Game Review - WarTune

Score +3/-6
From the website: "Featuring three unique classes, single and multi-player dungeons, PvP arenas, competitive battlegrounds, thousand-player boss battles, a robust guild system, and… farming, Wartune combines some of your favorite features from multiple game genres. Whether you consider yourself a casual gamer or a hardcore veteran, Wartune will keep you coming back for more."

The English version of WarTune is presently a partially converted version of their Chinese version, Divine Comedy. It is fully playable, but the conversion is far from complete (e.g., no mounts).

WarTune generally revolves around building up your character with stats and equipment, and like most MMO games there's a lot of gear you can get and upgrade. However, this also means that most of your time will be spent staring at your city or game interfaces rather than getting out in the game world. The game world is very limited as it is and 2.5D -- basically they are token places to look for special loot.

WarTune presently has significant complaints about certain player-versus-player systems such as their Battlegrounds team PvP where many players aren't truly participating but using an automated "Away From Keyboard" mode. Gameplay may never be changed as this is apparently a port of a presumably tried and true MMO.

We played two Mages to L28 and L31 respectively. Over the next few days, we'll present some tips for playing the game. For now, here are our initial impressions.
+ No shortage of things to do. Your time online can be busy for hours and at all hours of the day. If you really want to spend that much time. If you actually like what you are doing in the game (essentially just inching your character forward to more gear and more power), then you may not mind the repetitiveness. You can even be logged in and not do anything, and your character could still be doing something (e.g., collecting Stamina points in the Altar of Ennoblement.)
- Incredible amount of time-consuming, boring, grinding. There are so many things to do each day, and the system encourages you to do almost all of them for maximum daily free stuff. However, it all takes time and none of it helps you advance in the storyline very much. If you play this game, don't expect to follow the story quickly past level 30 -- and that's not very much story at all. (On the other hand, if you keep playing WarTune, you're not really playing for the story. You're playing to make a powerful character for the Arena.)
+- Artwork is nice overall, but very limited in variety, and only special equipment shows up differently in-game.
+ Not a lot to learn and easy to learn it. You can get into the game right away.
- Ludicrously unbalanced in various ways. For example, some of your highest daily experience point awards can come from (and I am not kidding) playing flash games like Whack-A-Mouse (mouse pops up, you hit it with a leg of ham) or QTE exercises (correctly press a sequence of arrow keys). A single short flash game can easily earn you more than a Multiplayer Dungeon run.
- Experience and rewards for doing inane things. For example, one of the tasks just about everyone does every day is speak in World Chat, because this advances a "Devotion" counter that gives you free stuff when you reach various point totals. Often, people don't have anything useful to say and type garbage.
- Accounts cannot be transferred to another server, or deleted. You only get one account per server. This means you must start over with a new community in a different server if you want to restart your character. This also means that at any one time, there may be hundreds of abandoned accounts on your server, and it's hard to say who's who.
- Not a lot to see. There aren't a lot of locations to visit, and once you hit level 25-30, it gets harder to gather proper resources and upgraded troops to access new maps. And new map are the only thing that changes the scenery. If you are there for the PvP arena, that's a different story. You'll probably not even care about the story except that you have to go through those motions every day to get the bonus experience, gold, and goods that come with doing more things.

Oblivion Mod Review - Reclaiming Sancre Tor

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Reclaiming Sancre Tor (ver 1.0.5)
Score: +3/-3

Summary: Major Blades faction expansion.

Why Get This: You like long quests involving running around and the Blades.

This mod sounds very promising, but the early game is extremely boring and with poor design choices. Could not continue because of a quest bug (?) and in any case lost confidence in the modder, in much the same way as I gave up on Golden Crest.
+ Major expansion to the Sancre Tor area. Full town and extensive Blades HQ.
+ Good use of dialogue overall.
+ Some portions of quests interesting, if implausible.
- Time-wasting base layout. There's an incredible amount of running around to get to the barracks and the training area and outside. Seriously: Get a teleport mod (like Advanced Mark and Recall) if you play this mod..

-- Implausible and stupidly time-wasting quests at the start.

• During the escort quest, if you ask the captain to take the lead, he WALKS. It takes forever. You could instead scout the end location, choose to take the lead, and Fast Travel there. Duh. Why even bother making this a quest?
• Early training quests are OK in concept, but the actual things you need to do waste your valuable time as a person (not your character's in-game time -- the real time you spend playing the game). In other words, pacing and quest planning is terrible.
• You are asked to find skill books. Presumably other Blades before you have been tasked the same, so why can't you just ask them, instead of running around to find the correct villager to talk to, in order to get a referral to talk to someone else (and why the middleman?). And for one of the persons you need to find, it turns out he's a pathetic alcoholic who keeps rebuffing your attempts to speak with him. Why am I helping these losers when there are more critical, life-saving quests?
• Once you find the skill books, you are told to read them and then you are tested on them in sparring. Only in the first book does the sparring session have anything marginally related to the book you find. The rest -- I have no idea what I'm supposed to do after reading the texts. Apparently the sparring session just goes on and on until you gain a level somewhere (?), which can be an extremely long time if your skills are high and you use a levelling slowdown mod like the one built into Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul.

