Obligatory Skyrim entry

Because Skyrim.

People might say it's overrated, and I guess in some parts it is (ohai, bugged quests and arrows to the knee!), but I've been enjoying the game. I'll honestly say I hadn't played the previous Elder Scrolls games bar a 45-minute adventure in Oblivion about 2 years back. I know, I know, shame on me.

So why did I get into it while I have close to 0 knowledge with TES series? Maybe it's one of those more accessible games, yet yield some amount of challenge at the same time. Or maybe it's the extensive lore. Or the dragons.

Or maybe it's just Farkas.

It's not the bugs though.


What I've done so far:

Waste a lot of time with my game on pause. I've clocked 120+ hours according to my last save, but I don't know how much I actually played of that. I'll put it on pause and move onto a MMO or a handheld. I like the game, I really do, but it's another game amongst what I own and I'm slowly getting back into Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions on my PSP.

Anyways, I went with a male Nord who I named Gael. I've never really been into magic classes, and I can't stealth to save my life (Gael can back me up on this one). So I went all-out melee, heavy armor, and got myself a husband who can hold his ground in a fight: Farkas. Maybe Vilkas would have been a neat choice too, but there's something about Farkas... ahem. Moving on. I'm halfway through lv25, done a bunch of side quests and wasted a ton of time as previously stated. I don't have my stats handy though.


The awesome:

The lore. So much lore. So much backstory and books and dialogues and quests and - fuck, it's good. I've tried reading the books as much as I could, or just took them with me and stored them for later reading. I've been paying attention to the storyline and NPC backstories, as minor as they are. I love the accents.

My inner yaoi fangirl is very pleased with the fact I can marry anyone regardless of gender, hence my male Dovahkiin/Farkas marriage. I seriously giggled a couple times. I do, however, cringe everytime Farkas calls me "love" - it just sounds terribly OOC.

The map is extensive and very readable, provided you have a good TV (one of my RL friends suffered this issue, unfortunately, hope she got her TV today).

An odd thing I like it the dead body physics and how they realistically fall, roll on slopes and fall off cliffs. I laugh everytime I send someone flying with Fus Roh Dah... and I laugh even more when they land.

Radiant quests are awesome, really.

The bunny kill counter.


The good:

Interface is nice. It's very, very Oblivion/Fallout-like - as I said before, I hadn't played Oblivion much, but I had a good taste of Fallout New Vegas. And my very first impression was "LOL IT'S FALLOUT BUT SET UP NORTH". The graphics aren't bad at all, especially at night and in anything related to Dwemer / Dwarves.

I love the changing weather, but I like it less when I can't see in darker areas. My TV has dynamic lighting/gamma and it can get frustrating at times.

The music score is well done too. The tone was familiar and I stopped a couple times, trying to remember where I had heard similar keys, chords, crescendos and general flow. I wasn't surprised when I found out it was Jeremy Soule, who did the Guild Wars music as well.


The bad:

Animations. Seriously. Some NPCs don't walk, they just glide around. The NPCs talk to you whenever your PC is somewhat facing them, or just hangin' round. Which drives me absolutely nuts when you consider I'm an auditive person. Hearing them repeat the same dialogue ad nauseam eternam makes me wanna go Fus Roh Dah on their asses...

The follower AI is ridiculous at times. I understand they won't jump cliffs like I do (Farkas is much less suicidal than Gael). I wouldn't have any problem with that if the game didn't take it to the extremes. I jump off a tiny cliff and the follower AI reverts to a dumbass, and absolutely has to find the "shortest" path back to me without using that damn cliff which would have saved the both of us 5 minutes, if not more at times.

Talking about followers... Farkas gets incredibly OOC at times it seems. When I first married him, he started calling me "dear" and "love", which I thought was a little weird coming from freaking FARKAS. I did his purify quest and that behavior stopped. It brought and end to him being my little personal shop (he won't sell me potions and lockpicks anymore, the motherfucker...). On top of that, he passed from "essential" to "non-essential"... which means he can die now.


The ugly:

The insane amount of bugs.

