Towards the end of last week, I got restless with the games I had to play. Borderlands and Dragon Age: Origins were still a couple weeks from release, and although I still had Final Fantasy XII to finish, I really just felt like playing something else. I played halfway through Half-Life 2 episode 2, I fired up Fallout 3 briefly, and I played a few minutes of Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. Meh. Not what I wanted. I played some Plants vs Zombies, some Scribblenauts, and some Zuma. Nothing was satisfying me. I didn’t want to start Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena until I’d have some time to really get into it, and I knew that I’d be dropping any other games I was playing on October 26th, once Borderlands became available for download via Steam.

Then it came to me: Oblivion. I’d reinstall Oblivion.

When I first played Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion a few years ago, I had a blast with the game. But one thing that never sat right with me was the fact that all enemies in the game leveled with you. You’d never get mauled by a mountain lion at first level or bump into a rat whose ass you could quickly stomp when you were level 30. Then I found Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul. Although there are hundreds of changes enacted by this mod, the two parts that really make it worth it for me are the AI changes and the alterations to game difficulty. Now, the world is not such a safe place when you’re level one.

So on Friday, I installed the game and downloaded a number of mods. After installing everything and starting up the game, I noticed that there were strange translucent yellow areas all over the place – odd graphical artifacts. After another hour or so of play and googling the problem, I learned that these were missing meshes. The game was also crashing every hour or so. Rrgh.

I eventually decided to uninstall and reinstall the whole thing on Saturday afternoon. How upset was I when I found that after reinstalling, the meshes were still missing? The Oblivion Mod Manager has a tool for updating and re-registering meshes and textures, but it did me no good. I tried playing for a while longer, and the game had seemed to stop crashing, which was a plus, but when I realized that the missing meshes were actually containers, that every chest and barrel in the game was missing, I gave up. Quit. Uninstalled. I’m now playing the original Dungeon Siege at 1680 x 1050 resolution.

I’m sure that I could get the thing running correctly. It might take an extra install or two. But I just don’t have the willpower right now. From what I’ve read, it’s an issue with Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul – the game replaces containers and their meshes, and although I installed “OSCURO’S OBLIVION OVERHAUL V 1.3 + 1.31 & 1.32 PATCHES“, I seem to have somehow ended up missing the required meshes. Maybe next time, I’ll try downloading a different version of the mod from a different site. I’ve heard that disabling your firewall during the download is supposed to help. Or maybe I’ll just try FCOM, which contains “Francesco’s Leveled Creatures Items”, “Warcry”, “Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul”, and “Martigen’s Monster Mod”.