This mod would have been nice if it didn't depend so much on the Main Quest being finished first. It could have been split into two parts: The training part based out of Cloud Ruler Temple as soon as Jauffre offers you a position with the Blades. You are probably still a newbie at that point and the Blades training would have been very appropriate to the character's inexperience. You can then be summoned later to do the rest of the quests once Sancre Tor is recovered.

Oblivion Mod Review - Origin of the Mages Guild

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Origin of the Mages Guild (ver 7.3.1)
Score: +2/-2

Summary: Mages Guild expansion.

Why Get This: Expand the Mages Guild services.

Mostly what you will interact with is new rooms in the Mages Guild and Arcane University. There's a lot of stuff to see, but barely anything interesting to do. There is a vampire lair that is basically a long dungeon crawl ending in powerful loot and made irritating by lore dumps to justify its existence.
+ A LOT of cosmetic content for the Mages Guild, including a lot of common sense things like magic classes and more spell vendors in the Arcane University. Unfortunately, it is mostly cosmetic. Interesting to see but you may hardly use it.
+ Some nice common-sense things happen to the Mages Guild after you become Archmage, like re-opening the Bruma Mages Guild.
- Rather heavy-handed with the info/lore dumps. However, if you are a lore fan then you may find a lot of this rather interesting.
- Some of the quests after you become Archmage are inane -- like running around to find candidates for the Council of Mages. You are the Archmage. You are probably also the Champion of Cyrodiil. Why are you doing gofer work? Send a lackey! (You in fact do get an Assistant, but can you send her? No.) All the quests prior to being Archmage are far more interesting than any quest this mod offers.

Oblivion Mod Review - The Duelists

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - The Duelists (ver 0.96)
Score: +2/-2

Summary: One-on-one fights with high-level characters.

Why Get This: You like running into fights with tough characters.

This mod sprinkles characters throughout vanilla locations that can provoke or be provoked into duels.
+ Fights have some dialogue or scripting to them. Some are simple but others have a bit more story. The overall experience is that each is an encounter, rather than just another fight with a hostile NPC in the wilds.
+ Smooth integration into the game world. They generally blend into the general populace. If you've never played Oblivion before, you wouldn't even know it. Unfortunately, the duelists are meant for high to very high level characters and you are advised not to install this mod until much later. Most of the duels require talking to someone first, however.
- Uses some quest characters and intercepts their dialogue so that this mod's dialogue comes first. May or may not break quests. Chancellor Ocato referring to you as the Champion of Cyrodiil before you finish the Main Quest is probably the most obvious error here.
- Some fights are crazily overpowered, like a level 75 vampire. However, by level 15, if not 20+, you generally have a lot of weapon, spell, and potion options available to you and if you take time to assemble your resources, you are probably even more crazily overpowered. Still, this could have used levelling.

Oblivion Mod Review: Knights of the Nine: Revelation

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Knights of the Nine: Revelation (ver 1.1.5)
Score: +8/-0

Summary: Excellent story/quest mod. Lore friendly.

Why Get This: Great story with good action and pacing.

This mod greatly extends the Knights of the Nine DLC with an additional long adventure, a new and larger headquarters for the Knights of the Nine, and cosmetic options for the Crusader's Relics.
The summary of the story is that you get to relive the events that ultimately lead to the formation of the Knights of the Nine.
Needs a special uninstaller mod to remove from your game. Otherwise, some changes may screw things up.
++ Ambitious and interesting storyline.
++ Well-scripted and very interesting quests.
+ New, interesting worldspace.
+ Voiceovers.
+ Good pacing. Very little unnecessary action -- you are a hero, so you are assigned heroic things to do.
+ Good companion management. They have important roles to play in the story, but they don't get in the way of stuff that only you can do. You are always at the centre of the action.

Oblivion Mod Review - Vampire Hunting: Order of the Virtuous Blood

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Vampire Hunting - Order of the Virtuous Blood (ver 3.0)
Score: +4/-2

Summary: Dungeon crawl with story wrapper. Treasures and abilities as rewards. Great risk of vanilla Oblivion NPCs getting killed.

Why Get This: Kill Vampires for treasure and reward.

WARNING: Random vampire attacks in cities can kill off NPCs that don't have Essential status.
In general, vanilla Oblivion sets many NPCs to "Essential", especially if they are involved in the Main Quest. But not all of them are set this way, and they can be killed off at any time.
You might not miss much, or if they have already played their role you might not miss anything at all. However, in vanilla Oblivion, if you do every quest, you will have interacted with everyone and gone everywhere. Because NPCs can get killed by unimportant randomly generated vampires in towns, you risk breaking quests or not receiving certain quests.
It is best to have a savegame you can revert to before installing this mod.

