For example, if all you want to do is customize your character's chin you'll have to decide whether you want it to be pronounced/recessed, retracted/jutting, shallow/deep, wide/thin, tall/short. And there's an equal number (more or less) for each of those aforementioned features (brow, cheeks, eyes, etc.), so I spent a good 25 minutes just tinkering with all of the options while my fellow journalists were walking by the Oblivion gate and attacking monsters. Finally, after realizing that these four hours were going to go by extremely fast, I chose to randomize my character, and what the computer came up with, while not the image I had in mind was definitely good enough. However, this isn't the only time I was faced with making a complex decision. Later on I had to select one of about 13 birth signs such as The Thief, The Apprentice, The Serpent, The Lord, The Tower, and The Warrior, among others, each one granting my character some special power. The Lover, for example, lets you kiss people and the benefit of this is your being able to paralyze them for ten seconds. Then there's The Shadow, which grants you the power of invisibility, but only for 60 seconds per day.

During the day, town guards and merchants stopped each other in the street to chat.

When I went into a store to look around, the proprietor followed me around as I looked around the shop.

The game world has day and night cycles, so when evening came, the citizenry locked their doors and went to sleep.

If rambling sounds a bit aimless then impressive settlements like the Imperial City, Skingrad and Anvil offer an abundance of more structured pastimes. You might want to try your hand/paw at gladiatorial combat. Fighting in the Colosseum-style Bloodworks in Cyrodiil's capital is a fine way to develop combat abilities, earn some Septims (ES cash) and vent some aggression. Even if you don't take to the arena personally you can enjoy the sport by betting on bouts and watching from the terraces. Slightly less risky is membership of one of the class-based societies. Joining something like the Fighter's Guild opens up lots of lucrative side-missions. If these are all as intricate and original (watch out for an imaginative variant of the classic clear-rat-infestation-from-Mr-X's-cellar task) as the few we tried then Guild life should be an attractive option. Naturally you can also make a living through commerce and thievery too. These activities involve two of Oblivion's engaging mini-games: lock-picking and persuasion.