Unretrofied for you: Retro City Rampage

Retro is all the rage these days. Sorta. It's getting to the point where it's losing any meaning because people forget to distinguish between genuine throwbacks and any game with pixelated graphics. For instance, as far as I'm concerned: Cave Story is retro; Super Meat Boy is not. La-Mulana is retro; Retro City Rampage is not. The biggest giveaways are modernized control and balance settings, in-your-brain's-face story presentation, cars, general lack of concept. As usual, we need a definition to get to the core of the issue. "Retro" can mean a lot of things to different people - clearly whoever titled Retro City Rampage doesn't define it the same way I do. I'm not saying Vblank's game is a failure to achieve its objective, just that the developers probably have some childish, pathetic, and completely wrong understanding of the term, and probably roger small mammals, burn Christmas cards, and drive fifteen miles under the speed limit FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER.

Back from my IRL barf break (how many times do you get to read a post where the author has to pause to vomit? That, my friends, is deadication). The dic' definition gives us nothing, simply that "retro" means "related to the past"- that doesn't tell us anything about function. I of course consider myself a budding dictionary, so face your demise:

retro (word, adjective): evocative of a specific time period or work.

Seems lazy, is lazy! At least it leaves plenty of room for both intentional and unintentional retrofication.

See the tiny blob? Okay, that's you. Now see the other tiny blobs? Okay, those are bad guys. Now see the other tiny blobs? Okay, those are civilians. Why is this game so much uglier than actual NES games?

Let's talk bad before good. Boy I hate Retro City Rampage. I'm here to admit to you that of course I only played the demo, because I would never put down cash for something so... well... stupid. RCR strikes me as moronic straight from the concept. "What if Grand Theft Auto was 2D and top-down?" [oh wait, it already was! It's called Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2]. So, well then it's kind of a remake/revival of those early crime-driving games? But instead of remaking it in the original visual style, or modern "technology-graphics", Vblank went with 8-bit micro-sprite RTS graphics. Huh? Then, when my brain is already completely lost, you throw me the twist that it's also a cover-shooter? Since open-car-world-games are so widespread today, and nothing screams "2012" like cover shooting, all RCR has done is arbitrarily amalgamate the safest and blandest forms of gameplay with the safest and blandest form of "retro" visuals, while evoking no classic era whatsoever.

God, like, if GTA 1 and 2 had never existed, I could be so much nicer, or at least understand a little bit what this game is going for. But instead it's as bizarre as someone sitting down to Super Mario Galaxy and saying "I wonder what this game would be like on the SNES".

And then as a result producing Plok.

In particular the game falls prey to all-too-common retro condescension - it's not revering or even evoking past days so much as mocking them. "Look at all the stuff they didn't have back then!" This (understandably) rubs me the wrong way, because developers in the '80s and '90s were just as smart (if not cleverer) than those today. See yesterday's bit on Panorama Cotton. Is GTA really a great example of where games have come in all these years? Seems the opposite - emblematic of the missteps and the taken-for-granteds. The notion that RCR would blow people's minds in 1987 is just kinda embarrassing. It's not like we didn't have NARC.

That was actually a tangent, not my main point. Retro City Rampage wasn't even in my outline for this post, I was planning to discuss Mutant Mudds, Rocket Knight, and Black Knight Sword. I've said before that I'd rather use the blog for conversation on those games I love, not shit on whatever doesn't work for me. Today I've Yahtzee'd, but tomorrow I'll return / to stand within the pleasure dome, decreed by Kublai Khan

Try this game: Cottoning to Cotton

You're forgiven if you've never heard of Cotton. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Go now in love and peace to serve the SNES. Amen.

Does the word "cotton" meaning "to come to like" come from a mispronunciation of "caught on"? Perhaps with some kind of Boston accent? Seems wildly unlikely. Etymologists, write in.

Seriously, Ad Caption Guy???