+ This large mod is a sort of compilation of various vampire hunting quests. Tons of quests here.
+ Some interesting and not overpowered rewards, including Abilities. However, some of this involves Fortify Skill, which is treated by the game as a permanent skill increase when implemented as an Ability.
+ A lot of dialogue and backstory makes the missions more than just dungeon crawls, though not by much. Still, better than simply getting sent on a dungeon crawl.
+ Good effort to make the bosses different and interesting.
-- Huge risk of NPCs getting killed at random. You can avoid some of this by simply not going to town while playing this mod, but there's still no guarantee.

I recommend playing this mod, then uninstalling it. The best reward to keep is probably the Abilities. You can recreate them in a small mod of your own making using the construction set. If you do so, I recommend you make them Enchantments on clothing items assigned to no body part.

Oblivion Mod Review - Famous Battles of Cyrodiil

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Famous Battles of Cyrodiil (ver 1.0 Final)
Score: +1/-3

Summary: Combat scenarios with limited gear.

Why Get This: You want short battles with limited gear instead of your usual uber loadout.

The concept is interesting, but the scenarios fall far short (in part due to engine/scripting limitations), the story is nonsensical, and the ad copy is utter rubbish. "Save a doomed city from certain destruction at the hands of Mehrunes Dagon"? Uh, no. You don't even make it past the throne room.
+ Interesting lore-based concept. The missions would actually be interesting if they could be scripted better.
- Missions are implausible and play out in an uninteresting way.
- Badly thought out mission design. We'll talk about each mission below. WARNING: SPOILERS.
- Nonsense story that doesn't make sense. You see the diorama maker too...? It sounds like you want to make sense of what happened to Kvatch. Somewhere it becomes saving the model-maker's daughter who probably died there. Then magically he can transport you into miniature worlds. But he's just a toymaker for Azura's sake. Sheesh. Example: Reading a book about one of the famous battles of Cyrodiil leads you to imagine what it must have been like, then cut to the action as your "imagination".

Mission Critiques:
Mission 1: Commando squad infiltrates a facility to capture enemy commanders.

• As with all missions, you start stripped of your usual gear. There's nothing wrong with this, but REMEMBER TO UNEQUIP QUEST ITEMS. If you don't and they are forcibly unequipped, you will end up with permanent enchantments and will be unable to equip the item when it is returned to you.
• At the start of the mission, one of the squad members stealth-kills a sentry with a single firebolt. You are then placed in charge of the mission. Everyone is in Imperial Legion armor. This sets the tone for the mission: Stealth and stealth kills where necessary so the facility isn't alerted. However, if you play this mission at mid-low levels or higher, this mission becomes stupid (not hard, just stupid). Here's why:
• You can swap your gear for something quieter, but you can't tell your noisy, clanking, squadmates to stay behind. Invariably they will alert the enemy. For a stealth mission, none of them are properly equipped to be stealthy. Duh.
• This is supposed to be a stealth mission, but if the enemy has too high a Health for you to quickly take down, then you will end up in melee for possibly upwards of a minute while you and your squad hack down the enemy. Noisily. Why can't that unnamed soldier take point and drop everyone with his magical one-hit-kill firebolt? Duh. Instead we are left with a highly implausible stealth mission. It takes a very specialized character build to stealth-kill enemies once their health reaches a certain threshold. If you don't have an appropriate character, this mission will just end up being you and squad hacking one to three enemies to death in melee -- completely destroying the whole stealth-mission concept.
• You can't change anyone's gear, so it's a melee free for all with your squad mates. In the fast-paced combat of Oblivion, it is insanely easy to hit your allies, especially when they are all jammed in melee. Three hits and they turn on you. You must then kill them because they are not marked Essential (an Essential character goes unconscious and wakes up with hostility reset and no longer immediately hostile even if you've "killed" them dozens of times).

Mission 2: Follow a scout through the jungle to find the enemy

• You don't really get to choose to do anything here. It's linear. You look for the scout that's run ahead of you. You run through clumps of enemies that you must fight.
• You can speak with your allies, but they either say nothing or tell you to be stealthy. But they won't sneak along with you so they get found and you all have to fight.
• It is later revealed that the "purpose" of the mission is to teach you that alliances can't be counted on. We don't actually get to use that information, and in any case we just stumble into it.
• The enemy wears red, we wear blue. There was an opportunity for an in-disguise mission here, maybe to expose the traitor or find the enemy commander, but that wasn't used.

Mission 3: Rally troops to counterattack the enemy.

• It is later revealed that the "purpose" of this mission is to teach you to command troops. Except your "command" of them is to run petty errands for them. Duh.
• One of the missions involves dragging a corpse back. Due to how dragging works in Oblivion, this is easily the most tedious if not outright impossible mission.
• If you are stuck, use the console to resurrect the corpse. Go back to the quest giver and use moveto player on the now-living corpse to move them into place. Finally use kill on the resurrected soldier to turn him into a corpse again (i.e., kill him). He should be close enough to where he needs to be for you to get a quest update for retrieving his body.

Mission 4: Follow a necromancer to kill the Elder Council.

• The most boring mission. The necromancer is marked Essential and the other three skeletal minions (in my play-through) were level 14 and with just under 2,500 Health -- Yes, just under two thousand, five hundred Health points. You basically just let them handle everything.
• The "purpose" of this mission was to show you evil. It would be much more interesting if the Elder Council members actually begged for their lives and you had to choose a dialogue option to kill them.

