Yesterday, Bethesda released their long-awaited Creation Kit, which gives every owner of Skyrim on the PC access to modding tools. Not just any modding tools, but the same ones used by Bethesda to create the game. If you’ve already messed around with the tools for earlier Bethesda titles, then you should feel right at home here. Otherwise, you might check out their official YouTube channel, where they have already uploaded three tutorials on how to use the kit.

Also released was the Skyrim Workshop. Despite only having been up for less than 24 hours, there are already over 300 mods available. Most notable is one that was designed by Valve. This particular mod involves everyone’s favorite personality core, the Space Core. You will be able to watch him crash land, and listen to him babble on and on about the place he loves the most.

Last but not least, we have Bethesda’s super secret surprise. This one is a real treat. They’ve given us a High-Res Texture Pack. This takes their already beautiful game, and makes it look even better. Just be aware that with higher resolution textures comes greater hardware demands. The company recommends “a minimum of 4GB of system RAM, and a DirectX 9.0c compatible NVIDIA or AMD ATI video card with at least 1 GB of RAM.”

“I am sworn to carry your burdens.” This has to be one of the most annoying lines I’ve ever heard in a video game. Out of context, it doesn’t seem that bad. However, when you’ve heard it a few hundred times, it really starts to get on your nerves. It’s not that I hate hearing repeated phrases mind you. Nor is it simply the sarcastic tone in which she says it. It’s the fact that even if I’m trying to hand her a sweet  new weapon that I’ve traveled the world to find, just for her, she still bitches about carrying my burdens.

There are a few ways to solve this problem. The easiest would be to utter those sweet, three little words that you know she deserves to hear. However, if you’d rather she stay among the living, rather than flying off the mountainside, you could always install the Less Bitchy Lydia mod.

This is one of the most beautifully simple mods that I’ve seen. The only thing it does is change the line “I am sworn to carry your burdens” to “What do you want me to carry?”. The line was already recorded, so it’s in the same voice that you would expect.

Yesterday we showed you Bethesda’s teaser video for the upcoming Creation Kit for Skyrim. This will finally make most of the company’s development tools available to consumers, so that the game can be customized to your liking. What the company failed to tell us was exactly when the kit would be available.

Thanks to a Tweet from @Bethblog we at least know that we don’t have very long at all to wait. In response to one user’s question, they announced that the Creation Kit would be coming next week.

We can only assume that the Skyrim Workshop will be rolling out at the same time as the kit. It would only make sense, as the two are closely tied together. We’ll only know for sure once the kit rolls out sometime next week.

One of the reasons that Bethesda is among my favorite game developers is their commitment to bringing us tools for modding. Here’s a company that doesn’t just want to make awesome games for you to play, they also want to give you the ability to change the game, and make it your own.

The company has released a teaser video of their upcoming Creation Kit for Skyrim. It looks as though it will be much the same as we’ve seen in previous titles, with a few updates. The biggest new feature is called Skyrim Workshop, and is an area within Steam that will allow you to upload your mods, so that they can be easily discovered by people, rated, and downloaded. It will even ensure that the latest version of your mods are downloaded each time you want to play the game.

What’s really nice is that they aren’t forcing you to use Skyrim Workshop for your mods. They specifically mentioned that sites like Skyrim Nexus will have no problems offering mods like they have in the past. The Creation Kit will not break existing mods. Now the only question is when they are going to actually release this.

There’s been an ongoing thread on the net where the community brings us some of our most favorite game locations that have been recreated in Minecraft. Minecraft is arguably one of the best PC phenomenons to hit the gaming community period, and every week we get to see brand new genius creations from all over the world.

This week we’ve got something from the Wild West era, a recreation that will warm the hearts of all the outlaws in the land. Both Red Dead Redemption’s Armadillo and city of Blackwater have been re-imagined with 8-bit proportions. From the sophisticated city streets to the rolling tumbleweeds of the western town, this map mod will give players everything they want from the Rockstar Games smash hit.

Once you download the map mod you can either tear down the entire design, make your own improvements, or pretend to run a cattle ranch from within the Minecraft world. The mod is available via Planet Minecraft, and it’s totally worth the download. Go ahead and Westernize your Minecraft experience now, or forever remain a lonely cowpoke.

