. This could be for a million reasons and as long as I'm not that person, all is well. As you know I had an extra Xbox 360 hard drive from my repair fiasco a couple months back. I decided to list this hard drive on eBay to see what I could get for it, because at this point a 2nd hard drive is of no use to me. A new hard drive retails in stores for $100, so one would think that the online prices would be at or below that price. Now I know that some places are in short supply of these hard drives but where I'm at, there are plenty of them. This must be the case because people were paying over a $100 + S&H for new hard drives. If people want to pay that much for them, thats grand. Back to the story, I've managed to digress long enough. I listed my hard drive (never used but not in a package) on ebay expecting to receive below $100 for it. I actually saw one go for $86 after shipping so thats what I was expecting. However this was not the case. Without going into some climaxing rampage of details I will just tell you how much I got for it. $135 +S&H. I never thought that I would receive $40 more than a new one in the stores for one that was not in a case. I'm half tempted to go buy up all the ones I see in the store and sell them for a healthy premium online, because apparently there is a shortage somewhere. I am not aware of one and all my friends are amazed that I manage dto get that much. I would of been happy with $80 since after all, it was free to me. However ebay and paypal took a slice of it, a bit more then I think they should of, but whatever.

I notice that in the stock market this happens too (this is not news, most everybody notices this). I have posted about my liking of the Gold industry and how I think its a great investment, especially for the next few years. The price of gold fluctuates every day and in turn the stock prices of gold mining companies does as well (Gold = Precious Metals). Sometimes the market over reacts and the stock will drop like $2 a share in one day, now if I had more money this is when I would start putting in more money, on these dips. I just think its funny that people will panic so much on a solid company because the price of gold goes down a few bucks one day. You bought the company knowing that there would be times like that (or maybe you didn't, maybe your shorting the stock or trying to make a quick buck). Guess what, it goes back up to where it was over the next couple of days then proceeds to go even higher. Bottom line is, the market over reacts all the time. It's people like you and me (capitalist loving people) that need to recognize these opportunities and profit from them.