Mission 5: Defend the throne room during the Daedra attack on Kvatch.

• You arrive in civilian clothes and no other gear. You're not even a soldier. But for some reason you are immediately promoted and given command. Duh.
• The most promising mission that ended up being the most disappointing because it's bugged: You have to give orders to 6 people: 5 soldiers and the Count of Kvatch. For once, it looked like you could set up a nice killzone and have NPCs obediently supporting you. But no...
• You only get to have 5 conversations with the soldiers. If you talk to one twice to try to change their orders, that still counts toward your total. After all 5, you can't talk to anyone else.
• They don't necessarily obey your orders. For example, the two archers always fall back.
• There are two lines: The front barricade near the door, and a second line nearer the centre of the room.
• Soldiers with only melee weapons in the first line immediately abandon their position and mix it up in melee, so they are now in the line of fire of yourself or anyone that might hope to be shooting. Duh.
• When the daedra come, the second line won't move. Archers and magi there are apparently too far away to detect the enemy and shoot. Duh.
• If you are actually good enough to survive the final wave and keep at least one of the NPCs alive, the game is stuck. Everyone needs to die in the final wave involving Dremora.

Oblivion Mod Review - Golden Crest

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - The Golden Crest - A Major Pirate Quest (ver 1.20a)
Score: +2/-5

Summary: Supposedly you play as a pirate. Supposedly.

Why Get This: Wasting time. Might be better later, but I didn't want to waste more time.

This mod initially starts out with some promise with some interesting quests, but quickly becomes awful. For a "pirate quest", you spend an inordinate amount of time on land doing quests that could have shown up in any other mod. There is even a quest where the questgiver clearly states that they wouldn't normally do that sort of task. Further, a couple of early quests involve so much wasted time that you are clearly taking a risk with the modder's design philosophy if you want to persist with this mod.
+ Some interesting quests and situations.
+ Good use of dialogue overall.
-- For a "pirate quest", you spend a lot of time on land. You do a lot of utterly un-pirate things, like set up a mining operation, hanging out in an inland pub, and looking for a bounty hunter deep in caves. Where the heck is the pirate stuff?
- When you first join the pirate crew, you are given a shirt and pants which looks like a lower-class labourer outfit. Except it's for sailors. And it's heavily ENCHANTED. WTF? And none of the other crew are using it. Hmm... "Inexplicable" and "implausible" are words that come to mind.
- Incredible time-wasting linear quest that is not optional and not very pirate-like at all -- "A Sister's Love". There is a journal entry that reads:

• "I found a list of people who have bounties on their heads. It seems that Mal gro-Shick [the person you need to find] is a bounty hunter, a good one judging by the names and locations on this list. If I want to track down Mal I will have to follow the list and go from cave to cave. When I find somebody from this list that still draws breath I should wait at that location for Mal to arrive. The first location on this list is..."

Naturally, you go through a couple of duds -- already-dead persons -- but not until you've gone through several monster-infested dungeons. All to come to a dead end. WTF? If I wanted to do aimless monster-killing in vanilla Oblivion dungeons, I don't have to download a mod to do that.

- More incredible time-wasting with another non-optional quest: Quest, "The Straight Arrow". The quest update pop-up reads:

• "I've tried speaking to a few of the regulars but they refused to talk to me. Vitisha was right, they dislike talking to passing travelers. I need to make them realize that I want to become one of them, a regular. I have a plan that just might work. I should come round every day for the next few days and spend a few hours here, without leaving through the door until those few hours are up. Hopefully, after a few days they might notice me and start talking with me. [Pressing T and waiting or sleeping doesn't count]."

So basically, the modder wants you to walk your character into the inn, then leave Oblivion running and idle for god knows how long while you, the player (not, not your character) go do something *other* than watch the screen while your character does absolutely nothing interesting. WTF?
When this quest showed up, I uninstalled the mod. I can't trust a modder who gives you such ludicrous quests. Who knows what other rubbish you'll need to do later even if you waste your time jumping through this hoop.

Oblivion Mod Review - Sexy Maid of Chorrol

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Sexy Maid of Chorrol (ver 3.2 and crossover with Claudia's Little Secret and HentaiMania 2)
Score: +3/-1

Summary: Short quests, voyeuristic adult content, home expansion.

Why Get This: Humourous quests, masturbating maids for your home in Chorrol (no, really). Significant crossover if you also have Claudia's Little Secret installed.

This is a mod that feels larger and longer than it really is. For actual pornographic interaction, Sexy Maid of falls short of the newer and more sophisticated sexual-content resources and mods but at least there's a story here.

• Definitely get Growlf's Universal Skeleton NIF if you don't already have it. Otherwise there might be issues with stretched textures.
• The basement expansion to your Chorrol home sits in the same place as the teleporter for the Basement for COBL.

