Two recent TSA experiences:
1) Going from Wash DC Reagan to Ft Laud. Have a Swiss Army Knife (the classic, little tiny one with scissors, file blade and tweezers) on my keyring. Did not realize I had carried it on the plane out of Reagan until I was going through security at Ft Laud and they caught the knife on x-ray and made me either surrender it or exit security, check it in my bag which I was going to carry on, and go back through.
2) Like a dumbass let my driver's license expire (still have FL license, live in DC with no car) 3 days before needing to fly, again out of Reagan. My passport was also expired, so that left me with no current gov't issued photo IDs. At the security line, the lady checking boarding passes and IDs caught that my license was expired, wrote NO ID on my pass, sent me to another line, put me through a puffer machine, x-ray, and then I got the bag search with the little swatches they stick in the machine to check for explosives. I thought I was going to have to talk my way through, but nope. I had my Social Security card and birth certificate with me and they weren't even interested.
It's interesting, I came to Oblivion from WoW, having never played the previous TES games. My only other pure SP RPGs on PC were KOTOR1 and 2. When I played WoW I usually logged about 8 hrs a day, since then I've just been playing a variety of other games as they are released for much less daily time.
I quit WoW when the 4-5 people in the guild I was in decided they were bored with the game and wanted to play Guild Wars, which I hated. The options I had left to me in Wow seemed to be a) try to join another serious 60 guild so that I could regain the raiding opportunities I lost or b) attempt to make something fun out of the game at 60 without a close support group, i.e. the core of my guild, around me. Neither seemed really pleasant so I just gave it up.
A lot of the things I dislike about Oblivion (and I like lots of things about it) are the things that made me decide to give up on WoW. I saw WoW at 60 as pretty much the conversion of time into loot, since after awhile every guild had a script for every instance that was worth raiding. Disclaimer: I think I quit at 1.0.3, so Dire Maul was the most recent dungeon I saw. MC and Onyxia were the only 40 man events we could do then. Anyway, the closest thing in Oblivion to that sort of naked and repetitive timesink seems to be the leveling of certain skills. That is, like someone said upthread, when I decided I needed to raise my Alteration skill to get the Feather spell, it was time to hold the C button down for awhile.
Either way, I'm enjoying Oblivion a lot, but would probably go back to WoW if the same group of people I had before (some of whom were real life friends and the rest of whom were the e-friends of my real life friends) decided to give up on Guild Wars/Auto Assault and go back to it. I do absolutely hate the interface in Oblivion and consider it (without evidence since I don't have a 360) the biggest example of the theory that the game became positioned primarily for 360. I'm going to experiment with the mods tomorrow, though, so who knows, that could get fixed. I also have a 3500+/7800GTX/2GB RAM system and find the game to chug uncomfortably in 1600x1200 with HDR, so I stick to 1280x1024. Like other posters said I have high hopes for patches tuning the game to run a little more efficiently.
Slashdot Mirror
Two recent TSA experiences: 1) Going from Wash DC Reagan to Ft Laud. Have a Swiss Army Knife (the classic, little tiny one with scissors, file blade and tweezers) on my keyring. Did not realize I had carried it on the plane out of Reagan until I was going through security at Ft Laud and they caught the knife on x-ray and made me either surrender it or exit security, check it in my bag which I was going to carry on, and go back through. 2) Like a dumbass let my driver's license expire (still have FL license, live in DC with no car) 3 days before needing to fly, again out of Reagan. My passport was also expired, so that left me with no current gov't issued photo IDs. At the security line, the lady checking boarding passes and IDs caught that my license was expired, wrote NO ID on my pass, sent me to another line, put me through a puffer machine, x-ray, and then I got the bag search with the little swatches they stick in the machine to check for explosives. I thought I was going to have to talk my way through, but nope. I had my Social Security card and birth certificate with me and they weren't even interested.
It's interesting, I came to Oblivion from WoW, having never played the previous TES games. My only other pure SP RPGs on PC were KOTOR1 and 2. When I played WoW I usually logged about 8 hrs a day, since then I've just been playing a variety of other games as they are released for much less daily time. I quit WoW when the 4-5 people in the guild I was in decided they were bored with the game and wanted to play Guild Wars, which I hated. The options I had left to me in Wow seemed to be a) try to join another serious 60 guild so that I could regain the raiding opportunities I lost or b) attempt to make something fun out of the game at 60 without a close support group, i.e. the core of my guild, around me. Neither seemed really pleasant so I just gave it up. A lot of the things I dislike about Oblivion (and I like lots of things about it) are the things that made me decide to give up on WoW. I saw WoW at 60 as pretty much the conversion of time into loot, since after awhile every guild had a script for every instance that was worth raiding. Disclaimer: I think I quit at 1.0.3, so Dire Maul was the most recent dungeon I saw. MC and Onyxia were the only 40 man events we could do then. Anyway, the closest thing in Oblivion to that sort of naked and repetitive timesink seems to be the leveling of certain skills. That is, like someone said upthread, when I decided I needed to raise my Alteration skill to get the Feather spell, it was time to hold the C button down for awhile. Either way, I'm enjoying Oblivion a lot, but would probably go back to WoW if the same group of people I had before (some of whom were real life friends and the rest of whom were the e-friends of my real life friends) decided to give up on Guild Wars/Auto Assault and go back to it. I do absolutely hate the interface in Oblivion and consider it (without evidence since I don't have a 360) the biggest example of the theory that the game became positioned primarily for 360. I'm going to experiment with the mods tomorrow, though, so who knows, that could get fixed. I also have a 3500+/7800GTX/2GB RAM system and find the game to chug uncomfortably in 1600x1200 with HDR, so I stick to 1280x1024. Like other posters said I have high hopes for patches tuning the game to run a little more efficiently.