Yamaha YS125: Last of the Breed

Let's have a brief look at the Yamaha YS125. It's not often that I write about motorbikes, but it's 2024 and I've recently passed my motorcycle test, so I'm in an up-beat mood. The YS125 is a learner-legal 125cc motorbike sold by Yamaha from 2017 to around 2021, as a replacement for the decade-old YBR125. NB It has nothing to do with the Yamaha YZ125, which is a motocross bike, or the Yamaha Y125Z, a scooter.

The YBR125 was apparently very popular, with sales of over 150,000 units. I have no idea how well the YS125 sold, but I have seen a few here and there, including this one in Trieste, Italy:

Some 125cc motorbikes are sold in Europe with 150cc or 200cc engines - 150cc is the minimum requirement for the Italian autostrada - but as far as I can tell the YS was only available as a 125.

I bought mine to learn how to ride a geared motorbike. Now that I've passed my test my YS125 is in theory surplus to requirements, but it sips petrol and doesn't take up much space, and one of the few good things about being middle-aged is that motorcycle insurance is cheap.

The YS125 represents an interesting turning-point in the evolution of modern motorbikes. A long time ago all of the big motorbike manufacturers had a boring, ordinary 125cc learner model - neither a sports nor an adventure nor a custom bike - but now only Honda has a standard learner bike, the CB125F, which is yours for just over £3000. Where did they all go?

There's still a huge demand for 125cc motorbikes, but the entry-level end of the market is now dominated by cheap imports from China. Chinese bikes are controversial. There's a stereotype that they're unreliable and don't last. It's not that Chinese manufacture is inherently rubbish. The YS125 itself was made in China. It's just that importers in Europe and the UK tend to import the absolute dregs.

On top of that the Japanese manufacturers have all gone upmarket. Yamaha's nearest modern equivalent of the YS125 is the XSR125, which is considerably more capable but also a lot more expensive, at £4800 (vs £2800 for the YS125 in its final year). Yamaha's other entry-level 125 is the sporty MT-125, at £5000.

Honda has a range of 125cc motorbikes, but they're mostly novelty models such as the pint-sized Grom or the semi-automatic Super Cub 125. Other 125s from other manufacturers, such as the Kawasaki Ninja and the Suzuki GSX, are aimed at the sporty market, and so the basic commuter 125 is a dying breed, on the endangered list.

What's the YS125 like? Agricultural. Part of the reason for its obscurity is that it was essentially a continuation of the 2005-onwards Yamaha YBR125. The YBR125 was originally sold with a carburettor, a kickstarter, and an old-fashioned round headlight, but by the end of production it had been updated with electronic fuel injection and plastic fairings. The YS125 added a slightly larger fuel tank, a tweaked engine that complied with EURO 4 emissions standards - the YS125 is ULEZ-compliant - and a simple digital dashboard:

It also added a linked braking system. From 2016 onwards European standards required that new motorcycles have ABS, or alternatively a braking system that linked the front and rear brakes. The YS125 has a disc brake at the front but a drum at the back, so Yamaha added a linked braking system. It's odd. When I press the rear brake pedal the front brake lever moves slightly. The rear brake itself is designed to stop the bike on a hill, but it's not particularly effective otherwise, which is something that tripped me up slightly when learning to ride a bigger bike, but more of that later.

Yamaha's publicity materials quoted a fuel consumption of 2L/100km, which is 140mpg, but most reviews suggested a range of 300 miles from its 14-litre tank, which equals around 100-120mpg or so. That's still not bad. I find that £10 of fuel takes it from a couple of bars on the meter to full. The fuel meter is such that I can start off at two bars and reach my destination with three bars, perhaps from the tank tilting in the corners.

Performance-wise Yamaha claimed 7.4kw at 7400rpm, which is just slightly less than 10bhp. In the UK the legal learner limit is 14bhp, and I can confirm that the YS125 is not a rev-happy speed demon. Let's talk about the good and bad things.

Good Stuff
The YS125 is almost purpose-designed for commuting in a city. It's slow off the lights, but it keeps pace with ordinary cars and vans. It chugs along easily at 20mph, 30mph, and 40mph in second, third, and fourth gears - 20mph falls slightly between second and third gears, perhaps because a 20mph limit was still unusual in 2017, when the bike was new. It weighs around 120kg and I have no trouble moving it around. I am six feet tall, and I can easily, easily get both feet on the ground while sitting in the seat.

It's physically tiny, and it doesn't look aggressive, so I find that squeezing in between traffic isn't a problem at all. No-one waves, no-one shouts, I have not been glared at. Parking is easy.

My commute amounts to around 50 miles a week, and every three weeks or so I have to buy £10 of petrol. The bike doesn't smell of petrol, and it doesn't leak oil all over the place. Maintenance consists of periodically wiping off and lubricating the chain and checking the oil level. Yamaha sold a top-box as an accessory, although there are also aftermarket mounts that allow for panniers. As far as I know the battery, fuses, wheels, probably chain are shared with the YBR, which was on sale for ages, so parts are still widely available.

As a recently-qualified motorcyclist I can't comment about the handling. The only time my knees have touched the ground while owning my YS125 have been while I was changing the oil (it takes one litre of 10W40 and has a separate filter). But, again, in town I can easily wend my way around vans, pedestrians, bollards etc.

Bad Stuff

As mentioned up the page performance is sluggish. I noticed this after doing my motorcycle training and my test. Moving from a 650cc Kawasaki back to the YS125 was a striking experience. In particularly it needs a fistful of revs to pull away at more than walking pace. Up to 50mph it keeps up with traffic, topping out at around 65mph in fifth gear, although I have only briefly touched that speed, and the speedo over-indicates, so it was probably more like 60mph.

The biggest problem is handling - not so much cornering but staying planted on bad roads. On regular roads the YS125 doesn't have a problem, although it tends to smash over potholes, but it copes poorly with ruts. It has a habit of tramlining, as if it wants to follow ruts in the road rather than bumping over them, and in general I wouldn't want to ride in the countryside in poor weather at high speed on a YS125. On the other hand mine still has stock tyres, so perhaps the problem is the tyres.