+ Humour to the quests.The humour is weak but doesn't sink to cheap and tasteless despite this being a mod with adult content.
+ More than just having quests that don't emphasize killing, the quests here actually immerse you more in the mod and give you more backstory. Too bad there are very few quests.
+ You can choose one a custom race for the maids instead of being stuck with the somewhat ugly Oblivion defaults.
- Unless you get the crossover quest with Claudia's Little Secret, there's no sex with the maids. The crossover quest there is somewhat boring, though, and you can more easily get sexual interaction just about everywhere with something like the basic Lovers Biko. Even with the crossover, you need to get the maid to follow you through a magic portal, then take a long walk to a pedestal, and press the button there -- it's tedious. With Lovers Biko, you just press the "L" key a couple of times.

The additional content from the Claudia's Little Secret crossover also includes a long story filled with sexual encounters. Pornography being so varied, some of this content could become too intense / tasteless / vulgar for you. Fortunately, the story is told in stages, so you can abort at any time and choose not to hear the rest.

Oblivion Mod Review - Giskard's Tales from the Tomb

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Giskard's Tales from the Tomb (ver 1.3)
Score: +2/-1

Summary: Dungeon crawl, character home, companions.

Why Get This: Bug-free dungeon crawl.

This mod starts off with promise of an intriguing experience but ends disappointingly as a pretty basic dungeon crawl. There are elements here that suggest it could have been much more interesting, but weren't followed up on. For example, there is a journal that talks about having to decapitate someone to prevent them from rising as undead, but you don't actually have to do that here. Would have made for a more interesting experience than a straight dungeon crawl with basically two different types of enemy grunts.

The quest starts out with historical Elder Scrolls lore-based data, but that turned out to be disappointingly token as well. At some point, just before you get access to the Reman Fort you are to investigate, you are basically handed the whole story. Whatever sense of mystery that was built up in the early stages of the quest is disappointingly dropped.

The story didn't entirely add up for me, but I would be more concerned about it if it hadn't been so token.
There's also what appears to be a very separate and unrelated Dwemer underground facility nearby. More dungeon crawling, only more aimless. Also FPS intensive on the second level.

The dungeons are not levelled. Level 50 bosses.
+ Player home where you can choose the population to a certain extent. Mostly you end up with a choice of companions and a convenient way to outfit them. If you want companions without too much overhead, then you can try this mod.
+ Decent voiceovers.
- The staff you get at the fort could use some cosmetic work. Even the female altmer dancer you get has the crude an ugly squarish face that comes with Oblivion. Sheesh. This just makes you look elsewhere for companions, and there's no shortage of player homes.

There tends to be integration from other projects, so there's the possibility that this mod will receive an expansion or crossover content. For now, however, there's not much here to see or that you can't get better elsewhere.

Oblivion Mod Review - Heart of the Dead

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - The Heart of the Dead (ver 6.5)
Score: +8/-1

Summary: Excellent quest and encounters. Possible companion afterwards.

Why Get This: Good quest, interesting puzzles and environments.

This is a long adventure that is DLC-quality in story and scripting.
++ Very good voiceovers, with the exception of the Kat character, which had to use pieced-together voiceovers and therefore sounds kind of odd.
+- Companions that actually do things in the story instead of just following you around. Dialog and romance is very token, however (although the romance itself can play a part in the story if you choose to pursue it; and helps decide which companion you end up with after the story).
+ Some very interesting locations, especially at the start of the story. More dungeon-crawl later on, however.
+ Some very interesting scripted events and animations that enhance the experience instead of just being vanity/show-off scripting exercises.
+ A really decent story with good plot points. No huge text dump of information -- good mix of story progress combined with dialogues, clues and other getting-background-information events gives this quest good pacing alongside giving you backstory to better realize the scope of your involement.
+ A really good escalating ending that takes you step by step to a more dramatic ending each time you think you're at "the end".
+ Some quests have various alternative solutions and you aren't always following a very narrowly defined sequence of events to advance the story. This avoids a common frustration with some mods, especially those that combine do-my-specific-sequence-of-events with no-quest-markers.

Oblivion Mod Review - Bartholm

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Bartholm (ver 7.0)
Score: +3/-3

Summary: Worldspace and a lot of quests.

Why Get This: Quests.

There's a lot of content and quests here, but not a lot of it is really worth playing through.
+ New town. Slartholm isn't that interesting, however.
+ A lot of quests for characters of almost all levels. Only a couple of good ones, however. Probably only the Foreign Legion quest to clear the Moarmer (some good fight setups here) and the murder mystery on Slartholm are worthwhile. Even then, the murder quest is quite flawed and could have used more dialogue to enhance the investigative aspects.
+- Voiceovers. Unfortunately, mostly they are either horrid, annoying, or revoiced lines from vanilla Oblivion.
-- Shamelessly cloned content from vanilla Oblivion, such as the Bartholm Arena, where not only the layout and people are obviously only cosmetically changed if at all, but the sequence of fights is more or less cloned as well, down to the fighter with the magic dagger, the multi-character fights, and the mage with protection from magic. Plus the badly voiced arena announcer. Don't waste your time here.

Oblivion Mod Review - Viconia DeVir - The Underdark Saga

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Viconia DeVir - The Underdark Saga (ver 1.2)
Score: +2/-9

Summary: Companion. Buggy linear quest.

