drawing pixels

Found a short piece on Morrowind I wrote on a forum in 2009:

I played a couple of hours of Morrowind last night in the back-bedroom on a tiny TV with the sound of the wind in the trees outside. It's immediately more fascinating than Oblivion*; the world-building is leagues more imaginative and actually fantastic. Creatures and Hell-gates apart, Oblivion seems to be collated from real-world natural and architectural influences, whereas Morrowind is a work of actual imagination. Some notes: I found a naked man covered in blue face-paint who seemed to speak in a Scottish accent. He requested my help in chasing a woman it seemed he was intent on seducing, although she was actually a witch who had stolen all his belongings. I declined and tried to attack him instead. My pathetic attempts to beat him up weren't working so I ran. He chased me and eventually punched me to death. It was quite humiliating.


I reloaded my save and headed in a different direction. A woman with some snazzy winged-boots needed escorting somewhere and offered the boots as payment. Wary of my last encounter, and covetous of her boots ('the boots of blinding speed', I think they were), I accepted. Not knowing my way around caused me to become lost and I ended up wandering along the coast. A beast suddenly attacked so again I ran. Unfortunately it was pitch-black, raining, and I had no clue as to where I was running. In my panic I ran straight off a cliff. It took a twenty-minute swim to reach a shallow enough bit of coast for me to climb up, even then I was quite far away from where I had so bravely legged it and left my companion to her fate, but I really wanted those boots so I set off back to where I thought she was. Instead, a huge mysterious ziggurat-style stone temple emerged from the fog. That is where I saved. Off to play again now.

Morrowind is always a game I think I will go back to. These notes were from when I first played the game on a second-hand Xbox I bought solely to play it. I wound up hating the Xbox control pad so much I bought an Xbox 360 to play it instead but got distracted by all the shiny new games I bought alongside it. That was all a few years ago and I no longer have the means to play Morrowind at all, yet I still have the game itself, ready for when I can give it the time it deserves.


*My many attempts at playing Oblivion often descended into farce; once, I was minding my own business, pottering through the forest on my trusty horse, when I was attacked by a couple of wolves. I dismounted and went to retaliate but the wolves were biting my horse, not me. The horse began to run. The wolves followed. I gave chase, but due to my heavy armour I was far too slow. I stripped naked and started after them but by this point I had fallen way behind and had no idea where the horse had got to. I realised I was simply a naked man running through a forest.

Another time I fell into the routine of bare-knuckle boxing a local barman and yielding just before he boxed me back. Unfortunately the effect of my punching him in the face was cumulative and he ended up dead, lain awkwardly across the bar. His wife (perhaps in terrific shock) failed to notice his lifeless body strewn right in front of her and went on talking to me as if I were a regular customer and not a manslaughtering buffoon.