That's about all the bad stuff I can think of. It has no integral storage at all, beyond a small compartment for a toolkit, but that's motorcycles for you. Did I mention the toolkit? It comes with a toolkit:

The lack of storage makes it awkward if you're going to be a delivery driver. Where are you going to put your helmet and security chain, hmm? Despite the sluggish performance it's still inherently fun to ride a motorbike though, and as a tool for learning how to use gears it worked in my case, as I now have a full motorcycle licence.

On the used market prices from dealers vary from £1000 or so to £1800 depending on condition. A scan of eBay suggests that anything less than £1000 has masses of rust, and anything above £2000 is wishful thinking, bearing in mind that a brand-new Honda CB125F is only £3000. The YBR is still widely available used, and older YBRs have a classic, retro look that has aged well, although I have no idea if the YBR was ULEZ-compliant or not.

Incidentally, the YBR's predecessor was the carburetted SR125, which looks great but dates back to the 1980s. My hunch is that the few SR125s available nowadays are valuable antiques. There was also a 250cc version of the YBR, with a 21 bhp engine. To confuse matters Yamaha still seems to sell a version of the YBR125 in Pakistan, as the YB125Z-DX, but it's not formally imported into the UK.

Is that it? Can I stop now? My impression is that the equivalent Honda, the CBF125, holds its value slightly better, and judging by the reviews the Honda had one extra horsepower. But I imagine that either one will teach you how to ride a geared bike, after which you have the choice of selling it to the next student, or keeping it and using it for errands.

Peugeot Tweet 125: Because Somebody Has To

Let's have a look at the Peugeot Tweet 125, a 125cc scooter sold by Peugeot. Despite being on the market for almost fifteen years the Tweet is surprisingly obscure. The internet has one professional review, from Motorcycle News. I've only ever seen a handful in the wild, including this one in Turin, Italy:

The Tweet is actually made by SYM of Taiwan. It's a rebadged SYM Symphony 125, identical except for the badges. Peugeot sells the Tweet here in the UK for around £2800, vs around £2500 for a Symphony, but I live near a Peugeot dealership, and they threw in a top box, so that swayed my hand. Mine is the 2023 model. There's a slightly more modern update that has USB charging and a different headlight arrangement.

Why did I buy a scooter? Two reasons. I've managed to avoid learning to drive a motorised vehicle right up to middle age. Partially because I lived in London for several years, and also because the places I like to visit - Italy, for example - have great public transport. Or in the case of Greenland the only roads are dirt tracks.

But knowing how to drive will be a useful skill at some point, and a 125cc scooter is a handy way to learn the roads, so I booked a Compulsory Basic Training course and bought a cheap scooter. Two years later I am now a fully-licenced A-class motorcyclist, and perhaps at some point I'll learn how to drive a car, just in time for them to be banned, or something.

The other reason is that I have a soft spot for Italy. I remember the first time I went there. I was envious of the Italians buzzing around on their scooters. I had nothing like that when I was a kid. Here in the UK scooters are surprisingly unpopular - everybody gets a car instead, perhaps because of the weather - but in Italy they're all over the place:

Now that I have a motorcycle licence I can in theory hire a scooter when I'm abroad, but I really need a bit of practice before tackling Italy's roads. In the UK scooters have taken off over the last few years for delivery drivers, but they have to compete with bicycles and electric scooters, which don't even require a training certificate. Hanging over them all is a looming transition to electric motors, which will hit the scooter market hard, because it's difficult to put a big battery into a small scooter and sell it cheaply.

Peugeot has a modest range of scooters. The two most popular are the hilariously-named Speedfight, a 50cc model that looks like a much bigger scooter, and the Django, a good-looking Vespa clone. The Tweet is Peugeot's budget model, seemingly inspired by the Honda SH125. As with the SH125 it has 16" wheels at the front and back, vs 12" or 13" on most other scooters. Peugeot even calls it "the big-wheel scooter". Larger wheels cope better with potholes, which is useful in the UK.

Ye gods, it's filthy

The Tweet has the same GY6-style four-stroke engine as every other scooter in the world. It makes a soft burble when it idles and the electronic starter catches on the second beat. The engine is EURO 5 emissions compliant, and according to TFL's website the Tweet doesn't trigger the ULEZ charge. It has front and rear disc brakes with ABS, which actually makes it more sophisticated than my Yamaha YS125 motorbike. Transmission is automatic, with a CVT belt. Supercharger? No.

The internet gives varying figures for power, but the manual says 7.5kw, which is just over 10bhp, four less than the legal maximum. It weighs around 120kg with fuel. I have no trouble moving it around. There's also a 150cc model, not sold in the UK, that has one more horsepower. The 150cc model exists because that's the legal minimum capacity for the Italian autostrada.

I've driven my Tweet on a dual carriageway, and on the flat it will sustain 65mph, although the experience is terrifying.

Back in July 2023 I visited Middle Wallop's Wings and Wheels festival on this very scooter.

The 2023-model Tweet doesn't have USB charging, or a navigation system, or anything fancy. It's interesting to compare it with my YS125. Instinctively I would expect the motorcycle to be faster, but the Tweet actually feels more rapid off the line and up to 50mph, perhaps because it's lighter, or perhaps the CVT is more efficient than my left foot, or the technology is more modern. The suspension is softer, and the tyres tend to bash over potholes and ruts rather than tramlining, so it actually feels more stable.

The one problem is riding at dead-slow speeds. With a manual-clutch motorcycle this isn't too hard, but the Tweet activates neutral below a certain speed, so it has trouble crawling forwards at walking pace. I find myself lurching forward, then gently coasting. This isn't really specific to the Tweet, it's a consequence of CVTs in general.

125cc motorcycles and scooters are frustrating. They're just slightly too little for general motoring in the UK, at least outside a city. It's not so much the performance, which is van-like, but the fact that 125cc bikes and scooters tend to have weak suspension and brakes. There's a market on the continent for beefed-up 200-300cc scooters, but here in the UK the licensing requirements are such that mid-sized maxi-scooters are very rare. Above the age of 24 it makes sense to get a full A-class manual licence, at which point why not buy a full-sized motorcycle, hmm? Only a few riding schools in the UK even have an A or A2-compliant automatic scooter on which to perform the necessary tests.