For all Minecraft players out there, the mods are what help keep the game truly interesting. Players really stretch their creative minds with Minecraft, and they create works of art with the tools they are given. Today’s creation hits all of us gamers in our nostalgic hearts, and takes us back to the land of Hyrule.

We’ve seen a full mod of Minecraft before that let us play out a new world of Zelda, but this one takes us back to the specific world created with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Modders GenGame have completely recreated the OoT world, and it’s now available for players to walk through. The mod took over 9 months of building and planning, and GenGame is really excited to have the server run live.

You can see the release trailer for Hyrulecraft below, and find more information out about it on GenGame’s official site. The mod is a 1:1 scale of the original, and later this year there will be NPCs, dungeons, guilds, and much more. GenGame has done a good job, and I look forward to re-living the good old days in the land of Hyrule.

You’ve had enough time to adapt to leading a gruff and heroic life in Skyrim. Slaying dragons, giants, and all manner of beast has filled up your time quite nicely. Surely though, you have never come across such a fierce beast as this Pegasus! Oh yea, and her name is Fluttershy.

I don’t know why we find these mods so wonderfully amusing, but it doesn’t seem to be getting old, as there are only more cropping up everyday. This one in particular will turn all of the horrid dragons into an even more terrifying Fluttershy, which yells a half-whispered “Yay” before pelting you with icy gusts and scorching torrents of fire.

It is sort of hilarious how much attention the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic show has gotten, but hey, it gives you awesome mods, so no complaining. If you’re not so much of a Fluttershy fan, you can always opt for a Rainbow Dash mount instead, which looks somewhat similar to the one pictured above.

When someone makes a mod for a game, it can have a profound effect on how it is played. Skyrim has seen plenty of these, whether they improve the game’s performance, turn mudcrabs into Zoidberg, or just remove the clothes from female characters. However, this latest mod that I’ve come across changes very little, and might be one of my favorites to date.

Dubbed KenMOD – Time on Loading Screen, this mod does much what you would expect. It puts the real-world time on each and every loading screen in the game. This means you won’t finally exit the game, only to find that you’ve been playing for a couple of hours longer than expected.

Sure, some will argue that this takes a bit away from the immersion factor. However, for those of us that like keeping an eye on the time, this is a nice little reminder. Sure, we all usually have a phone nearby, but this actually forces us to become aware of the time.

A lot of gamers nowadays are constantly on the go. When it comes to traveling, keeping your games portable makes all the difference when it comes to making the choice in what to play. Gamers are playing more games on their phones, tablets, and handhelds now more than ever before. When companies propose a new handheld device, they go through a lot of pros and cons before it ever makes it to market.

One of these cons is the whole concept of portability. When it comes to things like disc drives, there is a big challenge in how to incorporate the idea into a device that works. When a demand is great enough, however, the right provisions can be made just so the gaming can commence, no matter where you are. That’s what happened with The Envision, which allows players to take their Gamecube gaming on the go.

ModRetro member Jonathan Shine concocted this creation when he sought out to find a solution to the disc drive error. The Envision is Shine’s homemade version of a portable Gamecube, but it doesn’t operate in the way you’d think. The device works off of saved information on SD cards instead of using the disc drive like a normal system would. You can see The Envision in working order below, and head here for tech specs and photos of the finished product. Way to go Jonathan! Keep it up!

A new mod released for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim brings back a legend from the dead. Macho Man Randy Savage takes flight, as well as setting buildings ablaze in the new Macho Dragon Mod.

The mod takes a Randy Savage skin and applies it to all of the dragons flying around in the game. It comes complete with his famous hat and sunglasses, which make village burning all the more fun. Perhaps the coolest, and most weird part about the mod is how the dragons now look when they breathe fire. The dragon’s mouth opens so wide that, when paired with the Macho Man skin, makes for an almost horrifying experience.

The mod was created by a tinkerer called FancyPantz, and hats off to him. Not only does it blend a new skin in with the game, it adds sounds to the game in authentic Macho Man fashion. Playing this mod, you’ll most certainly run through a few change of underpants. Check it out for yourself below, but be warned, laughing will ensue.