Couldn't resist getting Elder Scrolls 4 (Oblivion) yesterday. Not really my kind of game. Except that it might be. Number one son has been playing it for a few hours and I've been watching. It really is a game that puts you in a very big somewhere else. An enormous somewhere else. The world that it creates is very impressively realised. Amazingly so. Particularly the grass and foliage on the ground. The whole thing on a big screen has to be seen to be believed. I had heard that there were loading screens and there are. But they are not intrusive, any more than the "checkpoint reached" messages in the XBOX Halo games. Every now and then the message appears, but only stays on the screen for a couple of seconds before you can move again. And the environment is very very big. If the entire game world was not in jeopardy I reckon I could spend quite a while just wandering round and sightseeing.

We are on a quest to save our world from something very nasty indeed. Number one son has just made his way into Oblivion itself, and things have got very strange and really scary. When he has gone back to university I can see myself venturing there as well.