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Can a 45-year-old man maintain a marriage and a videogame habit? Let's find out!

Daily Archives: January 18, 2007

Not bad for $2.99

My wife is a big Sudoku fan. Loves the stuff. I’ve never much cared for it. But today we downloaded the demo of Go! Sudoku from the PlayStation Store and darned if the game didn’t hook me, too.

The free “starter pack” offers up four matrices each of four different difficulty levels. I let my wife try it out, because I want thinking Sudoku was about as fun as writing out a bunch of return address labels. My wife was skeptical she’d like it because she prefers to work things out on paper when she does Sudoku.

But soon she was having a decent amount of fun and when I tried it later on, it hooked me, too. We checked into the PlayStation Store again and there are four booster packs available for $2.99 each. I was hoping each pack would offer maybe 50 extra puzzles at that price.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. The first booster pack weighs in at well over 500 “easy” level matrices, and by the time you buy all four booster packs at $2.99 each, you have over 1,400 matrices in all.

Some folks have been skeptical the PlayStation 3′s PlayStation Store can succeed. But with low-cost, high-entertainment stuff like this available, I think once they work out the kinks (like no background downloading), PS3 and their online store could give Xbox Live some competition this time out in the world of online gaming.

Oblivion fans will shiver at this!

Despite boasting up to what some estimate to be 500 hours of game playing time to complete, the makers of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion have decided it’s not enough… thank goodness! 2K Games and Bethesda Softworks today finally made the official announcement that they will release, this spring, the first full-fledged and official expansion to the game, The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles.

The expansion will open up a new area on the map to explore, offering a 40+ hour main quest and possibly at least another 100 or more hours of total gaming time. There were also new screens released from the expansion.

While adding content to this ground-breaking RPG may not make the list of anyone’s ideal first communion gifts, for series fans, it’s pretty spiffy.

Oblivion gets first-ever GOTY honors at DigNews.com

I’m happy to say I was part of the decision-making in naming 2K Games and Bethesda Softworks’ Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion as DigNews.com’s first-ever Game of the Year winner. Our site’s never named a game of the year before, and there’s no guarantee we will again, but Oblivion is a game that’s made a huge next-gen impact.

There’s a lot of freedom in the game to do whatever you want to, from farming to setting up a retail business to – probably – printing up professional business cards for your fellow adventurers. Well, maybe not quite, but you get the idea.

It’s a game that has turned a lot of people who don’t normally play videogames into addicts. That’s rare, and that’s why we game this first-of-its-kind honor to the game. What fun!