I'm gonna build me a castle!

My taste in games has evolved over the years, right along with the evolution of games themselves.  Way back in the mid-1990s when I first really started getting into computer games, there was never a lot of depth.  You ran down a pixelated hallway killing things, and that was pretty much it.  But no one cared about the simplicity, because it was damned fun.  It wasn't until 1994 that the type of games that I love the most started being made -- the Sandbox game.

1994 saw the release of The Elder Scrolls, which was one of the first attempts at creating a 3D open-ended non-linear game world.  It was a modest success, and was improved upon all the way up to the release of Oblivion in 2006.  1997 treated us to both Grand Theft Auto and Fallout, two of the greatest game series of all time, both of which have only improved with each subsequent release.  (Arguable, sure, but in my opinion GTA4 and Fallout 3, the most recent installments in both, are the best games in both.)

The idea of a sandbox game greatly appeals to my playstyle.  There's nothing I enjoy more than diving into a game world where I have no rails, no direction that I *have* to go, and no one thing that I must do first.  Checking my Steam account, I have spent over 20 hours of play-time in Fallout 3 after I finished the main story-line.  All that time was spent exploring all the areas of the map that I hadn't yet discovered, and in doing so I found more quests and so many cool places/people/things. 

I'm bringing all this up because Mafia II is due to be released this summer -- end of August to be exact.  If the game lives up to it's potential, it will earn itself a place in the very elite group of games that have been able to keep my interest in them for over 50 hours of play-time.  Here's hoping.