What I'm Playing Mondays: Skyrim

So I'm working on picking a couple of days to do themed post and this is my first foray into this experiment. Hopefully this will spurn me to have more text in my blog since it seems to be mostly mobile pics and book reviews as of late. My first themed post I thought of is "What I'm Playing Mondays" (as you might have guessed by the title of this post).  Most of my videogaming happens on the weekends so I figure that monday might be a good day to do a geeky post about whatever games I played over the past weekend.  Since I don't know how this experiment will go, I'm not going to bother making another category for it, and Geeky Stuff is probably fitting enough for the time being ;-) So the game I've been playing recently is Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I was lucky enough to get this from GameFly not too long after it came out.  I had heard a lot about it, but had to admit that I was a bit wary after I heard it came from Bethesda.  Bethesda is the same studio that released FallOut 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, two of the buggiest games have ever played (to the point of completely locking up my PS3 every hour or so).  Luckily, I have had no issues with Skyrim so hopefully Bethesday decided to start doing some testing on their games before releasing them into the wild. One of the prominent things I heard about this game could be summed up in the alternate title "Skyrim: Life sucker".  I can definitely understand this after playing for a bit.  Pairing such an expansive land with so many details (e.g. most books you find have at least a few pages of actual text, most completely irrelevant to your quests) definitely gives the player tons to do / fiddle with / waste time on.  It is all too easy to start messing with your alchemy station (to make potions/poisons) or cooking pot (yes, you can make a slew of different recipes) and realize you just spent half an hour making venison stew or some potion that does half of what the potions you already had did. I haven't played too long, but I've already been amazed with the number of paths down which you can take your character.  You have a ridiculous number of perks and skills that you can choose to enhance and there are random changes that you discover during your quests (e.g. my character just recently became a werewolf!).  I have been spending most of my time with myriad side quests (as I like to do so I am better equipped for the main quests) and have been developing quite the little archer/mage.  I am not yet sure whether I prefer it to the Dragon Age series, but it is definitely looking to give it a run for its money. Now to see if "What I'm Playing Mondays" get bogged down with multiple Skyrim updates over the next few weeks, haha.