I've been hearing a lot about this video game called 'Skyrim' lately. From all the hype it was getting, I originally thought it was a Call of Duty game. I soon found out that it was part of a different franchise I rarely ever hear about called 'The Elder Scrolls'. I didn't know much about the aforementioned franchise, other than it was some kind of fantasy RPG. A few days ago I decided to look Skyrim up, and it actually sounded sort of interesting. When we were out shopping last Saturday, I asked my mom if I could rent it. I doubted I'd be able to find any copies, because after all it is a super popular game. It still didn't hurt to try, though. She agreed, and the last stop we made before heading home was a movie and game rental store the next town over. I headed to the video game racks in the back, and scanned the Xbox 360 section for the game I sought after. I found around six Skyrim boxes all in a row... and to my dismay, they had all been taken out. My mom asked the clerk if anyone had returned a copy recently, and amazingly they found one at the front desk! We rented it for the weekend, as my mom figured it might interfere with my schoolwork if I had it any longer.
After I set up my miniature Christmas tree that I got the same day, I plopped down on the couch and started up the game. It started out in first person, and apparently I was a prisoner and I was going to be executed. I don't even know why; I couldn't hear what the other characters were saying (and the subtitles weren't turned on) because there was too much background noise. After probably more than five minutes of dialogue I couldn't hear, I got to create my character. There were ten different playable races, and from there you could customize your character practically however you wanted. It took me at least fifteen minutes to finalize my character... I decided to play as an Argonian, which is a reptilian humanoid thing which looks like this:



I was a female with dark green skin, orange eyes, dark red war paint and feathers on my head, and several small horns or something like that. When I was done, I watched someone get decapitated... lovely. I was going to be beheaded next, but right as they were going to sever my head, a dragon appeared and started destroying the village... since everyone, including the executioners, fled, I got to escape. I had no idea what I was doing and where I was supposed to go, and I died like ten times... I was really frustrated with the game at first, but once I finally got past that part, I was shown Skyrim's true potential.
It's hard to summarize all the things you can do in Skyrim. There's a main plot for you to follow, but you're free to go anywhere and do whatever you want whenever you want. It's an open world RPG, and there's plenty of places to explore. Mountains, plains, forests, lakes, villages... all decked out in very nice graphics. You can freely switch from first to third person view; I tend to use third person when I'm fighting, and first when I'm exploring. There's tons of different side quests to complete, but I haven't really looked into them. There's three main paths your character can pursue in the game; that of a warrior, a mage, or a thief. You don't have to follow just one of these paths, though. And then there's eighteen skills you can gain and improve, all falling under these three categories. These range from lock picking to archery to enchanting. There's a wide variety of different weapon, magic, armor, etc. types you can obtain. Personally, I prefer fighting with a war axe, but that shouldn't be that big of a surprise. On that note, you can kill or steal from pretty much everyone in the game, but there's some consequences if you're caught committing crimes in public. You also get to take stuff from the dead bodies of enemies you kill, which is where most of my inventory came from... Alongside normal enemies, there's also animals roaming around, such as elk and foxes. They generally try to avoid you and flee if you unsheathe your weapons, but if you catch them you can kill them and take their pelts/meat/antlers/whatever. You can apparently become a werewolf or a vampire, but I've heard being a vampire is bad. There's a bunch of other things beyond all this, too...
There's a lot I don't know about the game, mostly because I'm still at the very beginning and I've never played a game in The Elder Scrolls series before. But it's really fun and super addicting. I played it for many hours at a time over the weekend, and I've been really wanting to play it ever since we returned it on Monday... Hopefully I'll be able to get Skyrim for Christmas. And hopefully it won't interfere with my time on here, or anything else.

Quote of the day:
"Let's play Pin the Sombrero on the Russian!" ~Mr. E, my Spanish teacher