I lasted almost 3 whole months

But the lure of a £20 10/10 game was too strong. The missus just told me that The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion's been delivered at home.

The stupid thing is, I don't even know why I bought it. I'm still 50% through a major "Conquer the World" mission in Rise of Nations and midway through a Space Rangers 2 campaign. I've hardly touched The Movies, Anachronox and GT Legends and I haven't even installed Rome Total War. That's just the PC stuff too, on the Xbox I still have Call of Cthulhu, Brothers in Arms Earned in Blood and GTA Double Pack sitting unopened on the shelf and pretty much all my Gamecube games require more attention.

I'm mad, I really am.

I'm freee-eee to do whatever aaaaaaye...

It's getting worse. I'd just gotten over the GR:AW incident and resigned myself to the fact that I could quite happily miss out on it, and then Oblivion got reviewed by a fave haunt of mine, Eurogamer. I am so close to picking up the PC version of this.....

Their review is impressive. To say they liked it is an understatement. 10/10 games are very few and far between and when they do come along you should really take notice. The whole premise of Oblivion is that you play the game that you want to play on the terms that you want to play it. To all intents and purposes it's an MMORPG without the hassle of having to deal with real people. Other reviews I've seen have outlined that it's so well-crafted that different reviewers in their teams are essentially playing different games.

I could be more verbose on this subject but I need to stop thinking about it. I need to go distract myself :-)

Someone up there likes watching me squirm

I realise this is going to make me seem ungrateful but I got a letter from work a couple of days ago telling me about a sizeable bonus I'll be receiving in my next pay-packet. This is killing me. So now I have a decent raise and a nice lump sum to contend with and GRAW is really calling out to me. There's more than enough money just made itself available to me to cover an Xbox 360, a video cable and a copy of Ghost Recon, but I'm determined not to crumble.

The whole "being powerless to resist" thing wouldn't have been an issue if the Xbox hadn't established itself as such a good online console. Ghost Recon 2 (the same which GRAW succeeds) was one of my favourite games on the console not because the single-player campaign was so compelling, but because it represented a stunning leap in online play. It didn't matter how many of your mates were online, GR2 adapted itself to the occasion and created a sense of comradery I'd never ever encountered before in my entire gaming lifespan. Now I'm reading accounts of people who've cracked open GRAW to invest a few hours into the game already and everything they're encountering just builds on the system that GR2 set in place.

It's this online experience that's going to make AND break GRAW. Because the game is so biased towards the online experience, the audience that buys it is going to be limited mainly to those that subscribe to Xbox Live. Also, trickle sales later in the day are going to be pretty much killed off as the online experience requires other people to be online at the same time. If a game's not "the latest thing" then the experience evaporates. This means if I do decide to pick up a 360 after the end of this ban there'll be practically no point whatsoever in my buying a copy of GRAW, regardless of how cheap it is, as if I can only play the single player game I'm losing out on more than 50% of the package.

This level of online integration is a canny move by Microsoft and their development partners in many ways. Even though all of my gameplay mates have moved onto Xbox 360, I'm still sat paying for my Live subscription as online scoreboard play is still very compelling in games like Geometry Wars, PGR2 and MotoGP2. Couple that with the fact that one day one of my friends may "lower themselves" to join me in a co-op game of Splinter Cell Chaos Theory or a race in Flatout, I'm still left paying my subscription fees like a chump.

Oh well, I'll kick the habit one day :-)

Decisions, decisions

I've still not finished anything. I'm a little further on in Space Rangers and I've enjoyed trying to get a little further with Brothers in Arms, but 2 months into my little experiment I've not finished a single game.

You now what though? I'm not bothered. I'm enjoying playing the games as they come and getting what I want out of them. So what if I don't see the end of a story? If designers made the stories worth following and didn't pad out their games with useless filler (Resident Evil 4 I'm looking at you) then they'd have more people complete their games in the first place. I have to simply face the fact that I'm a sandbox sort of guy, even when the game wants me to be a story sort of bloke.

Some good news today has left me in a pickle though: I got a payrise at work. A nice one. Usually in this sort of situation I'd be going on a virtual spending spree, totting up all the little gimmicks and games that I'll be buying. I'm at the point where even an Xbox 360 wouldn't really be out of my reach.

But I must remain steadfast and not give in to the tormentuous temptations. I still have umpteen games I've not even touched and can't even consider buying anything new until I've at least had the courtesy to unwrap the cellophane on those.