Still, back to the Tweet. The storage box isn't quite large enough for a full helmet, doubly so once I stow away my padlock and chain, which means that the rear top-box is almost mandatory. The storage compartment appears to be airtight. If I leave a damp cloth inside it the compartment quickly starts to smell musty.

The Tweet is compatible with E10 fuel. The manual says that the tank has a capacity of five litres, but I find that after depleting the tank to a flashing single bar on the meter the most I can put in, with the scooter on the centre stand, is around four litres, which is around £5.60. The manual also suggests a fuel consumption of around 84mpg, which seems reasonable enough. A lot of petrol stations claim that they will only dispense a minimum of five litres of fuel, so I always feel slightly guilty when I fill my Tweet.

I bought mine brand-new with a discount in February 2023 and have driven it for just over 2000 miles, with a professional service at the 500-mile change-the-manufacturer's-oil mark. For the first 500km the manual recommends not sustaining more than half-throttle, and from 500-1000km not more than three-quarters throttle.

During the time I've owned it the only trouble was on the hottest day of 2023, when the temperature reached around 32c - and only then it was slightly slow to start. During the winter, at temperatures of just below 0c, it starts, then seems to bog a little bit, but quickly settles. Beyond that it starts with two chugs of the motor every time. Tell a lie; shortly after getting it the motor wouldn't start at all, but that's because I forgot to flick the yellow cutoff switch (visible in the photo above) to the UNLOCK position. Whoops.

Any other problems? The left headlight stalk tends to trap water, perhaps because the bike sits tilted to that side when it's at rest. I find that even a day after it has rained the stalk continues to drip, which makes me wonder if it'll rust out. But the stalk itself unscrews easily - you have to do that to fit a mobile phone mount - and spares are readily available.

Do I have anything else to say about the Tweet? Over the course of a year it hasn't let me down, and although I've passed my test I have no plans to sell it, because it's handy. In the UK it tends to be overshadowed by the Honda Vision 110, which has slightly less power but much better fuel consumption. The Vision 110 is the same price, £2800, and it's a Honda. Everybody likes Honda. "You meet the nicest people on a Honda."

Within Peugeot's own range the Django is much more striking, and as mentioned the Tweet is essentially a SYM Symphony, so it's technically not a Peugeot. It has to be said that Peugeot hasn't gone out of its way to sell the Tweet, and I was wary of buying one because "what the heck is a Peugeot Tweet?". But I like it, and I'll probably end up riding it until the exhaust rusts out and petrol motors are banned, because it's incredibly easy to drive and keeps up with traffic.

Tiny Core Linux on a ThinkPad X60s

Let's have a brief look at Tiny Core Linux, a tiny Linux distribution. It's only 23mb! Or 240mb if you want out-of-the-box WiFi support and a choice of different languages. That's a far cry from the days of the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST, when operating systems could fit into a 256kb ROM chip, but it's still very impressive for something that can connect to the internet.

Now, I didn't explore it in any depth, and I wasn't expecting something I could use on a day-to-day basis. I think of Tiny Core Linux as a kind of singing dog. It doesn't matter what tune the dog sings, it's enough that it can sing at all.

In the image above I've connected my old X60s to the internet with an Ethernet cable. Tiny Core Linux doesn't come as standard with WiFi support. I tried out the Core Plus version, which has WiFi, but although it detected my WiFi network it couldn't connect. My hunch is that the WiFi card in my X60s is too old to support modern encryption. You might have better luck than I did.

The oldest laptop I own is an IBM ThinkPad 600X, but it doesn't boot from USB, so I used my circa-2006 ThinkPad X60s as a guinea pig instead. Mine has the chassis of an X60s, but the lid of an X61, because I swapped the screens. The X61's screen was getting yellowy and old.

Tiny Core Linux's website is vague about the minimum hardware requirements, but it apparently needs at least 48mb of RAM. My X60s has three gigabytes of memory, so it's good to go.

The X60s-for-slimline model is a distant ancestor of the X1 Carbon. It has a low-voltage, dual-core, 32-bit Core Duo processor running at 1.66ghz, with a slimmer heatsink than the standard X60. In theory it'll run Windows 10 - probably very badly - but I've left Windows XP on mine for compatibility reasons.

The X60 in general will take 4gb of memory, but the motherboard can only see 3gb, and unlike the X61 it won't accept the popular Middleton custom BIOS that unlocks SATA 2 storage speeds. It's stuck on SATA 1. My X60s has an old SSD in it, but a lot of the SSD's speed is wasted by the slow bus.

The best thing is the keyboard. The X60-61-200-220 generation of ThinkPads had a lovely, lovely keyboard. From the X230 onwards Lenovo moved to an Apple-style design that is, apparently, still very good, but not in the same league.

Overall the X60s is a really nice piece of hardware. Lightweight but solid-feeling, plastic but not in a bad way, with decent ergonomics and a surprising amount of ports, including three USB sockets, an SD card reader, BlueTooth, FireWire 400 - unusual for a PC laptop - and a PCMCIA card slot. It's let down by an Intel GMA graphics chip that was below-average even in 2006, and it only has VGA out, not DVI or HDMI. The 64-bit X61 is more useful nowadays, although the faster models tend to run very hot.

A long time ago you could pick up ThinkPads of a similar vintage for £120 or so. As of 2024 the X60 generation has mostly gone to silicon heaven. After all this time even third-party batteries are dying off, so it's of limited utility as a portable laptop. Enough of the X60s.

I downloaded the regular 23mb version of Tiny Core, which has a graphical interface. There's a command-line-only version that's just 16mb. They're available for both 32-bit and 64-bit processors. I burned the ISO to a USB stick with Etcher on my Mac Mini, which worked flawlessly.