Why Get This: Companion.

This mod somehow hopes to recapture the interest and engagement in the character from the classic Baldur's Gate games, which included a long romance with the dark elf Viconia in Baldur's Gate II.
One of the big problems with this premise is that there is much less investment in companions in Oblivion. In Baldur's Gate II, you could control your companions as if they were a character completely under your control. There was much more tactical control and strategic options, especially with a spellcaster like Viconia.
In Oblivion, companions are typically more troublesome than useful. They typically blow your stealth, get lost, fall off cliffs, etc... They are generally useful only as distractions while you do the killing because the Oblivion AI automatically prioritizes them higher as threats. For this reason, companions are generally set to "Essential" (i.e., not killable, but you can knock them unconscious temporarily), and most companion mods will have a teleport-to-player feature to help them catch up because no creature other than the player can jump to negotiate obstacles, and because they get lost or stuck so easily.
For all these reasons, companions are generally more of a hassle than they're worth.
+ You get a fairly advanced companion with her own horse and straightforward control options through dialogue.
+- Good voiceovers. But they rarely match the subtitles. WTF?
- Part 2 involves a lot of events where the scripting is apparently very fragile. You have to do things in a very precise way sometimes or you will have broken the quest and cannot continue. A walkthrough is pretty much necessary to know when you've accidentally done something wrong.
- Some quests are very easily broken. For example, there are three entrances to the Underdark, but you MUST use the one entrance where the modder has scripted all events to occur. Only there's really nothing telling you that you must do it that way. You can't skip those events, but the story doesn't move to a chokepoint where you have to encounter them.
- She keeps sheathing her weapon and walking away in the middle of combat. The author admits that this has been fixed as much as possible, so don't expect this issue will ever go away.
- It takes about two months worth of linear dialog -- you get one talk with Viconia per day to advance the romance -- to get to the end of part 1. It's also really easy to see what you're supposed to say. You can "roleplay" and give her a snarky response, but that just penalizes you by forcing you to wait another day before getting closer to the quest events that aren't just a talk. Obviously you are playing along with the romance, otherwise you wouldn't bother downloading this mod; but it's really rather boring because we generally haven't built up the same attachment to the character.
In Baldur's Gate II, you really wanted Viconia around because she's powerful and useful -- and she was that way because you could closely control her and use her tactically. Also, there was a balancing act between her, Jaheira, and Aerie since pursing a romance with any one could alienate the others and cause you to lose them from your party -- the possible presence of the other two, and your investment in them, complicated and increased the engagement with Viconia.
In this Oblivion mod, there's just Viconia. And she (and companions in general) are so irritating to have around that you will probably end up not caring if she falls in combat because she's not killable. Besides, if she does fall in combat, you then don't have to worry about restraining yourself when using area effect magic.
TIP: Get a bullet-time mod like the one included in GQ Conveniences when using companions to help you avoid hitting them.
- Part 2 is incredibly boring because of all the running around through vast areas of the Underdark. It just breaks up the momentum/pacing of the story. Everyone and their pet spider is teleporting except you -- Can't they give you a magic item or something? Or get something like the recall-to-shrine spells from Morrowind. The Arcane University can research a Wish spell for Viconia, but they can't research a teleport? Plus, navigation is hard enough in the Underdark. Why can't Viconia actually help you find your way with waypoint quest markers or something like that?
- Finale of part 2 turned out to be broken. Lolth wouldn't show up. I just gave up at that point. You can try a third-party mod that fixes it that was written over a year ago for the merged story version of the mod, or try the separate files version.
- There are a lot of dialogs, but they are very contrived and lame. Some quests are extremely lame, such as the rescue-the-priestess mission where you basically just let Viconia do the talking. The priestess that needs to be rescued then appears out of nowhere and promptly teleports out to safety (!). You then have to leave by killing the single guard in the small prison -- the same guard you were warned against killing because something might look fishy. WTF?
- For the final fight, you are given a supersword scripted to kill 3200 Health spiders (that's not a typo) in the temple of Lolth in one hit. Uh... Why not just reduce the health of the spiders? Especially when your supersword won't work the same way on the priestesses or the smaller spiders with less than a tenth of that Health score.

Oblivion Mod Review - The Underdark

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Underdark (ver 1.1)
Score: +2/-5

Summary: Very large worldspace. Annoying to navigate.

Why Get This: Run around a lot. Kill things sometimes.

This is a large and promising mod that is obviously meant to give you a Dungeons & Dragons Underdark experience. However, the overall difficulties in actually finding anywhere interesting to go make this mod very annoying and a time-waster.
+ Huge worldspace to explore.
+ Quite a few quests that don't emphasize killing or simple "Fedex" style delivery/fetching.
- Irritating autoload feature for area transitions. This makes actually finding area transitions hard as area transitions in vanilla Oblivion are marked with doors on your map.
- No fast-travel map markers, which are important to locate landmarks and to avoid tedious running around. And this mod uses large worldspaces with a heck of a lot of running around.

