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.
Publisher: Bethesda
Developer: Bethesda
Genre: open-ended RPG
Requirements: about 50 hours of free time
June 18, 2002
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