Gimme a break here. I know all games end up with some exploit that was found too late in testing, some that were simply waived as being "by design" or deemed too minor to fix, and some that were simply not found until your average gamer did something they shouldn't have (or should have done, really). I find localization bugs in English, and I'm not even a native speaker. (Then again, that's what I've been trained to do, as a loc tester)

But the amount of bugs in Skyrim is purely ridiculous for a release game. Seems every quest has one or several bugs to it, ranging from "this NPC may not appear, simply exit the area and come back" to "you're screwed, restart your save file, GL". What I can remember, or didn't block from my memory yet:

- Farkas refused to follow me after his purify quest. Then he disappeared, and I had to reload my save file to find him. He followed me right away.
- Talking about Farkas, he got killed yesterday during the Battle of Whiterun; the Stormcloaks tend to attack followers.
- One of my quests bugged because I was a step ahead. I was doing this quest in Morthal, Laid To Rest, and I killed the lady before checking the coffin. Big mistake. Had no save handy, lost a good hour of gameplay.
- Farkas again: This is a funny one. I was in Darkwater Pass; he fell off a waterfall, onto some rocks, and got stuck there. He stopped following me and I had to reload a file to find him. I had to patiently wait for him to find a way to get outta the rocks and into the water. He kills spiders even though he's arachnophobe, but a bit of water and I need to hold his hand.
- I've tested beta games that were more stable than Skyrim. I only had one major crash/showstopper - my console froze completely when I first entered Fort Amol - but the amount of framerate drops is pretty bad.

That's just what I remember. It's nothing close to looking at any quest over at UESP...


So to resume it all:

It's a pretty damn good game, just be careful when doing quests and pay attention to your follower. If you can get the PC version, go for it - they left the cheat console on it and it comes in really handy.

Now go kill some dragon ass!

Here comes the rant!

Actually, partial rant. I shouldn't start about all the cultural differences between Quebec and France, and why they affect our language, thus the games I test and the content in it.

FYI, I'm a Quebecer. A French-speaking one. Québécoise pure laine, as they'd say. "Pure wool Quebecer," female singular.

All you need to know, at this point, is that France French and Quebec French, although using the same grammar, spelling and characters, is pretty much the equivalent between British English and American English. You'll never hear "wanker" said seriously by most Americans, and if so, it might be used for a UK or Aussie mate. The same way you won't hear "criss de tabarnak" spoken by a Frenchman, unless he's in Quebec and trying to make the others laugh with his accent.

Because I have to admit, hearing Frenchmen use Quebec cusswords is funny as hell.

Well, worked with them. I used to be in a localization video game testing team. Used to, because I had to change companies, and my present company has denied me a localization job because I'm not European.

Yep, that's right. My grammar and spelling might be as good as a Frenchman, but I can't do so because I'm not European.

Let's face it, it's a bit insulting. I'm in my own country and I can't do my job. Instead, it's a guy from France who does it, because he speaks a partially different French. And I'm not kidding.

However, I'll admit two things:
1. Game localization, in French, is mostly used in France, as most Quebec gamers are bilingual and don't play much in French because...
2. ... Culture-wise, we're different than Frenchmen.

I have no problem admitting this. We're different when it comes to culture. Quebec is very Americanized for a French-speaking population. Argue all you want about immigration, English in Montreal and the Loi 101, we're still, at base, a French-speaking population. And we have our own culture too. Which differs from France. Here's a good excercice if you want to understand what we're going through when we play a game in French.

You're American? Watch Coronation Street, or a UK stand-up comedian. Yeah. You undestand it, but you wonder what makes it so popular, at a point where you actually don't understand it anymore and tune out. That's what happens for us when we play a game in French. Maybe not that bad, but it still sounds awkward and forced.

Now, the main problem is that 99% of the games available in French were translated for France. It's like you being a huge soap-opera fan, but 99% of the time you fall on Coronation Street-like soaps. You just resort to the 1% that's made for your country, or you watch in your second language, which actually offers the same things you want. It's handy like that.

In other words... it created one hell of a vicious circle. There's little market for Quebec French games because we speak English too, and there's no content available because there's no market.

This being said...

My French may not be the same as a Frenchmen, but I have no problem with asking questions about what's preferable to use there, or simply Google it up. That's what localization is - you're translating and fixing issues for a language, and make sure the target audience gets it. Which is why I'm willing to translate for France.

