The Day of Reckoning has Arrived...Oblivion is here.

Shipping out from Bethesda's factories on the East Coast on the 20th, the 21st (today) will be the day when most people receive their shiny, fresh copy of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on their doorsteps. At the time of this post, the game has only been getting rave reviews, affirming the game's greatness among casual and hardcore RPG fanatics.

Numerous friends have told me of their good fortune, finding stray copies at their local Target, Walmart, and CompUSA. All the top gaming chains have all since but depleted their stocks. EB Games, Babbages, Gamestop, and Best Buy are turning away downtrodden consumers from their doors, leaving them to fend for themselves. Naturally, being the hot commodity it is, Oblivion has shown up on Ebay with markups ranging from 5 to 30 dollars. Numerous bidders have made one Xbox360 copy go for 80 dollars without shipping costs; and the auction isn't even over with two days to go.

I myself was foolish to not preorder my copy sooner. Online reserves from Amazon.com and other online sites are fresh out. It's a good thing I got the hookup at *a place that will go unnamed in order to protect the identity of the employee* which gurantees me a copy when I return back to San Francisco for Spring Break. Bless his kind, generous heart. I haven't been anticipating a game this much since Half-Life 2, and that's a lot of awesome games to be meandering through since it's release. This will also be the first time I've actually...erm...purchased a game since Half-Life 2 (with the slight exception of the expansion pack for Battlefield 2). This game won't suck, I know it, and I want to support Bethesda in developing more of these types of games; thus they get my money. "Tactically acquiring" this game would be a betrayal to them. And if the game does suck, well, I'll still be left with one crappy, but awfully good-looking game.