Skyrim Sucks Arse

After a protracted absence, I finally got back to writing my Sucks Arse blogs.  This one, published on 8th December 2011, led ultimately to a major falling-out with one of my IGN buddies because I kind of took the piss out of some of her arguments against the game (in my defense, I did it because I thought her arguments against the game were dumb).  Still, some time later I realized that I don’t really care and I have plenty of other buddies who are actually capable of taking a fucking joke.

Again, this post is copied and pasted…edited for typos…yadda, yadda, yadda…

That’s right: you heard me.  Skyrim sucks arse, balls and donkey dick, and in this incisive, eloquent and detailed review I will tell you all exactly why and how, and what must be done to Bethesda to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.

First of all, let me give you a bit of background on the developers and on the game itself.  Bethesda Softworks is a company that releases nothing but BROKEN games – that’s right; games that come out of the box broken.  You actually have to slip in the individual pieces of shattered DVD or Blu-Ray in order to load it up.  Not only that, but if you want any hope whatsoever of actually playing the game, you need to feed these small shards of plastic into your console in the right order!  Just to add insult to injury, Bethesda have failed to number the seven-hundred individual pieces, so it’s a fairly hit-and-miss process to even get this far in playing the game.  I’ve heard anecdotal evidence to suggest that some people who bought the game on the day of release have, as yet, been unable to even correctly insert the first hundred and fifty shards, and in frustration have written polite messages to Bethesda insisting that “it’s just not on.”

Bethesda Quality Control – this image was taken part way through final testing.

The pictured disc was one of 7000 shipped to Atlanta, GA.

Bethesda have a long and proud history of releasing games in this state.  One only needs to look at Fallout 3 or Fallout: New Vegas to see this is true.  Nobody on the planet has, to date, managed to successfully play either of those games all the way through or get their platinum trophy, so it’s easy to see the extent of the problem.  And of course these are the only games that Bethesda makes.  They could be forgiven if they could make a game as solid as, for example, Brink or Rage or WET, but they insist on releasing nothing but the same tired old game every year or so, with nothing but a vague and tedious makeover to disguise its true form.  Hell, I’d even be happy if they made a game even half as good as Star Trek: Legacy.

Just two of the many games that Bethesda could have been involved with,

if they hadn’t wasted so much time, effort and money on the risible piece of shit that was Skyrim.

So that’s Bethesda, in a nutshell, but what about the IP?  Skyrim, for those of you who don’t know, is a continuation of the Elder Scrolls series, which last graced our consoles in the form of 2006’s Epic Fail, Oblivion, a game that was very nearly as bad as Skyrim in almost every conceivable way.  Hell, it didn’t even win any Game Of The Year awards or anything, so it’s no wonder that it made virtually no impact on the game market and, to be frank, disappeared from gaming history without so much as a whimper.

This was to be the front cover of the “Game Of The Year” edition of Oblivion,

had it actually managed to win any awards at all.

In Skyrim you can play as a guy or a girl of any one of numerous races of being, and this is where the problems start.  Playing as a Nord is all well and good (though, with their blond hair and blue eyes it is all-too-easy to see parallels with the Nazis’ ideal of an Aryan Race, which leads me to believe that Bethesda are Fascist Sympathizers who probably deny the Holocaust), but the Elves are a real problem.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Wood Elf, a High Elf, a Dark Elf or even an Orc (which, in Bethesda’s retarded little world, are also a type of elf), you can’t make them look attractive.  The fact that it’s a first-person perspective game is neither here nor there – if my main character isn’t gorgeous enough to give me a raging stiffy then I’m not going to be satisfied at any stage in the proceedings.  And, honestly, who wants to play as a cat or a lizard?  Did Bioware give me the ability to play through Dragon Age as Ser Pounce-A-Lot?  No, because they realized that it would be silly, a waste of time and, if you could make the character attractive enough to give you a raging stiffy, borderline bestiality.

Admit it: you’d bang a Nord and you might consider an Imperial, Redguard or Breton, but the “exotic” races?

I’ve seen more exotic things growing in my fridge that I’d rather fuck.

That said, let’s discuss the game itself, which clearly has so many issues that even if you can get all the shattered splinters of game-disc to swirl in the right direction inside your console you will want to extract them all within five minutes and snap the disc in half.  Which of course you can’t do, due to the fact that the disc is already shattered, thereby adding yet another dimension of frustration to Bethesda’s latest “masterpiece”.