Cotton is a pretty tiny series of shoot-'em-ups (shmups) spanning from the early '90s to about '03. The chronology is so convoluted that I'm just going to refer you to Hardcore Gaming 101, though suffice to say that there are only two primary series entries: Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams and Cotton 2: Magical Night Dreams, both of which debuted in arcades and were subsequently ported/arranged*/spun-off onto every major Japanese console of the time. Only a single - hilariously chosen - release ever made it to the West: the Turbo-CD port of the first arcade game. The series graced every console from the Famicom (NES) to the Dreamcast, yet the publishers chose the Turbo-CD version to bring to North America? Did you know that less than three (3!) Turbo-CD units were owned by live humans in its active lifespan? Did you know that if there were as many humans as there are molecules in the universe, and were the Turbo-CD's sales numbers adjusted proportionally, it still would have moved less units than the N64 did with Earth's existent population of ~6 billion? Did you know that science considers it a statistical impossibility to own a Turbo-CD? 

Let me give you a quick sense of Cotton's raison d'raisin before I send you off to your local ROM conservatory to legally enjoy the most fulfilling of life's pleasures, trying out new games. The name itself, Cotton, refers to a lil' witch gal who serves as the series' recurring protagonist, perennially accompanied by one of anime's other great tropes: a completely inappropriately clothed buxom fairy. This bipolar protagonistic pairing sets the scene for a veritable Lethal Weapon of tales, though Cotton ought to be exclaiming "I'm too young for this shit!" in place of Danny Glover's filmic line. Generally the series is undeservedly lumped into that deservedly unpopular subgenre, the cute-'em-up**, but aside from Cotton herself, the game's fantasy setting is relatively dark and serious. Check out these screenshots and videos if you don't believe me.

I've experimented with everything in the series short of Dreamcast's Rainbow Cotton and found that you can basically get the full experience through just three games, which I'll describe in detail... after these messages!

A screen from the surprisingly dark arcade original

Maerchen Adventure Cotton 100% (Super Famicom):

For those just being introduced to the shmup, a fast-paced and accessible experience

Though the sprites have strangely become cutesy, this is otherwise what Cotton is all about. A bare-bones level up / down system, one-hit deaths, bouncy power-ups a la Twinbee, and frequent boss battles. The pared down mechanics and forgiving balance make 100% a great place to start for anyone new to the genre. It's not too tough, keeps the scenery changing, and provides a pretty comprehensible scoring mechanic that is instructively tied to power-ups. If Gradius and R-Type scared the shit out of you and Fantasy Zone was a yawn, don't give up on the genre yet - MAC100% may be just the game you're looking for. And PLEASE do me a favor and appreciate the laziest title screen music ever.

Magical Night Dreams: Cotton 2 (Arcade):

For longtime shmup fans looking for a new experience, this is the Mischief Makers of the genre

Cotton 2 is kinda silly for a few reasons - it's definitely one of those games that you may not 'get' after dicking around for ten minutes, then you'll go to Youtube to check out a walkthrough and say, "OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH". Now that you can skip that step, we can talk about how the entire game revolves around grabbing enemies and tossing them out to ricochet off each other around the planet. In fact, the need to keep alive your makeshift projectiles (by shooting them, re-grabbing them, or making sure they keep hitting enemies) calls to mind pinball - turn the game on its side and turn off the scrolling, and you'd be damn close. It's a neat twist, if not necessarily brilliant, and I certainly can't think of another game that plays the same.

Panorama Cotton (Mega Drive):

For, well, anyone with even the slightest appetite for oldies. If you've enjoyed a single 16-bit game since 1994, you owe it to yourself to track this down

Here's the game that gives the whole series a reason to exist, and as the king of irony (Jeff Daniels) would have it, it's the most unique in terms of gameplay.  Panorama Cotton belongs to the tragically small genre of 3D rail-shmups (Star Fox, Space Harrier, and the present day Kid Icarus: Uprising and Sin & Punishment). Fans will get a kick out of seeing all the ideas of the series adapted into this presentation - this is still very much Cotton. Newcomers won't care about that, but have to be impressed by the extent to which the game pushes not just the Genesis, but 2D sprite games altogether. Beautiful aesthetics are about seeing a vision and pushing it through with utter disregard for technical limitation; while Panorama's choppy framerate and jaggies might turn off a blind snob, it's hard not to be blown away when the game takes you swooping over a cliff and down through a waterfall, or up into the skies above the clouds. This is the antithesis of Star Fox, and everything classics are made of. A complete fuck you to what "can" be accomplished.

So go play a Cotton game. Not because you're guaranteed to like it, but because I'm sure at least one of them is like nothing you've played before.

*arrange: a term relating almost exclusively to shmups, an arrange is like a remix of a song - same core elements with a new twist, be it new controls, score mechanics, or power-ups. Think Super Street Fighter II.

