Yes, I’m still playing Morrowind. No, I don’t have an X-Box 360 and no I don’t have a PC powerful enough to run Oblivion. So I still play Morrowind. Call me a dinosaur. Through the miracle of the anthology disc I still play SMASH TV and Mortal Kombat II. I might be a gaming dinosaur, but by God I know a good game when I see it.

And Morrowind is a good game. While not as open-ended as the developers would like for you to believe (try playing the game as a bard who may be a slick talker but can’t wield a sword or is so weak he can only wear light armor and see just how far you get), it is still one of the only truly non-linear games out there. And it still allows for some quite open-ended game play. I’m not familiar with too many games out there that allow you to say “bugger all this” to the main quest and run around wacking shopkeepers with a battle-axe that deals both lightning AND fire damage—while wearing nothing but your skivvies.

But there is another fun bit of Morrowind that keeps me coming back for more: glitches. Morrowind has some of the greatest gaming glitches ever, whether it be stacking up items and then removing them all but the top piece of the stack so that it floats in the air or exploiting a loop-hole in the spell-making system to level up your character to God-like status in just under two hours, sometimes I’ll start a new game of Morrowind just to see what fun I can have with a clean slate. One of my characters is appropriately named Azrael, after the Islamic angel of death. He can kill you with one punch because his strength is over 2,000. And don’t even think about killing him—his health is just over 20,000. One time I used a spell to jack his Speed upwards of 6,000. I tilted the joystick forward and all of a sudden I was at the very edge of the in-game world’s map. True, I have a character that I haven’t exploited any glitches with, and whenever I play for a long time with him it’s more rewarding and I feel like I’ve accomplished something and what have you, but playing with Azrael is just plain fun. I don’t even bother with the main quest with him; I’m just a guild-hopping avenger amassing wealth to buy bigger swords. Not that I need them; I have a permanent bound long sword in my inventory.

I can hear them now, the hardcore gamers calling me a cheater. But might I remind you that I haven’t inputted a single code, a single series of button presses. No. All I did was pay for some attribute-enhancing spells and cast each one of them about 40 times. I gained my great and terrible abilities with hard-earned (or stolen) money.

And there are those that would say I still cheated. In my mind, I didn’t cheat. My defense of this stance is that quite simply, it’s in the game. Had I had had the PC version of the game and called up the command console and typed in “player->additem daedric_dai_katana 1” to put a strong weapon into my inventory while still at the very beginning of the game, then I would have cheated. What I did was exploit an element inherent in the game’s design that did not instantly change anything about my character, which is not cheating. The difference is that a “cheat” instantly changes an element of the game. Using Morrowind as an example, I created spells to jack my stats into the stratosphere, but I still had to use the spells. Not to mention the fact that I had to do some in-game footwork to be able to make the spells. Had I used the code to instantly refuel my health level whenever it went down I would’ve been cheating.

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