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.

Blimey that looks nice!

It's starting to hit me. The post-Xmas blues are almost over and games that were previously distant on the horizon are now right around the corner. I knew it would eventually sink in but I didn't imagine it would hit me quite so hard.

The realisation of what I'd gotten myself into finally struck me whilst wandering round Next over the weekend. The missus was looking for some clothing and I, caring not for that sort of thing, chose to hang around the gadget section instead. It was there that I saw it. A pristine brand-new PAL C64 DTV for under £10. These things may be scoffed at by the purists but for someone like me it's a very quick, cheap and space-efficient manner of playing some of those 80's classics. But of course I can't, can I? I was simply only able to look at it folornley, powerless to buy.

Following up from that was some video of the new Ghost Recon game (click on the HD version) that, whilst not being in any way true to the series, looks like an amazing online game. There are niggles with the graphics engine and I, for one, reckon that diving's out of place (at least the way it's been incorporated doesn't seem to "fit") in this sort of game but I can't deny that it looks pretty stunning and I'm really going to miss being able to play along with my mates in this. Even if I do get a 360 at the year end, buying GRAW will be futile as the peeps I play with will have moved onto something else and therefore the experience will be somewhat muted.

Lastly, an impressive range of screenshots from the expansion for Guild Wars seem to have hit the net this morning and it's really stirring lustful elf-love feelings in me. The idea of a "casual" MMORPG (one with no subs and no real requirement to be part of any sort of clan) is really appealing to me and the screenshots (see above) make me long to explore the world NSoft have set out here.

But I'll not cave at this stage. Space Rangers is grabbing any spare time I have at the moment (single-handedly resolving my focus issues) and I've not even opened the GTA double pack, Rome, Call of Cthulhu or Brothers in Arms 2 yet.

The Windmills of your Mind

I got back into my US copy of Psychonauts this weekend and finished The Milkman Conspiracies - bloody excellent stuff! I read today's re-review on EG and I think they're pretty much spot on with the 8. As much as I've previously protested that it wasn't just a platformer, it essentially is exactly that and it's more than a little frustrating in parts. I wonder just how it would have been received if it were a "proper" adventure game as compared to a bit of a mish-mash of different games.

Focus!

I'm in a completely bizarre limbo at the moment, unable to concentrate on any games whatsoever. I think my MTV mindset has kicked back in for a while.

In the past ten days I've:

• installed and played the stunningly good Anachronox for an hour
• installed and played the reasonably impressive Silent Hill 2 (for an hour, then I uninstalled it)
• rediscovered and subsequently bored of The Movies, uninstalling in the process
• ditto Far Cry
• installed then uninstalled AVP2
• got back into Psychonauts on the Xbox, only to stop playing altogether after 2 hours

I'm toying with the idea of trying something entirely new, something to revitalise my love of gaming, but I don't know what it should be. Thinking back this isn't a side effect of the ban as I've had this happen many many times before. The difference this time round is that I have to get over it using what's in my collection rather than "buying" my way out.

I'll keep you updated :-)