**cute-em-up: a shoot-em-up with "cutesy" style graphics and a comic tone, usually with very simple mechanics, large sprites, a slow pace, etc. See: Parodius.

Tabletop, for a change

Some of us around here don't just waste our lives in front of the ol' boobtube. We actually interact with other people. Not on like dates, or some other cool thing like that, but playing some Pathfinder (or other DnD varient) in costume, of course (not really in costume).

So anyway, I was with my buddies, dressed as a warlock, the other day Dungeon Mastering a one-off that I had authored. I think it went fairly well, so I figured I might as well post it for prosperity on the blog so that someday, someone much smarter than I can parse through my poorly written and sparse notes on the thing to make it happen again. Here it goes.

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Opening:

In its most recent, but not unfamiliar, prospect of political strife, the nation of Samath has seen two of its Senators become embroiled in an intensifying cold war. Issues of labor reform and taxation have led Senator Alger and Senator Tydings to both make threats to the others lands, prosperity and personal safety.

You find yourself on the road traveling about a half-days march towards the castle-city of Mycroft. Your party congregated piece by piece on the road as you all made your way to the famous Lammas Festival located just outside of the city, on the grounds kept specifically for its celebration, once every 4 years. Your group simply found it easier to travel together as you happened by chance on the road, that is to say you are essentially strangers, though you have gotten on well whilst traveling. You are arriving on the first day of the festival, which lasts but one day. The festival is unique in its competitive nature. It is comprised of a few main events as well as a number of less complex games. Not coincidentally, the festival’s most famous event is a team-based race, filled with obstacles and other teams attempting to get to the finish first. The teams are comprised of, at most, 4 people, but teams of fewer are allowed. The majority of festival goers are merely coming to watch the event as well as participate in the smaller games, there are, on average, only 5 teams who will enter the team race, and they are often members of the city guard or the personal house guards of Senator Tydings or lesser leaders.

Pre-game notes:

The central idea for the world is it being medieval, obviously, but with modern America's political problems and some trappings of its political system. I think I just imagined the fiscal cliff issue being settled by state militias led by Senators and went from there.

The twist of the campaign is that two party members are being paid to investigate the group, in order to protect Alger. Two party members are being paid to kill him. Each pair know that they should be working together to complete their goal, but they are not aware that the other pair are anything more than festival-goers. Each are told to keep this assignment as entirely on the dl as possible and have only been informed that they will receive expansive financial compensation as well as a title if they are either a major factor in foiling the plot, or killing him.

Inform the players before the start of the campaign of their assignment. This is the email I sent to the Senator’s killers:

“Hey fellas.

You two have been chosen as the special people for this one off. Congrats. Let me explain:

(repeated from opening) In its most recent, but not unfamiliar, prospect of political strife, the nation of Samath has seen two of its Senators become embroiled in an intensifying cold war. Issues of labor reform and taxation have led Senator Alger and Senator Tydings to both make threats to the others lands, prosperity and personal safety.

Both of you are promising adventurers and as such, before the start of play, were approached by a high-ranking member of Senator Tyding's personal guard. You met with him, together (though before this meeting the two of you had never met) and agreed to embark to the capital city of his rival Alger's state, Mycroft, where the famous Lammas Festival is being held. There, as agreed upon, you will do all you can to murder Alger. You, as independent contractors, have more freedom to move without notice in the fairgrounds and will not attract direct political repercussions if caught. You are also informed that if possible, you should try and win the team competition, the centerpiece event of the festival, because winners are granted a large number a massive amount of tokens. This will be fleshed out more, but the object of the festival is to gather tokens, because the winners are granted an audience with the Senator. This will undoubtedly be a great opportunity to strike.If you are deemed to be instrumental in the death of the Senator, then you will be granted titles, a reward that is incomparable in worth.”

Something similar should be sent to the players deemed protectors.

Starting Play:

Somewhere on the road, just before the town, it’s not a bad idea for the DM to throw in a battle with bandits that you think won’t pose a challenge, just to get a sense of player strength and abilities.

