The red-headed stepchild of the Elder Scrolls series, where demons come out of his door to Oblivion (This is awful, please don’t actually leave this in). He is both beloved and maligned, criticised yet adored. He ruined gaming forever with just one dlc pack, but- um, the memes are funny?

Skyrim is accessible to a fault, a game that you can just pick up and play. Its greatest moments come in the quiet moments of exploration. Morrowind stands in stark contrast as an alien and inhospitable place, getting engrossed in an entirely other world is captivating, drinking in its bizarre culture and esoteric lore. Todd Howard saw Lord of the Rings and thought “sick, we’ll do that.” That is Oblivion.

We can talk about the gameplay, we both know about that. The level scaling, turning every encounter into something unkillable, the annoyingly precise stat allocation required on your character, “ah the clunkiness, can’t stand the clunkiness.” Mechanics probably won’t be what sucks you in, so what would be the draw?

The freedom! That’s what Bethesdaslop lovers crave. It’s the freedom to do anything you want and damn the consequences. Oblivion’s waltz out of the tutorial gate and seeing the beautiful countryside in the distance, the shimmering lake beckoning you to take a dive, the bone white ruins of Vilverin usher you into its mystery. Seeing that mountain, wondering if you could climb it (not yet). Its immediate offer of ‘go anywhere, do anything’ further cemented the future design doctrine of all Bethesda games. But are you really free? I mean, really? It’s not much of a roleplaying game, all things considered. It hardly lends itself to such a task. Oh, we’re not doing very well here, are we?

Okay, well. The writing is talked up a lot, but it really isn’t that good. Better than Skyrim, sure, but that’s hardly a feat. The Dark Brotherhood questline is held up as the golden standard- but even that doesn’t quite stand up to scrutiny- and the main quest is often outright ignored, so that can’t be a good sign. What the fuck is it then?

Why is Oblivion still adored by so many? Why is it one of my favourite games of all time? A damned near obsession of mine, some would say. For most, the answer is simple. Your first Bethesda game tends to be your favourite, such was the case for me. How would I put it? It’s kind of anecdotal, really, but let me try to explain:

Wandering into the basement of a random house, seeing corpses and blood strewn around everywhere, turning around and seeing the homeowner corner you in the darkness, only for him to greet you with, “Good day, how fares you this fine eve?” All while Jeremy Soule is playing his little heart out on the strings. Duh-duh-duh-duhhh-duh-duuuhhh~. There’s a reason Oblivion stands infamous for its lovely potato-faced denizens and awkward, stilted dialogue, but it’s the juxtaposition of their eeriness with such a worldly, standard high-fantasy environment, as the looming threat of actual hell comes to swallow you all. There’s a strange feeling of discomfort the game wraps around you, its stares disarming, the flicker of sheer madness lurking underneath their ungainly smiles. Unnerving, yet alluring all the same.

It’s drenched in this unshakeable charm despite everything visually going against it, something both deeply alien and all too familiar. A world that appears so real at first, then crumbles at the slightest touch of the player character, sometimes without needing your exact input either. And it’s in this place- between the uncanny valley and the scent of mother- that you’ll find Oblivion so strangely homely. My heart is still there, as it has been for over a decade. Wandering the Jerall Mountains, taking in the scenery, skittering just out of sight, eating your sweetrolls, gestating, taking form, lurking. Always lurking.

Constructing demented murder scenes and imagining the horrified responses of those that would discover it covered a great deal of my 300-something hours on the Playstation 3. A gleeful, slightly worrying past-time of tiny crows that now very big crows is actively writing long-winded, melodramatic fanfiction about to this day. Weird how things turn out, eh?

It’s almost impossible to describe. Oblivion is paradoxical in nature, a crawling mass of contradictions. Like a riddle, or a bad joke. But for all of its many faults and eccentricities- it all melts away every time the sun sets on the Colovian Highlands and I hear the Peace of Akatosh for what must be the billionth time. Those rolling green hills and towering trees, that whistle in the wind and the funny, impish creatures spattered around takes me all the way back to my first time touching the game all those many, many years ago. And it’s in these great hills where I shall make my grave.

The original DLC started out as blatant theft and sunk the already shaky reputation of Creative Assembly. Doubling up the units after six months is...nice? But most of these additions are scraping the bottom of the barrel (Tzeentch-marked Centigors?) or cut content that should have been in the game to begin with (Gate-masters). But none of this changes the fact that all three campaigns have horrible concepts and worse executions- and nothing has been done to fix them, mostly because there's just no time. CA have to move onto Thrones of Decay to prove themselves, or Sega's going to have to brandish the whip again- and a part of me hopes they garrote those crazy bastards in Horsham, so that they might join the great pack in the sky...

Ostankya marks the fracturing of Kislev's identity into a complete mess. She should have been part of a DLC later down the line as the rest of the lords get their armies bolstered and their mechanics fleshed out. The ungol/gospodar divide has been removed, because I guess an ethnic conflict in fantasy Russia draws too many parallels to current geopolitical conflicts for GW? That leaves us with ICE and BEARS, reducing Kislev to something utterly lame. BUT WAIT, now Ostankya brings...chaos beasts! To the bulwark against... chaos? That, and the ONE TRUE HAG OF KISLEV doesn't start in a Kislev forest and her mechanics are bullshit. But hey, at least we have the lore of Hags! Or whatever.

Yuan Bo possesses so many titles, even Settra is raising his fleshy eyebrows at him. Ambassador, Executioner, Spymaster. He's got so much going on that he embodies everything and nothing at once. His model is WoW-tier and his faction mechanic lets you buy out all of Cathay in a handful of turns. Couldn't really pay me to play Cathay though, so I'm not exactly sure about this one.

And just like that, the Changeling trolls us all by snubbing not just the Blue Scribes as an LL, but Aekold Helbrass as well (let's face it, he probably nicked Egrimm's spot too). All for a campaign that you cannot lose. That's not hyperbole. You'd have to go out of your way to face any kind of dire consequences when you're invisible on the campaign map and no one can touch your settlements. It's just not fun, and I've already gone straight back to Kairos and Vilitch. At least the Chaos Lord and Exalted Hero are cool.

Anyway, ignore shills. The DLC has gone from awful to stunningly mediocre but still broken. Certainly not the cream.api of the crop, and I would still not waste your money on it. If CA don't get their act together for Thrones of...Delay...(hold your laughter, please) it's over. And if it is, the cataclysmic conclusion to the Total Warhammer trilogy couldn't have come sooner enough.

The original TimeSplitters is entirely skippable. You're not really missing anything- aside from a few maps I still see when I close my eyes. The docks, the mansion, the castle, the graveyard, the seaside village.

It's Free Radical working out all the kinks to their little Goldeneye 64 successor. A senseless and wild shooter that has you staggering through a myriad of missions through time. The great big bloody leap from this to its sequel is really kind of shocking and that's probably the one big reason you'd want to play it. Just to see how far they've come in such short time.