60 Second Review of…

Morrowind

Tom's review: Okay, I'm going to force a metaphor here. Bear with me. When you go scuba diving, you press a button that lets all the air out of your buoyancy vest and then suddenly you're sinking into a strange trippy new world where everything looks different, from the quality of the light to the way the ground vanishes into the distance to the odd creatures that crawl and float in the murk. When you're down there, you can move towards a destination or you can just poke around at your leisure. Time moves differently and there's no sign of the real world. There's a languid floaty sensation to everything. It's like no other place you've been before. Morrowind is like that. You can play it as a conventional RPG, running the length of the linear campaign, but you're missing its charm. Better to tack your way up the length of the plotline, zig zagging from subquest to subquest, meandering in its open endedness. The game doesn't really hold up over the long run -- there are too many holes in the system and the difficulty level sort of plateaus and then rolls over -- but the ride is great while it lasts.

Mark's review: Morrowind has quite a few serious and nearly fatal flaws, and yet the game is still a triumph. Yeah, it's woefully unbalanced, a bit buggy, plagued by dull combat, and strangely empty at times, yet all of that doesn't seem to matter. The open-ended gameplay, the game world, the game's ability to make you feel like you're in its world - all brilliant. And the game should get better with patches and fan-made plug-ins. Maybe more than any other game I've ever played, Morrowind feels like the gaming version of the work of an auteur filmmaker.