As you approach Mycroft you are bottled up in a crowd attempting to gain entry into the festival grounds, which are quite heavily guarded by the city watch as well as some of the Senator Alger’s personal house guard, due to his presence as the ceremonial festival overseer. The fair grounds are massive, perhaps 2 square miles. It is bordered by wooden parapets about 15 feet high, and located about a half mile from the city walls. There are minstrels, tumbling groups and musicians, not of a caliber to perform inside the festival, performing outside near the line. There are about 10 entrance ways side by side, where you pay to enter, are checked by a guard for weapons (which are taken unless a sleight of hand check is made). If the weapon is not successfully hidden it is stored in a locked armory near the entrance until it is checked out for the team race event.

Entry to the fair costs 1 gold. There is ample opportunity for pick pocketing in the crowd outside. There is also gambling happening on the outskirts of the line.

Description of the Festival:

There is a station where players can trade silver for one token, up to 200 tokens. If your players are clever, they’ll realize it’s most likely possible to pay others to cash in their silver for them.

The DM should feel free to throw in perception checks for pick-pocketers at their discretion, throughout the players’ time at the festival. This especially makes sense if the players start doing rather well.

There are two major sections of the fair. There is the White City, where the entrance to the team race is located, as well as the archery competition and the grapple competition. There is also the infamous riddle competition. The White City is constructed with wood, but with a fresh coat of white paint on pretty much everything. On most of structures surrounding the major events there are detailed paintings of castles and fortresses, an attempt to make the scene more grandiose.

For the archery competition, there are targets 60 feet away from the line of fire. Each archer has 5 shots. If the roll for a shot is in the 10-15 range, one point is awarded, if 15-20, three points are awarded. Highest point total is awarded 400 lammas tokens.

For the grappling competition the player must successfully grapple AND pin the opponent. The opponent will have one opportunity to escape the pin or else the competition is over. The winner is awarded 400 lammas tokens.For the riddle competition, 5 riddles are given, and the person who answers the most correctly after having 1 minute with each riddle is the winner. They are also awarded 400 lammas tokens. Here are some sample riddles I used:

"Can you decipher the following common phrase?
T M C
A U O
H S M
W T E
[ed.: is this really a common phrase though?]

Mary’s father has 5 daughters: 1) Nana 2) Nene 3) Nini 4) Nono. What is the name of the 5th daughter?
[ed.: assuming Mary is a boy, I guess Nunu]

You are standing on the top one of two solid metal pillars. They are both exactly one kilometer apart from each other and they both stand one kilometer high. There is absolutely nothing around these pillars, but you have one small twig, one small rock and an unlimited supply of rope. Using only the materials named, how can you get from the top of the pillar that you are on to the top of the other pillar?
[ed.: very carefully]

If you spell out all the numbers, how far do you have to go until you use the letter a?"
[ed.: depends on how many steps you take for each number]

The Midway is significantly grungier. It is, roughly, located on the east side of the fair grounds, while the White City makes up the western portion. People come here looking for a good time, so to speak. There are a number of out-door bars serving all sorts of alcoholic beverages, dancing girls, and the like. In Midway players can gamble. Any number of classic die games work, but I’m going to use Chuck. A player rolls 3 6-sided dice. Bet on a number between 1 and 6. Payout of 1:1 for one right number, 2:1 for two right numbers, and 3:1 for three right numbers. Players should be betting lammas tokens.

The Team Race:

All team members bodies must be at the finish line for the team to be victorious (yes, that means corpses are permitted). At the start, all teams are placed in an open field, about 2 acres. Players, as well as the other teams, can try to make a dash for it, or they can duke it out in the field before continuing. It’s a good idea to have the players fight at least one other team at this point before moving on to the first obstacle. (When I ran this the players were clever and realized it would increase their chances of making it to the finish as a team if they entered as teams of one, and split the prize anyway, so be warned).Enemy teams should obviously be varied and as interesting as possible. I would also recommend making them as strong as player character teams, or at least strong enough to encourage some run and gunning to make things interesting. When I ran this, I had a Gladiator and a Rogue (who they met prior to the race at a bar) team up with two random drunkards they met at the festival. The drunkards died almost instantly. 

