I’ve had some time to play Oblivion for the Xbox 360 and it is definitely a fun game — I’m enjoying getting back into the RPG world. Back in the days of MUDs and the Eye of the Beholder games I was a big RPG fan, but lately they just haven’t had the same draw for me. I played the Diablo games and the Dungeon Siege games, but, those always felt more like RPG-lite, IMO. Oblivion is good, although not perfect. The flaws in the game, in my opinion, are (1) I spend a fair amount of time in “sneak” mode and if you leave it on “sneak” in non-combat areas the default is to pick-pocket, which I don’t want to do. They make stealing far to easy to do accidentally (and you will get in trouble for stealing) and (2) all of the enemies scale to your level, so, it doesn’t really matter when you do a quest. To be fair (2) can be good OR bad, I guess.
I did have one problem for a bit — my character got the Vampire disease and I didn’t realize that after three days you have to feed to be able to walk around during the day. Until I realized this I thought I had killed my character. SO, if you become a vampire, get cured within three days or feed every night (so you can walk around at any time). I will probably go on the quest to cure Vampirism this weekend (because feeding every night is kind of a pain).
All in all, I would say the game deserves the high ratings it is getting. It is a lot of fun to play and the graphics are pretty spectacular. Control on the 360 is about what you would expect — not as good as with mouse and keyboard, but, not bad after you get used to it (pretty much the same as any console FPS). The reason I got it on the 360 instead of the PC was due to the fact that it can be such a pain to get and keep PC games up and running where console games “just work”.