Tiny Core boots at lightning speed. As far as I can tell it loads itself into memory and uses free RAM as a virtual hard drive, which meant that the version of Tiny Core I used wasn't persistent - I had to download everything from scratch whenever I rebooted, but that wasn't particularly onerous. I'm sure it can be persistently installed to a hard drive, I just didn't feel the need. I downloaded Nautilus, a file manager, and it saw the SD card reader, so I used an old SD card to store downloads.

On boot it comes up with a Mac-style dock with a terminal, a control panel, a text editor, and an application repository. In the following image I'm installing Chromium, a web browser:

Initially it didn't work, but after trying to run it from the terminal I realised that I needed to install a supporting library as well:

After installing libEGL Chromium started working. Video is a distant dream, but it did access the internet and render pages, although curiously it only loaded the first few images. Perhaps there's a memory limit:

Unfortunately this version of Chromium is over a decade old, and a lot of websites refused to work because the security certificates were out of date. Perhaps there's a way to update the certificates. I don't know.

I tried out Dillo, another browser that's notable for being small, although it doesn't have support for JavaScript so it's of limited use. It worked! I also tried out a couple of other applications, including FoxIt (a PDF viewer), AbiWord (a word processor that will write PDFs), and Audacity, an audio editor. And DOSBox.

When I say "tried out" I mean "I established that they would run, then closed them":

Running under DOSBox, this is Doepfer's official utility for the A-112 sampler module

And, well, that's Tiny Core Linux. It works on a ThinkPad X60s, and will load and run a bunch of standard applications, albeit that they're all very old and it feels clunky. I have a hunch that TCL is largely pointless on something like an X60s, because the X60s is still sufficiently modern to run full-blown versions of Linux.

It might come into its own on a small development board, or perhaps you something that could sit in a cupboard under the stairs as a media server or firewall or something - although that raises the spectre of the Raspberry Pi, which can do those things in a smaller case. Incidentally the Tiny Core people have a Pi version of Tiny Core if you want to try it out.

It strikes me that Tiny Core has a fundamental problem. Development began in 2009, a few years before the Pi, a few years before a flood of ARM-based development boards. So they made it for x86, and for a while that made sense. But in this day and age x86 feels like a slowly, slowly narrowing dead end, especially for tiny versions of Linux. If you have an old PC gathering dust something like Puppy Linux is more functional. The fact of it being just 23mb is an impressive technical feat though.

Bonus Beat

But that's not all. No! Let's also have a look at Supermium, a port of Google's Chrome browser for older versions of Windows. It sounds vaguely rude but I can't put my finger on it.

Supermium is conceptually a bit like TenFourFox, the it-was-great-while-it-lasted port of FireFox for PowerPC-powered Apple Macintoshes. It's a port of Chrome for versions of Windows that no longer support Chrome, which includes Windows 7, Vista, and XP, with rumours of Windows 2000 support in the works. As mentioned up the page my X60s has XP, so I decided to see if Supermium worked on it.

What's the point? It might be particularly handy if you're running a business that has a bunch of XP machines that have some kind of industrial software, but they have a browser-based front end, or perhaps you need to log into a manufacturer's website to download an updated driver and you have to do it on the local machine. Or maybe you have an ancient Netbook, and you just want something that will check the BBC's news website or Wikipedia etc. Given the age of XP I would be wary of giving Supermium my credentials, but as a dumb internet terminal it might be useful.

The most modern version of Chrome for XP is 49. On my X60s I actually use FireFox, which goes up to version 52:

Why FireFox? Historical inertia. I'm old enough to remember Netscape Navigator. I'm old enough to remember when it became Netscape Communicator. This was back when the version numbers of browsers actually represented real, major changes. Now Mozilla just updates the version number to one-up Google (as I write these words Chrome is at version 122, Firefox is version 123), and in turn Google updates the version number at random, because Google doesn't care what Mozilla does and probably doesn't even like to acknowledge its existence.

I'm digressing here. FireFox 52 works, but again I would be wary of giving it my credentials. As mentioned my ThinkPad X60s has Windows XP, Service Pack 3, with 3gb of memory. Supermium installs without a problem:

And it runs just fine, complete with support for extensions:

Internet video playback is choppy, not unwatchably so, but not pleasant. I assume that's the fault of the X60s' ancient video chip. I was hoping Supermium would break, or something, because then I would have something to write about. A funny anecdote or something. Something about fiddling with the BIOS, or something.

Still, in summary, Supermium installs without any fuss whatsoever on a ThinkPad X60s that has Windows XP SP3 with 3b of memory. It browses the internet more or less exactly like modern Chrome, potentially giving the machine a new lease of life if you're very, very careful about using script blockers and don't plan to give the machine your personal details.

My recollection is that the typical netbook of 2007, 2008 only had 2gb of memory, which might be tight, but on the other hand XP doesn't take up all that much space, so perhaps it would even out.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Let's have a look at The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. A fantasy role-playing game from 2006, two years into Howard Dean's presidency. It was a huge hit, but a few years later it was overshadowed by its sequel, Skyrim, and then it became a joke, the butt of a thousand internet videos that poked fun at its simplistic AI, and nowadays it's a fondly-remembered classic and also a joke. Meet Rena Bruiant:

I remember the first time I bumped into Rena Bruiant. It was like meeting an old friend. I wanted to ask if her husband was okay, but the game didn't have that dialogue option. Does she know that she's famous? Here, in the real world, eighteen years later? Imagine if we could tell the people of Oblivion that they're internet celebrities. They could do personal appearances at conventions, or lease themselves out to other games developers, assuming Bethesda recognised their right to self-determination.

I'm not a fan of role-playing games. I hate them! But I'm broad-minded, and Oblivion was on sale, so I decided to see what the fuss was about. As of 2024 most of the bugs have been patched out, and a popular unofficial patch removes many more. In addition the modern version of the game includes all of the downloadable content and expansion packs.

Oblivion was a pioneer of downloadable content. The "horse armour" DLC was particularly infamous. For the low, low price of 200 Microsoft Points - $2.50, but you had to buy points in blocks of 400 - the player could download a 6mb texture pack that made some of the horses look as if they were wearing armour. It didn't make the horses tougher. It just added some health points and changed their appearance.

