[XBOX360] My Opinion

The mage's guild - this isn't an issue if you bought the wizard's tower download or the Nights of the Nine pack, but if you're playing vanilla Oblivion, the only way to make your own spells is to join the Mage's guild, which involves a long string of quests. Then, if you decide to join another guild and the quest line involves killing or stealing from the guild, you get kicked out and have to gather vampire dust to get back in; that means you get to find you some vampires and defeat them -- it would seem that most vampires are +3 or +4 levels, so have fun with that...

I'm in all three guilds, and finished the Mages Guild missions first. But I've not been kicked out by doing missions for the other guilds. It might just have been the way you were doing things.

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Side-quests do get better, !K_A!... though they do become a bit repetitive - clear out this cave, search through this ruin. Still quite fun.

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It might sound stupid, but have you got your 360 set to output at the right resolution? No point having it output at 1080i, say, if your display can only handle 576i.

I haven't changed any settings on the Xbox360 itself. My cable had the option of TV or HDTV, and I flipped the switch to TV. Other than that, I haven't done anything.

Fair enough.

There might be an option under display settings somewhere to change what resolution the 360 outputs. If there is, then it could solve the problem, though I reckon if it does it'll make everything readable, and the cutscenes less glamorous.

Honestly I might prefer that. Struggling to read stuff can pretty seriously impact gameplay.

If there is a setting, you're on your own in finding it, I'm afraid. I've just read through a PDF of the 360 manual, and it doesn't mention such a setting anywhere.

Oh well, it's most likely just my TV anyway.

How much does a decent but cheap HDTV cost these days?

Depends on the size you want, and the resolution you want.

If you want to go the whole hog and get a 1080p HDTV, then it'll be over the 40" mark, and cost around $2500, I guess.

You can get 720p HDTV's, though, for a damn sight cheaper. I reckon you can get a good 32" one for about $1000. Most of this is just guesswork, though. I'm going off UK prices and just doubling them to get dollars, but we pay a lot of tax on technology, so I'm probably way out.

In fact, here are a few Samsung's from Amazon. I thought you might want white to go with the 360.

Samsung 19"

Samsung 23"

Samsung 26"

The third one is part of the range I got mine from, I think. Very good TV's. All three have HDMI ports, btw, and they might have serial ports, so they can be used as monitors.

There are four guilds. There's a thieves' guild quest that can get you in trouble for stealing from some loon in a tower, and I believe there's a dark brotherhood quest that may get you in trouble, too. It's been a long time since it happened, but it sucked. That's why this time, I'm finishing off the other guild quests first, though this last thieves' guild quest looks like it's a whopper; may save that 'till I have more magic.

Oh yeah! I forgot one.

Thieves
Dark Brotherhood
Mages
Fighters

I can't say I had any trouble with any of the missions getting me thrown out of any guilds. The Thieves Guild mission to steal from 'some loon' - as long as you're not seen stealing from the Mages, then you're not thrown out.

Can't think of which DB mission might jeopardise your standing in one of the guilds.

If you do it all correctly, then there's no reason to be kicked out of any of the guilds.

And the last Thieves Guild quest is "mint", as some may say. Brilliant mission.

Actually, now that I think about it, I may have gotten kicked out because I got first strike on him last time, so it counted as murder.

I'm really loving the sneaky/assassin type play. I made my own class called "Ownerer" that is like a assassin/archer/illusionist. It's pretty awesome.