Tag: skyrim

Skyrim Travelogue: A Little Rain Never Hurt No One

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There’s a popular Skyrim mod called Frostfall I’ve had installed for a while. It takes all those background weather effects, the snow and rain and fog, and pushes them into the foreground where you can’t help but notice them. It achieves this by letting them kill you. You know that expression “a little rain never hurt no one”? Yeah, forget that.

Somebody at Bethesda put a lot of effort into modelling the climate of Skyrim in the regular game, but apart from that one area near the top of The Throat Of The World that can chill you to death, it normally doesn’t affect you. Frostfall, on the other hand, models temperature and exposure and dampness, and will slowly freeze you to the bone if you wander off without adequate protection. To prepare you for that, Frostfall also lets you craft cloaks and sleeping tents, makes eating soup and standing near fires grant warmth and dryness, and also lets you take that wood you chopped just to watch the animation and light an actual fire with it.

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I’ve been messing about with Frostfall on a savegame where I’m playing a Khajiit – one of the catfolk – named Hunter. He’s a hunter, yes. I’m imagination personified. Thanks to another mod called Live Another Life, Hunter S. Tomcatson isn’t the Dragonborn, hero of prophecy. He’s just an ordinary catman with a bow and a cloak who has been tooling around for nine levels shooting wildlife, skinning them, and selling the bits. That’s literally it. Sometimes he gets attacked by bandits, but since I didn’t initiate the main questline, Hunter lives in a Skyrim that doesn’t even have dragons in it.

The main supernatural occurrence in Hunter’s Skyrim is fast-travel. Memories of slogging through the ash wasteland in Morrowind, or being funnelled by those tedious mountain passes while Cliff Racers swooped down like broken pterodactyls, have made me rely on the fast-travel in more recent Elder Scrolls games (and ride horses a lot too). But to get the most out of Frostfall you need to see it on foot and you need to see it continuously.

To that end I’m going to spend an afternoon travelling across the country, and I’ve banned myself from fast travel while I’m doing it. No carts or boats or mounts either. I’ll visit all the capital cities of the various Holds and see if I can do it without freezing to death. How long will that take? Let’s find out.

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Opinion: Why I’ll Be Saying “No Thanks” To The Elder Scrolls Online

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The Elder Scrolls games have always strived to deliver – largely with success – expansive, open, fantasy worlds and the ability to explore them in your own way. For me, this epitomises the function of video games in my life: the ability to temporarily leave the day-to-day troubles of my life behind and enter a crafted world full of wonder.

Several times while I was playing Skyrim, I caught myself actually saying (yelling?) out loud “Wouldn’t this game be even more awesome if it was an MMO?” So when The Elder Scrolls Online was announced, I was struck by a severe case of “the hypes”.  This condition, which affects every gamer at some point, is marked by symptoms which include tunnel-vision, episodes of mania, and in my specific case a wee bit of mouth foam. Thankfully, two weeks ago I rid myself of this illness. If you are still affected by the particular strain of the hypes that was induced by The Elder Scrolls Online, read on.

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Zed Games Podcast – Episode 201

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“The Games That Defined a Console Generation”

The crew discuss, as objectively as possible, the games that made a real mark on the last console generation. For better or for worse, these are the games that had impact, spawned clones, influenced the industry, sold systems (and peripherals) and shaped the gaming landscape.

For the purposes of this discussion, only games released on the 360, PS3 and Wii were considered. And yes, we are aware that we left out “Bioshock” (we all make mistakes).

In studio: Razor, Lee, Candi & Alanah

Aired 8 January 2014

Zed Games Podcast – Episode 201

Subscribe to the Zed Games Podcast on iTunes

Episode 132 [Playlist + Podcast]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

<Listen Here>

Aired 22 August 2012

With Razor, Major Lee and Candy Payne

We review Sleeping Dogs, awesome Hong Kong open-world action!

We had a chat about our favourite all-time open world games.

And we announced our Radiothon prizes!  Subscribe before the 26th to win!  Details here.

 

1.SLEIGH BELLS – Riot Rhythm

2. JUDAS PRIEST – Electric Eye (Brutal Legend)

3. JEREMY SOULE – Secunda (Skyrim)

4. PEGGY LEE – Johnny Guitar (Fallout: New Vegas)

5. TOMOYA OHTANI –  Ulala Again (Space Channel 5)

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Gameplay Trailer is here!

2006: Hundreds of thousands of gamers disappear suddenly and without a trace.

Many months later, when the first of them emerge and hazily return to their workplaces, schools, and girlfriends, it is revealed that the cause of this phenomenon was Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. When the release of Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was announced for November 11 this year, many wondered whether our society could indeed survive another event like the Great Gamer Disappearance of ’06.

BEHOLD!