Whoops. I killed the Overseer and Amata was crying about me killing her dad...yeesh, what a whiner. I redid that part, actually, because at first I had no idea how to handle it without slaughtering everyone...see what Oblivion did to me?!? I can't resolve issues without killing someone!
I've worded and reworded my impression of that birthday party over and over in my head, but simply stated: that was the most depressing birthday party I've ever been to. And I was roughed up by one of the guests, too. Does this Pip-Boy gadget have a self-destruct nuke thingy like in Predator? That'd be sweet. Goodbye, muthafuckas...
[The following was spoiled for me when I watched the official gameplay trailers, so I'll cover it for those who don't want to know yet.]
Hey! I ran into
Lucien Lachance in Megaton. He wanted me to do something really awful to the town. I wanted to ask if I would be doing it for
Sithis, but it wasn't in the dialog.

I think I started liking this game more when I was able to forget that I was a badass at all times back in Oblivion (having a sword that does 258 points of damage is very good for one's self-esteem), and just trying to survive. As usual in my first runthrough of an RPG, I take the moral high ground; after completion, the next character sets about being...morally flexible.

Even so, after being jerked around by Moriarty I was about to tell
Mr. Lachance that I was all for doing his bidding. But I persevered and actually did some good. Probably. Right now, I'm helping Moira with her Survival Guide, and I'm just about to head out to Minefield to do some field research on landmines.
I'm playing a trigger-happy person with medical skills (Dr. Becker: "I will kill you. And then I'll use my powers as a physician to bring you back to life. And then, I will kill you again."), but I find that when I go into buildings, such as the Gemantown Police Station, I rely upon stealth and trickery. But it's balanced out by the fact that I kill all the bad guys anyway.
And lockpicking. Crap. I KNEW some day I'd need to put a few points into Security...uh...Lockpicking, I mean.
At least the experience/leveling mechanic is different from the TES games, so that I'm not just exploring for the sole purpose of power-leveling. Hang on, gotta jump around the landscape like an idiot while casting restore health spells on myself. That kind of thing.
Almost forgot: two more crashes. This time, they were in-game lockups. Nothing as serious as others have been experiencing (the Bethsoft F3 tech help forums are a hoppin' little juke joint), but annoying. It seems that, for some, the game just locks up and/or CTDs. No one really knows why, but a few workarounds have been offered. I read one mod's thread that said the problem may be due to the game relying on certain codecs that are associated with progs other than WMP (which the game expects), and he suggested changing the file associations of .ogg and .mp3 to point to WMP.
Okay, I'll point the .ogg's to WMP, but there is no way in hell that I'm using WMP to play my mp3s. I have Winamp for a reason, damn them.
This is typical Bethesda. I love their games to death, but they always let slip some enjoyment-killing fuckup that should've been caught during beta testing.
ANYWAY, I don't know if the ogg thing worked or not, but I played for a while after doing so without any problems. I still don't think it had anything to do with file associations; it's probably just some random audio bug. I did resolve my problem with the darkness by jacking my gamma all the way up and disabling HDR, which I never liked anyway. It only works in HL2, anyway.

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I think Bethesda should license the Source engine for TESV. Instead of using the buggy old Oblivion engine, get an engine that WORKS, looks good, and has exceptional support to help you out when your elves start acting up.