Bear in mind that Oblivion is a single-player game. The only person who saw the horse armour was you. The armour isn't even particularly good-looking:

In the publishers' defence the horse armour was an oddity. The other addons were more substantial. There was also a pair of large-scale mission packs, Knights of the Nine (for around $10) and the much more extensive Shivering Isles (for around $30), which got good reviews.

No doubt there was online gnashing of teeth back in 2006 at the thought of paying $69.99 for a game and the same again for the expansions, but as of 2024 the Game of the Year Deluxe version is around £12, and I only paid £3.24, because it was on sale. Such are the benefits of being patient.

What were Microsoft points? They were a virtual currency for the Xbox 360. I mention Microsoft because Oblivion was originally an Xbox-360-and-PC exclusive. It didn't reach the PlayStation 3 until 2007, and even then the PlayStation didn't get the horse armour DLC, only Knights and Shivering Isles.

I have dim memories that Oblivion was controversial with long-term Elder Scrolls fans, because it's a lot more prosaic than its predecessor, Morrowind. The fantasy world of Morrowind was truly alien. The architecture was organic and the player could hitch rides on the back of giant bugs. It only had a little bit of voice acting, but in exchange the dialogue trees were lengthy and detailed.

In comparison Oblivion takes place in a generic medieval fantasy Europe, and the conversations - although fully-voiced - are just a few lines long. It looks a lot more impressive than Morrowind, but it's less imaginative. My natural instinct is to not care at all about this, but with the benefit of hindsight I think the fans of Morrowind actually had a point, because Oblivion's major failing is its blandness.

Original copies of the Xbox 360 version will run on modern Xboxes with backwards compatibility, while PlayStation owners have to make do with a streaming copy of game via Sony's PlayStation Now streaming service, because it was only ever released for the PlayStation 3. To date it hasn't been remastered for later generations of the PlayStation.

The PC version is widely available on Steam and other marketplaces, and in theory boxed copies of the PC original can be made to work under Windows 10 and 11. The PC version supports modding and has a development console, so it's the best version to play nowadays.

There was also a mobile phone spin-off, but this being 2006 the mobile phone port was an isometric 3D affair written in Java that nobody remembers.

Is Oblivion any good? Was it any good in 2006? Has it aged well? The answers are "it's engaging although a lot depends on how you approach it", "yes, it deserved the awards", and "imagine a mixture of cheese and wine" in that order. Oblivion has aged like fine cheese, and also fine wine. It has aged like those MREs that Steve1989 covers - the crackers and cigarettes have got better with time, not so much the canned meat.

What is The Elder Scrolls? It's a fantasy role-playing universe dating from the 1990s, an unusually vague one. It's not a spoof, it's not super-serious, it doesn't aspire to being high art, it's not as gritty as The Witcher, it doesn't have the depth of Baldur's Gate or Diablo, it isn't a deconstruction of role-playing games. It's generic, deliberately so. The series has a tonne of backstory, but it rarely intrudes into the actual games.

A few years ago I had a look at Fallout 3. It uses the same engine as Oblivion and was published by the same company, but two years later. Fallout 3 is sci-fi, Oblivion is fantasy. Back then I described Fallout 3 as the role-playing equivalent of junk food, and Oblivion is much the same. Skyrim perfected the "ambient wash of wandering and quests" model, but Oblivion has that as well. In fact it's surprising how much it accomplishes for a game that came out in 2006. That's a long time ago. In 2006 Call of Duty was still set in the Second World War and Half-Life 2 was still a going concern; Episode Two hadn't come out yet.

The Elder Scrolls games are made by Bethesda Softworks. The pillars of its empire are Fallout and The Elder Scrolls and latterly Starfield. They games are popular but there's a perception they're all the same, and that the company has given up on innovation in favour of pumping out product. Bethesda also publishes the modern Doom games, but that's the publishing part of Bethesda. The developing part, Bethesda Softworks, is separate. They are all owned by a company that is owned by Microsoft. Enough of Bethesda.

The first Elder Scrolls game, Arena (1994), was released for the PC, and only the PC, because in those days the PC was nerd city. It didn't sell very well. The internet suggests that it shifted less than five thousand units. People only remember it today for the cover art, which was about ten years out of date for 1994:

Were breast implants a thing in the world of The Elder Scrolls: Arena? Perhaps they were. The cover stands out because the modern Elder Scrolls games are surprisingly progressive. The armour is gendered, but sensible-looking, and the series takes place in a world where no-one is fazed by green-skinned orcs or cat people. Male and female characters have the same stats, and indeed the player can play as a man or a woman, or an orc, or a lizard-person, or a cat-person etc. There's a certain amount of racial stereotyping, but it's very mild.

Arena's cover is also jarring on a purely stylistic level, because Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim have minimalist artwork. They're packaged as if they were ancient books. The cover art of Oblivion is modelled on an actual book in the game, on the table here, in front of Sean Bean:

After the failure of Arena Bethesda didn't give up. Daggerfall (1996) sold around a million copies, Morrowind (2002) around five million, with around a fifth of those sales on the original Xbox. Oblivion (2006) brought the series into the high-def age of the Xbox 360 and PS3, selling around around ten million copies, but that paled in comparison with Skyrim (2011), which has shifted around sixty million units on a range of platforms, more than the rest of the series combined.

In its day Oblivion was a big hit in its day, and a big thing on the internet, but Skyrim is a legitimate mainstream cultural phenomenon on a par with Grand Theft Auto. The New York Times runs stories about Skyrim streamers and during the COVID lockdown it took on a new lease of life, because no-one was allowed to explore the actual real world any more.

Skyrim is an unusually long-lived game. The 2016 Special Edition remains on sale at full price today. Nowadays it's almost the default modern fantasy game, the archetypal fantasy role-playing game that people who aren't interested in the genre might own. Even I have a copy, and I don't even like role-playing games.

Why not? I grew up at a time when Star Wars and Transformers were cool and He-Man was naff. The swords-and-sorcery genre was pretty embarrassing in the 1980s. You know what was cool? The Terminator and RoboCop, not effing Willow. The few decent fantasy were either too R-rated to develop a big popular following (Conan the Barbarian), or too weird (Excalibur, Time Bandits, Quest for Fire, The Navigator). It wasn't until Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings that fantasy became hip, and even that was an outlier.

