Still been playing Skyrim, but it's like the magic is losing its luster. I'm in Morrowind and I met this new "great enemy" and freed these huge elemental stones from his influence and now I'm looking for these black books that has more info on this creep. I get to this Dwemer fortress (i.e. Dwarven, who are basically tinkerers in this world who made steam powered mechanisms) and I need to get these cubes to unlock where the book is kept. These cubes are used to activate doors (logical) but also used to power these pedastals which control the flow of water in various rooms, as the building is under ground.

Now, seeing as I've owned but never played much of any Elder Scrolls game, I wanted to delve into Skyrim more as the puzzles and exploration felt more "adventury" more so than "video game-y". I think I mentioned before how Zelda:Breath of the Wild befuddled me with its wanting to be like a Skyrim (with a bit more realism in various areas) but its adherence to "video game puzzles" (like the shrines, the towers, the four guardians and moving through them, etc.) and weird inventory system (I can carry triple Link's weight in food, bug and monster parts and such yet I can only carry 7 weapons, that break rather quickly) made the experience a bit jarring for me. The breaking weapons thing especially. I've arrived to a point in Skyrim where the puzzles just went video game-y with the Dwemer fortress.

Here's a race of people who crafted great machines, devices and automotons that have lasted a millenia. These people were the engineer's engineer. So why in sam hill did these people, who relied on water to power their devices, put in control pedestals that control the water level in areas THAT ARE OBVIOUSLY MAIN THOROUGHFARES? What if one of these things glitched and suddenly the staff meeting on the floor below suddenly turned into an Olympic swimming pool? Dwarves in this series, I'm assuming, were short and their metals are heavy. These poor folk would be stuck at the bottom of the pool, drowning as the tech up top yells down "whoops! my bad!". I'd hate to see their accident chart. After all the things I went through, this didn't make sense other than to give you something to solve. I want to say Rapture from "Bioshock" had more sensible puzzles than this regarding control of water (though I could be wrong as it's been a while since I played it).

Sunday I tried to get my son interested in some TG-16 action with the Turbo Mini I picked up. No go as he said it was "too hard", even though he didn't try. He wanted to play Bubble Bobble but again I did not feel its call, even though we plowed through a lot of levels last time. He opted for Kirby's Adventure on the NES Mini. He played most of it while I jumped in when he needed help. After a while I could tell he was getting about "done"as he'd try to snatch the controller from me just as I beat something or would litterally toss it at me when he can't get passed a section. Of course that happened when the big bad was bearing down on Kirby so I had to quick respond. This really showed me that there really is delay on the NES Mini as the moves I tried to do didn't always respond or do it fast enough. Next time, the CRT is coming up for NES games.