- Ridiculous Health inflation on creatures. Driders, for example have 85 health per level. A mere level 10 drider therefore has 850! Nowhere as bad as Deathtrap Dungeon's thousands-of-Health, though.
- Vast, repetitive landscapes with not a lot of interesting sites.

- Mostly all that there is to do is kill. Pretty much everything is hostile to you.

Oblivion Mod Review - BladeSong

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - BladeSong (ver 1)
Score: +2/-0

Summary: Romance mod, companion mod. Short quest.

Why Get This: Very nicely done short quest.

If you can get past severe disappointment after the extremely misleading mod advert that promises a heck of a lot more than the mod delivers ("Take part in an epic adventure that slowly unfolds over time and journey across the lands of Cyrodiil to discover new locations and entirely new distant lands.") then this is a nice short adventure. You also have to buy in to the romance part to really make it work.

Read the uninstallation instructions carefully! This mod significantly changes vanilla Oblivions NPCs in Aleswell and replaces them with dead clones. There is a script included to undo changes.
+ Good pacing with some nice plot twists. A bit heavy-handed on the romance, though. Could have used more quests to build attachment to the key NPC.
+ Nicely done story with interesting quests that aren't focussed on just killing X to get Y (except the war at the end).

Oblivion Mod Review - Skyrim Ruins, Tombs, and Creatures in Bruma

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Skyrim Ruins, Tombs, and Creatures in Bruma (ver 1)
Score: +0/-2

Summary: Extra dungeons and tiny worldspaces to explore.

Why Get This: Kill things that looks like they came from TES V: Skyrim.

There is no quest to tie in anything here. You need to find the entrances to reach the small worldspaces. There's some attempt to make the worldspaces different and interesting from the rest of Cyrodiil, but there's not much to see. It doesn't really add anything to your game beyond some cosmetically different gear.
-- Hairless mammoths that skip around like deer. No, I'm not kidding.

Oblivion Mod Review - Gates to Aesgaard Episode 1

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Gates To Aesgaard Episode 1 (ver 1)
Score: +1/-3

Summary: Linear dungeon crawl with "horror" atmosphere.

Why Get This: Dungeon crawl. Some interesting visuals.

This starts out as a promising story-driven mod with "horror" atmosphere, but quickly becomes boring and aimless. Initially you are treated to some backstory, but once you find Ashen Rose's corpse and her final journal update, the gameplay switches to just finding keys in small locations. The "horror" theme drops off sharply and you end up in mundane locations fighting undead.
+ Good attempt at "horror" theme locations very early in the mod.
- Too much immersion/atmosphere breaking. For example, there's an illogical-nightmare feel to the early locations which might have stood on its own just fine, except it was sadly made implausible by Ashen Rose's journal entries which suggest that the location has occupants and purpose -- some method to the madness, as it were. This itself is hinted at by some of the locations you can access (such as a large dining room / throne room). However, there is no cohesion to the place, no sense of purpose. Even the characters you encounter there are simply standing around doing nothing except waiting to be encountered so they can be hostile.
Another example: There's a portal that is labelled as a location 800 years in the past. I'm supposed to know this information? How? Once I'm through the portal, there's nothing obvious to tell me the location is 800 years in the past.
- Boring and aimless once the story elements disappear. Just another dungeon crawl. Going around killing things does not necessarily make a good mod. There's no shortage of things to kill everywhere in Tamriel in vanilla locations and there are far more interesting dungeon crawls around. The enemies here are either vanilla (skeletons, zombies, ghosts, wraiths) or just cosmetically different regular creatures (mages and fighters with a custom head model).
- Implausible clumps of supplies like several healing potions planted right before the exit door. Couldn't they have distributed these more? Or done something else less in-your-face, such as provide alchemy ingredients and apparatus strewn about over several early levels?

Oblivion Mod Review - Cybiades

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Mod Review - Daggerfall Memories - Cybiades (ver 2.1)
Score: +2/-4

Summary: Dungeon crawl. Somewhat interesting locations. Looks horrible.

Why Get This: Kill things.

This mod would be a lot better if it didn't look so ugly and wasn't so irritating to play. Basically a linear kill-things-to-get-out dungeon crawl. NOT lore friendly, and a ridiculous attempt by the modder to justify it with token reference to characters and events from Elder Scrolls games.
+- Has voiceovers, which is typically a plus since it's extra effort to add atmosphere and immersion. However, the recording quality and tone here is extremely annoying that I wished they hadn't done any at all.
+- Interesting dungeon concepts in the second part, but made irritating to play because of the ugly landscape and dungeon design. Garish colours and primitive-looking dungeon layouts that may be "designed" to look like a very old 3D game, but just looks horrid now (and why would you want to play something that looks so primitive?). The words that come to mind are "cartoony" and "LEGO".
- It's boring. Despite the interesting dungeon layout, essentially the gameplay is linear and predictable. The fights are predictable and nothing really novel, especially if you are running Martigen's Monster Mod. It boils down to just arenas with fights.
- Too much boring running around through vast, empty spaces with nothing to do. Also, to trigger the second stage (the solo dungeon) you have to leave the island, come back, leave AGAIN, then come back. And each time you do a heck of a lot of running around. Duh.