Dear god I hate role-playing games. The numbers. The numbers! It's a genre where you can hit a man in the face with an axe and it only does two points of damage because he's wearing iron gauntlets on his wrists. A genre in which the power of a weapon is determined not by its sharpness but by the player's experience points. A genre in which the artifice of gaming is front-and-centre.

I can understand why role-playing games have numbers. I get the historical context. They're derived from table-top wargames, which date from a time when players had to roll dice to work out whether their little soldiers were winning. But that kind of thing doesn't make sense any more. Computers can model ballistics in real time. If I wanted numbers I would play Cookie Clicker, which I also do, but with Cookie Clicker the numbers don't mean anything at all, and I can accept that.

Do you know what amuses me? According to the internet Pokemon is a role-playing game. It's the most popular role-playing franchise of all time. Imagine how angry that makes OG fans of Ultima and The Bard's Tale and Wizardry etc. Their genre is dominated by a game with imaginary monsters. Instead of real monsters. Which are imaginary. I'm going to stop talking about role-playing games now.

But, seriously, if you want to mess with a fan of role-playing games, wait for them to say "I like role-playing games" and reply with "so you're a fan of Pokemon for example" and then cast a spell of invisibility or something.

Who is the hero of The Elder Scrolls? There isn't one, each game has a different main character. Who is the villain? There's a different one in each game. Some kind of wizard. The Elder Scrolls takes place in a world where everybody can cast spells, but there's a bit of science as well. It has elements of Greco-Roman mythology, bits of Tolkien, bits of Dungeons and Dragons, bits of Lewis Carroll, the list goes on.

Early in Oblivion I met a bunch of stereotypical European medieval monks, but they were armed with Japanese samurai katanas. They took me to a Himalayan monastery located just north of a town seemingly modelled on Bavarian Germany. The monastery was full of Roman legionnaires. The whole game is like this. It mixes a bunch of fantasy and historical elements into a thick, slightly bland soup.

Tonally the series has no swearing ("bastard" is about as bad as it gets), very little sex, some sanitised violence. The occasional diversions into darkness are generally played as black comedy. The game does dabble in unpleasantness, most in the expansion packs, but you have to actively seek it out.

For the most part Oblivion is however lightweight stuff. Having never played it before I was surprised at how close to Doom it was in places. The plot involves an invasion by satanic monsters that emerge from portals to hell, just like in Doom, and there are skinned corpses and piles of gore but they're too low-poly to be disturbing.

Incidentally the game was launched in the United States with a T-for-Teen ESRB rating, but the rating was increased to M-for-Mature shortly afterwards on account of a mixture of the aforementioned gore plus a default no-clothes skin that had nipples. Oblivion is still M, but it's very hard to take seriously nowadays.

The Elder Scrolls games are notable for is its technology. Daggerfall had an enormous open-world map roughly the size of the United Kingdom, with thousands of procedurally-generated dungeons. Morrowind and Oblivion had smaller, but still very large maps dotted with masses of locations, notable in that the player could run from one end of the world to the other with only minimal loading pauses. Unfortunately Oblivion was developed during what is now known as the "shedloads of bloom" era, when everything that was even slightly reflective glowed with the power of a thousand suns:

Well, that told me

I have the impression Oblivion was supposed to look like real life in 2006. I was alive back then, and having had a go at the PlayStation 3 version I can see why it felt like a generational leap. Morrowind had the same engine, but the environment was shrouded in fog and everything was brown or green. Oblivion on the other hand has a huge draw distance - the PS3 fades objects in and out, which works well - and it's a riot of colour. 2006 was just slightly before the "real is brown" trend in video games, so in that respect Oblivion has aged backwards, a bit like Mirror's Edge.

Almost twenty years later the realism aspect has dated hilariously, but Oblivion is still a good-looking game, albeit in a different way. The neon colours and plastic terrain now look like a deliberate stylistic choice, like The Long Dark or Zelda: Breath of the Wild, rather than a failed attempt at realism. It's a rare example of a game that has gone from looking great, to looking naff, to looking great again but in a different way. If I was remastering it I would improve the scenery pop-in, tart up the dungeons, licence a more realistic terrain generator, but otherwise leave it alone.

The music has also aged well, in a straightforward way. It's just legitimately good. The Elder Scrolls games have orchestral-style soundtracks that make the games seem more expensive than they are. I say orchestra-style because they have a whiff of sampled strings about them, but the orchestration is solid, and Oblivion is particularly lovely:

I played Oblivion on a Windows 10 PC in 2024 and it was generally unproblematic. Unlike Fallout 3 it doesn't have to be patched to get rid of the now-defunct Games for Windows Live. On a subjective level it felt slightly newer than Fallout 3 or Fallout: New Vegas. I'm not sure if it was the denser foliage, the more diverse colour palette, the grass, or the more expensive-sounding music.

It crashed in places, but the game generously auto-saves, so I didn't lose anything. This being 2024 I could run the game at 1920x1080 with all the sliders turned to maximum. I didn't use any mods.

Bethesda's role-playing games all share a formula. It was established with Arena but perfected by Oblivion, and the company hasn't felt the need to change things since. They all take place in a large, open world that has a handful of city hubs that exist as separate sub-worlds, plus several dozen smaller settlements, plus hundreds of little places that might have a small quest or a collectible sword or something.

Early in the game the player is given a main quest, but there's no time limit, and the player is free to explore the world and complete side-quests instead. The idea is that the player has to toughen up a bit before tackling the main villain, although Oblivion is odd in that respect. It's actually better to get Oblivion's main quest over with as quickly as possible and then explore the world later on. I'll explain why in a moment.

The games all use a first-person perspective. They take place in a sped-up version of real time, with a day-night cycle and changing weather, and they're filled with non-player characters who have their own sleep-wake-work-eat-sleep cycles. They feel like a living world, although on a fundamental level the non-player characters are just little robots who have a schedule and a set of stock responses.