But, to come back to my ranting point, Company B doesn't WANT this. They don't want people from QUEBEC working in their Quebec office, nope, it has to be Europeans. I even asked the HR manager. To quote her to the best of my memory, "I had to replace a French tester for a Quebecer, for one day only. Head office asked me if the tester was European because of the last name." In other words, not even native French-speaking Quebecers can act as a REPLACEMENT for ONE DAY ONLY.

So I can't do the job I qualify for... because I'm not European. Sure the cultural differences may be awkward at times, but fuck, I have the Internet. I have French friends. I know very well that "Saint-Eustache" wouldn't be used as a probable town name, but rather "Marseille" or "Caen" or "Saint-Aix-Sur-Mer".

I came up with that last one, I have no clue if it really exists. I could Google it up, but I'm off duty.

So I'll just swallow the salary difference and play my games in English, until I make it back into Company A.

The PC of Death

I've had consoles since I was 4 years old. Took a while for me to get how to install them, but at 7 I had no problem doing so anymore. Then again I didn't have a composite-able TV until I was like 10.

In 1997 or 1998 - I was 12 or 13 - my parents finally went along with the new craze: a personal computer. Pentium 200Mhz processor. 2GB HDD. 32MB video card. 56kpbs dial-up modem. Little marvel of technology it was. Came with Windows 95, which had a tendency to crash ALL the time. We always had problems with it, and when the techie moved or something, I became the house techie. I had watched the guy work on it and I had a general idea of what to do with the software.

But when it comes to the inside of a PC... I won't lie, I'm not that good. I can change a hard drive or a video/sound card just fine, but that was about it. A couple years ago, my cousin Isabelle's boyfriend Serge showed me how to hook up a motherboard to all the components, including the power supply. It didn't take him more than 25 minutes.

I took over 3 hours to fix my power supply today. Okay, I had a good half-hour of procrastination and early 90's anime/cartoon nostalgia trip, and a nap... but still. I won the damn fight.

I started at like 10am. I have a small apartment and I have very little place to set everything down. I fetched my piano keyboard's bench and put the case on it, and began "working". It took me about 10 minutes to remove the power supply and all the cables... and over 30 minutes to screw the new one back on. That's not including the nostalgia trip. This had me constantly turning around and clicking on YouTube links every 2 minutes or so. After finally screwing it all together and finding the right cables to put on the right devices, I tried booting it. It beeped, so it was booting something. All good.

Tried to hook it up to my monitor. Nothing. Figured the video card might have not been put in right, so I unhooked it, removed it from its usual space by my desk, put it back on the bench. Video card was fine. I took the cables off the HDDs, put them back on, found another power cord, hooked it back to an outlet, took my mini DVI cable and put it on my TV, and began booting and trying to find out WHAT was wrong.

Exhausted, I promptly said "fuck it" and went to take a nap. Was about 3. I slept until 5:30. At 6:15 I began working on it some more - with a clear head, I realized it might have been because my slave drive was in the master slot, and the master drive in the slave slot. Bingo. 20 seconds later it booted just fine.

Now there's a fan I can't get to work, but I might just place the PC back for a few days and check on the fan later on. Because I really wanna play on my PC.

This being done, I can focus on my current game: Pokemon White.

So... this is my first post. Yay!

So I'm trying to get back into the whole blog thing. I used to have a LJ account, but it's been years and holds quite a bit of bad memories. That and teenage / young adult angst.

I'll eventually come up with a better bio, but let's face it, I haven't used a blog in years. Years.

Either ways, I'm Sara, AKA ChibiShiva, Chibi, or just "that girl at the Starbucks". I've been a gamer since I'm 4 (I'm 26, do the maths XD) and I can't see myself dropping video games anytime soon. My fav genres are RPGs, action/adventure and puzzle games. Recent owner of a 360... without Xbox LIVE for now.

So I'll be mostly writing about the games I play, my job as a game tester (don't expect anything too specific folks XD, I don't wanna get my ass fired!) and random crap. Expect a lot of random crap.

And ranting. Because I rant. XD