Fallout New Vegas Mod Review: New Vegas Bounties

Fallout: New Vegas Mod Review - New Vegas Bounties - Part I (ver 1.3) and Part II (ver 1.25)
Alternate download links: Part I, Part II

Score: +7/-1

Summary: Someone gives you missions to kill bad guys for money.

Why Get This: The writing / story.

At its most basic, New Vegas Bounties involves you being a bounty hunter -- you go and capture (but mostly kill) bad guys for money. However, there are story threads that bind everything together or at least give you a sense of a longer quest.
+ Story for each bounty. This may not seem to be a big deal, but when the writing is good, it really adds to the overall experience. New Vegas Bounties doesn't simply give you text dumps, but more like text snippets that help you add things up. Each bounty has a bit of a story about why they are criminals, and there are sometimes notes / communications here and there to bring things alive and to give you a sense of a world that's alive and active beyond your own actions.
+ Foreshadowing. This is related to having a good story, but also ties in to there being a sense of a big picture story around your otherwise pointless kill missions. There is a reason why foreshadowing is a literary device -- it whets the appetite, sets up anticipation or trepidation. It's used somewhat in Part I (because that is a linear quest), and to much better effect in Part II.
++- Encounters. You get genuine "encounters" here, which might be dialogue with the bad guy, specific tasks to do (such as crippling them to force surrender), or combat setups that make it more interesting than simply sneaking up and sniping everyone from far away. Although these are often scripted cheats where you read a note and bad guys magically appear all around (used way too often in part 2, hence the point taken off), it does break up the monotony and tries to counter the whole stealth-and-snipe combat cure-all in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas.
+ Voiceovers. Any attempt at this tends to immediately add more atmosphere and immersion.
++ Interesting side quests. There's a good range of these if you can find them, such as a search for a hidden cache of legion gold, or telling an old man what became of his kidnapped daughter. Plus for dialogue-resolved quests, there are often several options or different outcomes.

Fallout New Vegas Mod Review - New Vegas Enhanced Content

Fallout: New Vegas Mod Review - New Vegas Enhanced Content (ver 3.0)

Score: +1/-3

Summary: Mod compilation.

Why Get This: One stop shop for a mash-up of various mods.

New Vegas Enhanced Content (NVEC) is a mod compilation. There are various components, mostly imported directly and most of which you can get and apply separately. They key separate components are:

• Cosmetic enhancements - Mostly improvements to the appearance of NPCs. Optional stat and inventory changes.
• Performance enhancement - Removes unessential static items, thereby reducing computing load and improving performance.
• Error fixes - Most very minor, but some quite significant.

The rest of the mod is a compilation of mods. You can see the list here.

+ It's a big convenience.
- Not well curated. You get quantity but sacrifice quality. Some mods, such as Snowglobe Perks and Unique Items and Collectibles offer bonuses that are okay on their own, but combined can be unbalancing or troublesome. For example, between the two, you can get a huge movement speed boost (about +30%). On its own, this isn't a huge problem and can be a convenience in crossing long distances. The problem is that the game engine can't really keep up properly. run too fast in an exterior and you will probably see the terrain hasn't caught up in loading and processing, and you're walking on terrain textured as if it were distant terrain. And there's no telling how much game information the game engine has NOT loaded. Also, see  the screenshot below. Some mods are added that not only don't work properly but have unnecessary profanity. (The text in the upper left corner reads, "You must equip a blade before using the Grinding Wheel stupid fuck.")



- Not well documented. You need to sift through all the mods separately to find out what's included and in some cases, how to activate it.

- Not balanced. There's just no thought to some of the inclusions, which may be those that the mod-compiler has personally added (instead of being drawn from a mod). For example, near the start of the game, you can easily pick up a 9mm handgun that has the high fire rate of a pistol, uses cheap and plentiful ammunition, has a damage splash radius, very low spread (meaning high accuracy for placed shots), AND does damage on par with an anti-materiel rifle. Even at a beginning Guns skill, you can one-shot a lot of enemies by hitting them in the head.

Helpful Tips
If you are handy with the GECK, you can selectively disable features. Otherwise you're stuck with an all-or-nothing. You can use the Console to remove some perks you don't like, but that's the extent of what you can do to remove content.

If you're not that good with the GECK and/or don't mind spending the time, I recommend you instead look through the included mods separately and add what you want on your own. Do this if you only want a few of the features you found in NVEC.

A basic way to remove content with the GECK is to first find out what the content looks like in the game file. In the GECK, instead of loading the file, use the "Details" button to look at a listing of every entry in the mod.
If you highlight an entry and press [DEL], it will modify the file by flagging that entry as "Ignore". It is NOT deleted unless you load the file. But the game won't load it from the mod either. In this way, you can turn content on and off.
To help you find out what to delete, you can download the mod that was integrated by looking up the list here. Use the GECK Details function to look through that mod, then find it in NVEC and disable it. Make a backup in case things get messed up.

If a perk gets added that you don't want, you can look up the FormID and use the removeperk console command instead.