The first obstacle consists of a huge 20 ft wide by 50 ft long piece of wood elevated off the ground 8 feet. The enclosure leaves the space dim. Hanging from the wood, down towards the ground, are pieces of string which send shocks of 1d6 electricity at the target. Players should make a check perception check to see if they can see the strings, if they complete that then they can make reflex if they try and go under the strings, acrobatic check if they try to dodge. Players can also choose to move very slowly and carefully with no penalty, but will sacrifice time in the race.The Second is a large hill where players are shot with jets of water as they attempt to climb up. Players must make a strength check to not have the water push them back down the hill, and then a climb check. Players must do this twice successfully to move on. 
The final obstacle is a pool of magically cold water, that while not frozen, is cold enough to cause 1d6 damage if submerged without making a will save or a swim check. This must be done twice successfully. If not, player evokes an attack of opportunity from a giant moray eel lurking in the water.

If the players end up winning, they are taken to an audience chamber towards the front gate of the fairgrounds. There Senator Alger is accompanied by 1 guard captain, while 5 guard officers wait outside. The Senator has come in through a different door then the players, a door leading to a passage way which in turn leads to the city of Mycroft, proper. If the Senator is killed, the players assigned to murder him must escape to outside the fairgrounds or to the city where they can hide. The two players assigned as protection must stop the other two players in some fashion before the Senator loses all his health.
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Like I said, I think it went well. I had to completely improvise the town of Mycroft because I had planned to have it completely closed off during festival-season, but stupidly forgot that players have ways of getting past guards. There was also trouble because one of the players who was supposed to be killing Alger made an attempt during the team race which threw things off, and ended in a successful assassination when he was taken to the barracks of the fairgrounds for medical treatment.

Voice Acting P1: A can of really yappy worms

For a subject so rarely mentioned beyond a cursory "good" or "bad" dismissal, voice acting (or voice-over or VO as it were) plays a massive role in a game's storytelling efficacy. What makes this a particularly interesting subject is the (vanishing) debate over whether VO is even necessary at all. Let me start you off with a quote from lead Elder Scrolls designer Ken Rolston, on the subject of adding full VO to ESIV: Oblivion:

"I prefer Morrowind's partially recorded dialogue, for many reasons. But I'm told that fully-voiced dialogue is what the kids want. Fully-voiced dialogue is less flexible, less apt for user projection of his own tone, more constrained for branching, and more trouble for production and disk real estate. Voice performances can be very powerful expressive tools, however."

Rolston gets straight to the point: VO is what the kids want. It's an industry imperative - you just aren't allowed to publish a major mainstream game without it. Is there an artistic justification for why it's become the standard? I don't think so, though most critics and developers would probably throw you that dirtiest of foul, back-handed compliments: "VO makes games cinematic". Regardless of whether this is true, or whether it's a good thing, no one feels the need to cite it as the basis for the pro-voice decision. VO has become opt-out: only to exclude it do you need to provide a reason. 'Universal' standards in an artistic medium are a can of worms (see that period around 2009's Avatar when every film had to use 3D), and voice acting is no different. Allow me to explore why I think games don't need voice acting - not to say many can't (or don't) benefit hugely from it.

Beyond any comment on 3D, was it necessary for this movie to look so retarded?

The progress of games as an art-form for its 40+ year existence has been inextricably bound to technological advancement. With so much in a constant state of flux, it's hard to determine what is strictly progress and what is a matter of creative discretion. Nothing is strictly progress really, because a designer can always make the conscious decision to step backwards, to use 'retro' tools (to continue with the film analogy, 2011 Oscar-winning film of the year The Artist was black-and-white and silent), but it's pure stubbornness  to pretend some advancements aren't indeed exactly that, advancements. They make our stories easier to tell, expand our expressive capabilities, blah de blah else. So here's where it's all: but is VO a true technological evolution, or just another tool in the toolbox? And the cop-out answer is, like usual: "for movies it was a permanent step forward, so it must be for games as well!"

If you're willing to invest a whopping one second of thought, we can jump ship for a second to books. Wait a minute: audio-books never replaced books on paper! It comes down to exactly what Ken Rolston said: part of reading is injecting one's own tone into the experience. We're allowed to come to our own understanding of the characters and narrative voice and present them in that light. Movies don't give us the same luxury - they have actors. As a matter of fact, that might be the primary difference between literature and film. I'm not going to delve into it at the moment. Regardless, as soon as actors come into the picture, we have a human intermediary in the delivery of the characters: our understanding comes through their interpretation. Actors in film predate audio though - they're inherent in the medium - so the introduction of sound can't be compared to games at all. Acting was already there in movies, so voices weren't a fundamental game-changer as they are for books and games.