The game looks horrible. Really.  It’s an affront to the visual receptors, causing physical sensations anywhere between Collywobbles and Violent Nausea.  The beautiful undulating landscape, interspersed with gushing rivers, tumbling waterfalls and majestic snowcapped peaks is utterly vomit-inducing.  I actually tore out one of my own eyeballs before my wife was able to rush into the room and stop me.  (A quick trip to the emergency room reattached the offending article.  When asked what had happened, and I explained that I had been playing Skyrim, the doctor nodded sagely and patted me comfortingly on the shoulder.)  The visual effects during the night portions of the game are a nice touch, but the cascading ribbons of softly-colored light, gently rippling in the crisp night air made my gorge rise again and I had to immediately dash for the nearest cave, just for a break.

As this picture illustrates, the graphics in Skyrim are substandard grotesqueries

and not worthy of 21st century gaming.

As for bugs…don’t get me started on bugs!  I’ve played the game now for over 90 hours – some 70 hours longer than most other games I own – and I’ve had the game crash on me twice.  Twice!!  This is unacceptable, and the QA team at Bethesda should clearly be taken outside the building, stripped naked, chained upside-down to lampposts and whipped mercilessly until they die from pain and blood loss.  In fact, given that I’ve also had some framerate drops, from 60fps to a shocking 50fps (!), I think that this punishment might be too good for them.  I suggest adding salt and TCP to their wounds.

What other things are there about the game that raise my hackles?  Well, the voice acting makes me want to puncture my own eardrums, and the dialogue is so inane that I wouldn’t even bother switching on the subtitles afterwards.  I’d far rather play through the game blind and deaf, possibly even foregoing the traditional controller setup and playing it with my feet.  The voice acting is so awful that I couldn’t even understand the words that came out of their mouths.  How Max Von Sydow and Christopher Plummer ever became household names is beyond me, since they clearly couldn’t act their way out of a Spice Girls movie.  If those two have ever won any awards in their long and storied careers, I would recommend breaking into their houses and taking the statuettes back, since they clearly don’t deserve them.

As for the story, I only have four words: Who Gives A Fuck?  Dragons, Elves, Humans, swords, magic, mountains, towns, intrigue, a quest to save the world…  How fucking derivative is that?  It’s like they took Lord of the Rings and shat all over it, scooped up the bits and poured them into a videogame.  There isn’t another game developer in the world brazen enough to so willfully steal from another source.  Plagiarism?  I think so.  I mean, face it: there’s even rings in the game, that you can wear and everything!  And don’t give me that “ah, but there’s no Lords” bullshit; they’ve merely disguised them with the “clever” name “Jarls”.  They might as well have called the game Jarl of the Rings.

See? He even *looks* like a Nord. And he’s wearing a Gold Sapphire Ring! What a blatant ripoff.

Seriously, I could go on for hours about how unutterably appalling I find this game.  Did I mention the backwards-flying dragon that you can’t kill?  Unbelievable!  In real life I have never seen an indestructible backwards-flying dragon.  Talk about a game-breaker that drags you, mercilessly, kicking and screaming, from your immersion in a videogame.  When I saw that I threw my controller down in disgust as it was rammed home to me that I wasn’t actually an epic warrior, traversing a vast world, slaying mythical beasts while securing for myself a dozen opulent homes and a fortune that would make Bill Gates blanch.  It just isn’t good enough, Bethesda!

I am going to draw a big fat line under my rant right there, because I can’t go on any more.  My face has turned purple just writing this, and a vein is throbbing dangerously on the side of my head.  I must stop, if only to avoid a burst aneurysm.  So – take a few deep breaths – really, Bethesda, if you continue to churn out games that are this unutterably shite then I will have no choice but to stop buying games off you and turn to your competitor, Tecmo-Koei.

Peace Out.

NOTE WELL!!!  The above post is retarded bullshit, intended as a humorous diatribe, as well as a sarcastic rebuttal to those who disliked Bethesda’s brilliant open-world adventure RPG.  I hope that it is taken in good humor and not as an attack on any person or persons who have perhaps not enjoyed the game as much as I have.  Thank you.  =)