Better late than never.

Next week sees the release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Game of the Year Edition, a full-priced collection of the original Oblivion, the bonus questline Knights of the Nine and the full expansion pack, Shivering Isles. That's all well and good for newcomers, but are current Oblivion owners without access to Xbox Live going to be left out in the cold?

Well, yes, but only for a little while, as Shivering Isles will also be getting its own release on disc sometime in October. The expansion will retail for $29.99, the same price it currently sells for on Xbox Live, and will also feature Knights of the Nine free of charge.

I don't quite understand the rationale behind releasing the expansion a month after the Game of the Year edition, aside from trying to lure people who already shelled out $60 for Oblivion 18 months ago into buying the GOTY edition. But hey, I'm surprised to see an expansion pack on disc at all. That hasn't happened since…well, GRAW2!

[via Joystiq]

When life is hard you have to change.

Between the daily demands that having a regular job, wife, eight-week-old son, second job reviewing games, and third job previewing games can force on a person, it can be pretty damn hard to actually, you know, play a freakin' game for fun. However, I've been hearing a ridiculous amount of love for Bioshock lately - you know, review scores of 10 almost across the board - so I decided that I am going to sit down and play it.

Naturally, to make that happen, I had to quit my job.

Believe it or not, I purposely gave myself a complete week off between when I leave my old job and start my new one, just so that for the first time in many months I can sit down and play a game just for the hell of it. Not for review, not for preview, just to lose myself in an experience and not worry about conveying my thoughts to the world in a coherent sense (not that I've been excelling at that lately either… ).

So, if you see me online any time between September 10th and September 16th playing Bioshock, you'll know that I am sitting there with a big smile on my face, ignoring my worldly responsibilities for a few precious days.

I sure hope this game is worth it…

OK, maybe $9 isn't really steep.

After all, NeoGeo games were $200 and up when they were originally released and they played on a console that cost $650 in 1991, which in today's money is something like the equivalent of a hundred thousand dollars. And the thing couldn't even play Blu-ray movies! From that perspective, $9 is almost stupidly cheap.

Still, charging a $1 premium over the NeoGeo's contemporaries, the SNES and Genesis, seems out of place when titles for another lesser known contemporary, the TurboGrafx-16, sell for $6. Further emphasizing the high price is the fact that NeoGeo fighter Fatal Fury Special is coming out for Xbox Live Arcade, with online play and achievements, for $5. 

While there are no doubt many gamers out there who wouldn't hesitate to shell out $9 to play Samurai Shodown II on their Wii, I can't imagine most people are going to be familiar with the majority of the Neo-Geo's library. VC operates largely on nostalgia and not too many are going to be nostalgic for Magician Lord and 'Nam 1975. Oddly enough, I'm nostalgic for both and I've never played either. Chalk that up to time spent staring at Nobody Beats the Wiz ads every week, trying to wrap my brain around how a console could cost $650, and more importantly, how I could get one.

Nintendo, whittle the price of these things down to six or seven bucks and then we'll talk.

[via Joystiq]