So really this discussion isn't at all about an advancement in audio technology. Technology opened the door, but what we're talking about is whether actors belong in games. When framed that way, all of a sudden it seems a lot stupider to jump to the conclusion that VO being possible implies VO is necessary. When we come back, we'll go from theory to practice and look at how games have been affected by the historical implementation of VO. Look out for Legend of Zelda, Oblivion, and maybe even a taste of Starf Ox!

Skyrim Revisited

You heard it here first - almost exactly a year after I got it, I'm making my glorious return to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - and this time, it's personal.

Here's the thing. I probably bitch a lot on this blog about Skyrim. It's hard to remember how much of this bitching is put into writing, how much is spouted off with friends, and how much just rolls around in my head, but I bet if you didn't know any better, you'd think I quite hated the game. And it's true that I spend a lot of time criticizing anything that achieves the amount of praise lauded on Skyrim. Sure it's partly because I'm a trend-breaking rebel with a bone to pick and a bone to prove about how I'm smarter than everyone else, but it's also because I think that to understand gaming as a whole, one of the most important steps is to scrutinize why we like what we do, and not be satisfied to declare it a masterpiece and move on. Something as massive as Skyrim, something that so well embodies the state of video games in 2011/2012, is bound to unveil many of the successes and flaws of the medium. So yeah, I'm going to give it a much fucking harder ride than a game carried by pure artistic vision like Black Knight Sword. I heap as much grief on every last Zelda and Blizzard and Valve game.

But at the end of the day, when I shut the fuck up and just play, this is a great game. So much time and effort, so many years of experimentation, so much vicious and worshiping fan feedback, and The Elder Scrolls V can't be anything but a triumph. Just like Nintendo knows exactly what made you fall in love with Mario and how to roll that out year after year, Bethesda has a masterful team that may not be overflowing with artistic genius, but that can come together and draw you into a fantasy reality. Every challenge thrown at Skyrim is framed as "how can Skyrim get away with X and still be one of the greatest RPGs of the era?"

If we roll back time a few years to the Year of Our Lord 2006, we'll find me wasting away my freshman year of Our Lord of college first being introduced to The Elder Scrolls by means of some 250 hours spent in Oblivion. At the time the game was an utter revelation to me, and to this day it remains one of my all-time favorites. Hopping my way across the Cyrodiil countryside to manipulate the skill system is a gaming experience I'll never forget. Fireballing my first rat. Deciding my second character would be a psychopathic mass murderer and almost entirely forgoing questing just to lurk among rooftops sniping the citizenry and evading guards. An RPG where you could be anyone was all I had ever wanted from the time I first picked up an NES controller at age 3 (well uh... kinda... the idea probably didn't hit me RIGHT at age 3).

It was probably this Oblivion saturation that caused my original hesitance with Skyrim. After you fuck around with a game for hundreds of hours, those colorful early highlights begin to dissipate into the memory of the little annoyances, like accidentally picking up an owned item and immediately putting it back, only to be charged with thievery anyway and forced to spend a night in jail. Or worse yet, the outrageously lax auto-saving system that demands you remember to save every few minutes, lest lose potential hours of content. To try to keep things fresh, I opted to go with a new and unconventional class, something I had never tried in Oblivion, a stealth destruction mage, and set off to join all the guilds and find the Dark Brotherhood et al.

This first round of play hardly lasted ten hours before I had had it. The little niggles were all I could see anymore, the new class was a hassle, and the iterative guild quests felt empty and unrewarding. Disappointed, I put the game aside for nearly a year. Determined to give it one more shot, I picked it up two weeks ago and decided to start from scratch. Forget trying to do everything the right way - I was going to make a plain old melee warrior and wander about the countryside until the fun came to me. And that's exactly what it did - I've hardly been able to put the game down and have probably dumped 30-40+ hours into this character in the span of just a few weeks.

I now realize the flaw of my original approach: I wanted to play the game as if it were still Oblivion, as if I had simply started it up and opened up a new save file. What this was ignoring is that I had gotten tired of Oblivion. I had walked away from it because there wasn't enough left to interest me, and all the really fun things I had already done. But the really fun things in Skyrim were still right there waiting for me, so why try to jump to what had been my Oblivion endgame - all that stuff I had first enjoyed was back again, fresh and tweaked and new. 

Also, this time I'm playing as a lizardman.