I'm old enough to remember The Hobbit on the ZX Spectrum, in which the player could ask other characters to pick things up or go north or whatever, which was heady stuff in 1982. The idea of an adventure game with other characters that led independent lives was cutting-edge at the time, although it didn't work very well.

In contrast Oblivion is infamous for its stilted, artificial NPC conversations, but for the most part the NPC scheduling and scripting works. I found that pitched battles involving lots of characters sometimes ended with my allies committing fratricide, because a stray firebolt or arrow had hit a friendly target, but for the most part Oblivion's AI is transparent, in its goofy way. The internet is full of tales of people spending hours living in its world, exploring and collecting furniture and exploring, because it's a nice place to visit. Albeit that the locals are odd.

Oblivion's AI is the stuff of legends. NPCs have a bunch of conversation fragments they deploy when they walk past each other. "How goes it", "I've been better", "goodbye!", "how goes it", "I've been better", "I saw a mudcrab the other day", "goodbye!". There's a player reputation aspect, which means that NPCs are bizarrely passive-aggressive at the beginning of the game. They begin conversations with a warm greeting, then dismiss the player with "not you again" and "stop talking". There's a whole conversational mini-game that involves gauging the NPC's facial expressions, which leads to some odd instances where NPCs switch from smiling to frowning as if they had suddenly received an instruction from the radio in their brain, which I suppose technically they had.

The game has just over eight hundred voiced characters, but only fifteen voice actors, which includes a small number of celebrities who only voice a little bit of dialogue. Oblivion established a Bethesda trademark whereby the company spent a lot of money on celebrity voice actors - Patrick Stewart, Sean Bean, Terence Stamp, and Lynda Carter - but then did nothing to publicise this, which raises the question of why they bothered. I was unaware that Patrick Stewart was in the game until after I started playing it.

Bethesda did the same again with Fallout 3, which had Liam Neeson as the hero's dad, and New Vegas, which had Kris Kristofferson and Matthew Perry. I have a theory that the people who make Bethesda's games love hiring actors and being in the studio with them, but are terrified to give them direction because they don't have a clear vision of what the characters should sound like, and they're scared to tell Patrick Stewart et al how to do their jobs.

Stewart voices the doomed Emperor Uriel Septim, but he doesn't have time to make an impression. His performance slips into ham at the very end - "you must shut the gates - OF OBLIVION!" - but there's nothing wrong with it otherwise. His reaction to the death of his sons is effectively underplayed.

Terence Stamp isn't nearly as good, which puzzled me. He sounds as if he's reading the script for the first time. Oblivion comes with a "making-of" documentary that includes footage of Stamp's recording session, where he does indeed appear to be reading directly from the script - amusingly he also voices the WARG! and YAHH! combat noises, acting out sword thrusts and parries - but it was in a professional recording studio, with direction and the opportunity to do multiple takes. And yet Stamp sounds hesitant, as if none of the fantasy words mean anything to him.

Sean Bean on the other hand is terrific. He plays reluctant heir Martin Septim, who resolves to do the best he can despite overwhelming odds. Without wishing to spoil things there's a twist at the end whereby the game reveals he was the hero all along, and the player was just a supporting character, but Bean is so charismatic I didn't mind. He was hired late in the day but delivers by far the best performance in the game. Even many months later I can still hear Sean Bean in my head saying the word "Akatosh".

Lynda Carter chipped in seemingly as a favour to her husband, who was at the time one of the co-owners of Bethesda Softworks. She voiced a few generic characters in Morrowind, a bunch of NPCs in Oblivion and Skyrim, but had a much larger role in Fallout 4, where she played a major character who sang a bunch of original songs.

That left around eleven voice actors for the remaining eight hundred characters. In Oblivion's defence the voice acting is at least competent. The actors emote appropriately and the quest-giving characters each have the germ of a distinct personality and voice. But generic, background NPCs often sound as if they're having conversations with themselves, and entire character classes - the guards, the cat-like Khajiit, every single one of the generic Oblivion baddies - have the same voice, as if they were the same people inhabiting different bodies.

Apparently the team recorded even more dialogue, but the game had to fit on a single DVD, so half of the generic dialogue was chopped out. The PlayStation 3 version came on a high-capacity Blu-Ray disc, but none of the extra dialogue was put back, which is a shame.

On a technical level every Elder Scrolls game from Morrowind onwards uses the same basic scripting engine, but with upgraded graphics. Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Fallout: New Vegas share an iteration of the engine that has plastic terrain and a curiously flat, shadowless look. Skyrim and Fallout 4 use the next generation of the engine, with vastly better lighting, although some things haven't changed. In every game from Morrowind in 2002 to at least Fallout 4 in 2015 the player can see through water by hovering the viewpoint just below the surface :

Fallout 4 (bottom) isn't quite as obvious, but the problem is still there

Oblivion was the first game in the series with a modern-style physics engine, but the game generally doesn't make use of it in a significant way. There's a telekinesis spell, but I don't recall any quests that needed it. Skyrim apparently has some traps that can be bypassed by putting a weighty object on them. If Oblivion has anything like that I haven't found it.

The game has a quirk that makes things easier if the player does the main quest early on. There's a complicated system of skills and attributes that advance each time the player jumps or sneaks or slashes or blocks or casts a spell etc. The overall system is arcane, although actual skill point advancement just involves repeating an action numerous times. There are tales of players putting weights on the controller buttons to continually cast low-level spells, or using a rubber band to continually sneak in a room with a sleeping NPC in order to boost their stealth.

When the player sleeps he or she advances up a level, but as the player advances the monsters advance as well, in lockstep, so unless the player concentrates on building up their health and combat skills the game becomes harder. Or rather the enemies take longer to kill, because they have more health. A levelled player is stronger, but so are the baddies, so the combat just takes longer. Pity the player who decides to major on speechcraft and lockpicking, because those skills are useless during the big combat sequences.

