After reading and hearing enough about Oblivion, I decided to shell out the $50 bucks to finally buy it and try it out. I was hoping it was not the same old plain vanilla RPG formula rehashed enough times that the critics had lost their edge and just collectively lowered their standards.

And so here I am about an hour and a half into the experience, and I find that that seems to be exactly what happened. The first hour was basically a tour of all the flaws of traditional RPG's:
1. You are thrust into a story that just throws a lot of names like Smerghoal and Khrzimir at you, expecting you to make a mental picture of the world and the places and people in it- without actually helping you at that.
2. It forces you to make decisions that affect your entire playing experience 10 minutes into the game (like what star you were born under, are you a Mage or Thief or whatever). I don't understand the people that make these games - how can you make an informed decision without being told anything?
...trust me the list goes on.

I also thought that the first hour of walking through what was essentially a sausage level layout (even though it curved around corners) was especially boring - the endless rat battles included. As in all RPG's, the player is woefully inept at using any sort of weapon this early in the game, but they usually give you one projectile spell (which is none too effective at anything beyond the space-filler enemies). The randomly placed chests (some of them randomly locked) completely shatter any sort of believability (at least for me) and at one occasion I had to lock-pick my way into the store that was selling horses and lock-pick my way out!! If that wasn't ridiculous enough, the guy who was selling horses did not find that at all weird, and even proceeded to lay on his bed AND SLEEP, while I - a perfect stranger that just lock-picked into his store - was standing RIGHT THERE next to the bed.

You may think these are details, but you would be wrong. I am the perfect casual gamer - I will recognize fun and innovation, but I will not wait around for hours waiting for it to begin. As this game goes, I would have dropped it 10 times so far if not for a strictly professional interest. Too many people have been telling me that this game is good, so I will hold my judgment. I will not give it more than 5-6 hours though, so it better get interesting pretty damn soon.

In the meantime lets repeat the mantra: YOU HAVE TO TRAP THE PLAYER'S INTEREST IN THE FIRST 15-30 MINUTES - they must be the best 15-30 minutes in your game; MAKE SURE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE MAKES SENSE IN YOUR GAME WORLD (case in point, the lock-pick store example). Rinse, repeat...