Birthday Loot + Preordered Skyrim

First things first - I've ordered Skyrim for the PlayStation 3 along with the monster 528 page Prima Game Guide for £50.50 (Amazon UK). I am super uber hyped and cannot wait till its release on 11/11/11 after I watched the E3 gameplay footage and some other videos on Youtube. Bethesda have revamped the whole graphics engine and let me tell you, it looks amazing! My only problem with the whole thing is that they've taken away 3 skills. It seems each time they release an Elder Scrolls game they take away skills. But, they do say the axed skills have been incorporated into other skills. I still think it is more awesome if you have more skills to level up though. The major things I'm hyped about are...

Skill Tree Screenshot (Skyrim)

• Level-Up Perks

These were epic in Fallout 3 and it's really fun as some perks let you do different things and open up different gameplay experiences. For example, in Fallout 3 there was a perk which would allow you to eat corpses, thus  giving you a small health boost.

Dual Wield screenshot (Skyrim)

• Dual Wielding

The more swords the better I say, even though this time around I'm going to be focusing more on the Marksmanship and the Magical skills I still think dual wield is going to be great. Bethesda have said that you can dual wield magic as well as normal weapons and doing so will allow for a more powerful spell.

Apparently there's a Forge
 in this screenshot (Skyrim)

• Woodcutting, Mining and more

Apparently these extra gameplay experiences will be included although there's not much info on them yet. You'll be able to forge your own weapons as well if you collect the right ingredients (sort of like Monster Hunter Tri I guess).
I'm not too interested in the whole dragon thing, still looks great though.
Anyway that's my little bit about Skyrim, now onto my Birthday Loot...

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For my Birthday I got a ton of awesome stuff - all to do with gaming!
I got an epic gaming chair with built in Sub-Woofer, amazing sound quality and it's even wireless! It's really comfy as well which is an important factor for lazy slobs like me.
I also got some excellent headphones so that my parents don't hear the sound of the Hidden Blade ripping through the craniums of people from the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods (Assassins Creed).

Assassins Creed - PS3 - Box Art

That brings me on to the Assassin Creed series which I also got. I got all 3! And... embarrassingly  I've already completed 1 & 2 and have started Brotherhood without blogging about them at all! They're really great and the concentration when you're focusing on making that next assassination just right is key. The 1st AC was interesting due to the amount of historical information included. Being the first in the series it had some flawes (like being fairly repetitive and actually pretty boring at times) but it's still fun to play. The only thing I really disliked was the linear factor of it. There wasn't much to do other than the storyline except run around, bored stiff, trying to find flags.

The second one was much better. There were plenty of things to keep you occupied like finding the 6 seals to open the vault in the bottom of the Monteriggeroni Villa and collect Altair's armour; raising money to buy weapons, armour, paintings and even dyes for Ezio's assassin clothes. You could also renovate buildings to raise the value of Monteriggeroni and earn tons of income every 20 minutes. The storyline was great playing as Ezio from when he was born to when he turned 40 and infiltrated the Vatican to assasinate the pope (long story).

The Third one has the good stuff from the first and second ones put together and is absolutely epic! I haven't played much of it so far, but it follows on immediately after the last part of the second one. My favourite thing to do so far is to throw massive two handed axes at people's heads :)

You probably won't hear much from me till Skyrim is released, and when it is i'm going to make a series of posts like I did with Oblivion... except this will be MUCH bigger as there's AT LEAST 300 hours of gameplay!