To make things worse non-player characters don't advance in level, so late-game escort quests are teeth-grindingly difficult. And so a perfectly legitimate strategy is to play the whole game at a low level, fighting a mixture of rats, skeletons, and weak barbarians throughout the entire storyline. For my playthrough I gradually advanced to level twenty, at which point the game deploys its whole array of monsters, and I can confirm that the combat just gets slower and more boring as the game goes on. The quest rewards are more powerful, but everything takes more damage, so I never felt as if I was actually advancing.

Story-wise Oblivion begins with the death of Emperor Uriel Septim, who is assassinated as part of a co-ordinated campaign of regicide. His sons are killed, too, leaving the throne of the land of Tamriel vacant.

Or so it seems. With his dying wish Septim asks the player to deliver an amulet to a humble priest, Brother Martin of Weynon Priory. It turns out that Martin is the Emperor's illegitimate son from way back. Martin is unprepared for emperor-hood, but he doesn't have time to reconsider, because evil Oblivion Gates start to appear throughout the land, spewing out monsters. The player learns how to close the gates by passing through them into the satanic realms beyond and stealing a special artefact, but the gates keep coming.

There's a bit of detective work, a lot of fetch quests, and a big battle at the end to close the gates once and for all, and on the whole the main quest is straightforward and a bit dull. An awful lot of people who played Oblivion in the 2000s never bothered with the main quest. It was designed so that the player could complete it at a low level, so none of it is especially hard, although the Oblivion gates can be tricky if the player hasn't put skill points into combat. My hunch is that the developers completed the main quest first, then had fun with the side-quests, because the main quest itself is linear and dull.

Oblivion feels like a prototype of Bethesda's later games. The player has a reputation system, akin to the karma in Fallout 3, but it doesn't play a major role in the game. There isn't an option to betray Martin Septim and side with the villain, or kill everybody and declare godhood. There are different factions, but they don't have any bearing on the main plot. The main quest is completely linear, without even the ending slides of the Fallout games.

The random side-quests tend to be very simple as well. They mostly involve travelling from point A to point B to find a special amulet, then returning to point B to hand it in. At one point a chap asked me to kill a bunch of drug dealers holed up in a local house. I was expecting a twist. Was he a rival dealer? Was he using me to kill a bunch of innocent people? Was there a special way of approaching the quest? But no, there wasn't a twist. I just had to go in, kill them, then go back for my reward. Most of the quests are like that.

There are several round-robin quests that involve visiting a series of locations one after the other. In particular there's an annoying side-quest where the player assembles an army to defend the city of Bruma, which involves taking down a series of Oblivion gates, one after the other, in order to persuade that city to send release some soldiers. It's tedious because there are only half a dozen Oblivion maps - essentially small-scale combat arenas with a central tower and some loot - so the quest gets boring quickly. I eventually found myself running to the top of the tower, ignoring most of the baddies, and that is apparently a fairly popular solution.

Overall Oblivion is the opposite of something like Deus Ex or BioShock. Those games are deep but narrow, while Oblivion - with its array of sidequests and diversions - is shallow, but a thousand miles wide.

Another issue is environmental storytelling, which is embryonic. The Fallout games are designed in such a way that each location tells a little story. From Fallout 3 I still remember the couple above, and also a radio broadcast from a chap frantically asking for medical assistance for his son, and the nurse-led refugee station that became overwhelmed with the sick etc.

Oblivion is much simpler. It has a few ghostly visions and mysterious pools of blood, some ransacked rooms, but for the most part the dungeons are just generic caves. The game also suffers from a curiously flat atmosphere. Half a decade earlier there was a great game called Thief: The Dark Project, which in some respects resembles Oblivion, but the maps were spookier. Oblivion has a stealth aspect, but it's simplistic, and I never felt scared.

The third thing that stands out is the lack of survival aspect. The game has all the elements - food, drink, cutlery, plates, fires etc - and the player character can even combine consumables to make potions, but the player never needs to actually eat or drink. Or even sleep, which makes the inns and taverns feel slightly pointless. I can't really criticise Oblivion for this because 2006 was a long time ago, and survival didn't come to Bethesda's games until New Vegas in 2010, but it's frustrating how close the developers got to something that was fashionable just a few years later.

A good example of Oblivion's cosy map design, ten years before "hygge" was a thing. Cosy design was something that Skyrim ran with.

I have to admit that I've only played the main quest and a smattering of side quests. The lengthy Dark Brotherhood plotline - in which the player becomes an assassin - is apparently much more interesting, and Shivering Isles gets good reviews. A quest in which I had to venture into a character's dream world stood out for its imaginative design, but beyond that the other quests blended into each other.

Now, you probably have the impression that I dislike Oblivion. The quests are simplistic and it doesn't have a distinctive atmosphere. The combat consists mostly of dashing forward, slashing with a sword, then dashing back again. The dungeons all look the same. The characters don't stand out. The levelling system is such that some weapons, notably bows, become useless later in the game. The main quest involves a lot of fetching things. The final battle is essentially a big cutscene.

But I found myself warming it it. Warming to the lovely sunsets and the attractive grass. The game works as as a kind of ambient entertainment. The internet has numerous tales of people playing Oblivion on and off for months, dipping into the sidequests every now and again and simply exploring the world. The countryside takes an appreciable time to traverse, and after a while most things respawn, so the player can tackle the dungeons more than once, trying out different weapons each time.

And it's fun to just hang around in town, seeing what bizarro nonsense the NPCs come up with. Moreso than Fallout 3, because the town hubs of Oblivion are larger and have more people. So I suppose Oblivion works better as a role-playing game than a standalone adventure. And there's always the possibility that by prodding the NPCs and trying to make them do crazy things they might develop consciousness.

Incidentally, here's what the PS3 version looks like:

The PS3 version doesn't have the foliage draw distance of the PC version, or even any graphical options beyond "brightness", but it's still good-looking, and recognisably the same game

On top of that, I have to remember that the game came out in 2006. I began to appreciate it more when I had a go at the PlayStation 3 version, because that brought home just how old the game is.

In 2006 the game was widely hailed as a masterpiece, because there wasn't anything quite like it, and if it has been spoiled by Fallout 4 and Skyrim nowadays that isn't Oblivion's fault. From mighty... from little acorns, something. Mighty oaks something.