Yes and Yes and Yes Intrepid...
I really am looking forward to Mass Effect.
I LOVE Jade Empire and the way the game "feels" as you play it, as well as the wonderful story, it is close to being a perfect evolution of its generation of games i think, IMHO and I find myself looking forward to my tine in that game very much.
And Oblivion, YES, i have been playing it, slowly and carefully for many months now, studying the game play, the story, adding mods, and learning about the major commnity additions including some spectacular landscape mods. As I return to Oblivion after playing other games, I often just stand on one of the hilltops and gaze out over the beautifully rendered countryside and say to myself, Now THIS is how a adventure game can look....and thank the stars that Bethesda kept going with the game series to this point.
I do love Morrowind too see my review and analysis on my bloggy in my sig, and still play and enjoy it, for its own qualities. It is a massive world and has many wonders plus amazing mods and huge world additions being developed by the community, Silgard Tower and Tamriel Reborn are two. It is dated in some ways, and I also wish for more spoken dialog and dream of the day some mod team converts the test dialog to speech completely for my old eyes get tired indeed of reading the endless scripts and many of the NPC responses are the same over and over. We are in a time of great evolution of game capacities and content and I think in our time we will see dynamic and fully realized 3D worlds with amazing potential, and I thank the stars again for the chance to live in this time that the classic values of the classic adventure games are once again having an impact and value in contemporary game designers and that we may indeed have survived the slash and burn years of rushing repeating sequels to market.
And yes, Insane Cobra, I think i see what you mean about the Mines, I will be patient and hopefully Riddick wont get too mad at me (I DONT want him mad at me about ANYTHING) for my fumble fingers at times