Here’s a few interesting reads I thought I’d share that I’ve come across in the past few days.

The latest 1Up Yours podcast brings up Fallout 3, as well as practically every Elder Scrolls game ever made during their community segment of the show. During the segment, which starts about 53 minutes into the show, the 1Up crew uses these games as examples in a few of their debates. Fallout 3 and Oblivion are brought up several times in a discussion about the “no name characters” and the choices your characters make in games. Later on in the segment, they also bring up the Elder Scrolls and Fallout in a discussion of how Japanese RPGs compare with western-developed RPGs like Oblivion. To download the podcast, head over to 1Up’s podcast site.

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Arena, Community, Daggerfall, Modding, Morrowind, Oblivion, Op/Ed, Preview, The Elder Scrolls, Todd Howard, podcast | 4 Comments »

Not too long ago, I found out that Guinness – those guys that determine the world’s tallest person, longest fingernails, and the most t-shirts ever worn at one time, were coming out with a new book that shares videogame records. While it’s not the first time Guinness has recorded videogame records, it’s their first book devoted completely to games. To help create the book, Guinness worked with Twin Galaxies, who have been recording pinball and videogame records for years.

The book, Guinness World Records Gamer’s Edition, just recently went on sale (I got my copy in the mail two days ago), and it even features two pages on the Elder Scrolls series. I won’t spoil the whole book (soon to be a staple in my bathroom library), but here’s a few tidbits I thought I’d share:

• Daggerfall has the largest land-based game area at 63,125 square miles.
• Daggerfall is also listed as having the most NPCs (non-player characters) in any RPG with 750,000.
• The fastest play-through of Morrowind was done by Vladimir “Knu” Semenov at 7 minutes, 30 seconds. Kudos to Freddo for pointing this out a month ago.

Who knows, maybe there’s a record out there waiting for you to break it. My new goal is to beat Brian Sulpher’s record for highest margin of victory over an AI opponent in a basketball videogame. In Tecmo Super NBA Basketball for SNES, he beat the computer by 331 points. If the Pistons could score 186 points in a real-life NBA game, maybe I can pull off my own magic with their virtual counterpart.

Books, Daggerfall, FTW, Morrowind, The Elder Scrolls | 7 Comments »

For a great deal of Elder Scrolls fans, Morrowind (or even Oblivion) was their first foray into the world of Tamriel. Given that Daggerfall (second game in The Elder Scrolls) isn’t the easiest game to find these days, I thought I’d share the introduction video that I found over on YouTube. For newcomers to the series (like myself) it’s cool to see Uriel Septim VII played by a live actor. For more information on the background of Daggerfall, check here.

For those that are looking to pick up Daggerfall on the PC, since I get asked frequently…we’re currently not planning to reissue the game. Your best bet is to look for a used copy on sites like Amazon or eBay. Pete also suggested sites like http://gametz.com where folks will often trade used games that are otherwise hard to find.

Daggerfall, The Elder Scrolls | 23 Comments »