Please note that the downloads on this site contain material appropriate to the BBFC ratings given to the games themselves and as such user discretion is advised. Bethesda Softworks is not responsible for any of the content linked to from this website.
By clicking on any of the links on this website you accept responsibility for your use of the content.
Bunny Blossom (www.kozyndan.com)
I’ve already made my feelings on “gender politics” clear, but we seem to be back there again, albeit with a different twist, following The Escapist’s rant about Twilight.
Yeah, it’s not a game (last I checked – though there probably is some utter bobbins movie tie-in game that people have politely been overlooking), but we’ll get there in a minute.
Bob Chipman thinks that Twilight is popular because it is the first thing to come along that openly panders to teen female sexuality, so that starved of anything to set those young hearts a-flutter, girls are flocking to these unintentionally hilarious films so that they can lust after Jacob and Edward. All this is, of course, highly disturbing.
I did watch New Moon, and I indeed found it disturbing. Not because of Bella’s suicidal dependence on the simpering Edward, nor because he was both creepy and dull. I found it disturbing because I found out, after spending over two hours watching very gratuitous, slow-motion shots of Jacob running around with his shirt off, that he’s only 17 years old.
I feel dirty. And not in a good way. I mean, all joking aside, whenever some teen actress cavorts around in next to nothing in a manner that suggests she is solely there for the titillation of male audiences, there’s normally an outcry. You know, all that crap about Miley Cyrus poledancing or whatever – I don’t know – I don’t take much interest in these things. Anyway, this is that, but for girls. Doesn’t make it right.
My problem with Twilight, such as it is (actually, I rather enjoyed the film in a so-bad-it’s-good way), is that all of these horrendous characters have no redeeming qualities whatsoever other than their good looks. As far as sending out messages to an already vacuous, overindulged generation, I can think of better.
Chipman dismisses Buffy as “male fantasy” (wait, what now?) when actually it’s human fantasy. Girls want to be Buffy. They want to be fancied by Xander and get with Angel. And they don’t need your permission.
Yes, before Edward there was the similarly brooding Angel, but at least Angel could be funny, instead of the absurdly po-faced Cullen boy. Sexy Spike was outright hilarious. Then there was cute Oz, gorgeous-but-dull Riley, and probably a few other recurring characters I’ve long forgotten about.
Two add-on .esp files for the Knights of the Nine expansion to Oblivion
Knights Essential: overrides the switching off of the essential flag on the knights, making them unkillable*
Knights Companion Quarters: adds a cottage, sleeping two, to the grounds outside the Priory. Also adds kitchen area to main priory building.
This plugin adds 8 new inhabitable homes in Fallout 3’s major locations, 6 of which may be rented by the player.
Games are fundamentally important to society. You and I might know this but a lot of people dismiss them as frivolous, childish pursuits that people are supposed to grow out of. Even people who enjoy them might undervalue them – or just not really understand why fun and games aren’t just important for psychological wellbeing but vital to human development as a whole. As game theory develops, says Koster in his book A Theory of Fun for Game Design, the central component of “fun” is being lost – and with it, the very essence of what games by their nature are trying to achieve.
Games are Education. Raph Koster – the former Sony Online executive who previously developed Ultima Online – says that games aren’t a medium at all, but just a broad facet of a defined pedagogical structure. The medium – which doesn’t seem to have a name – includes fire drills and tabletop disaster recovery exercises. Play, whether it’s playing cops and robbers in the back garden as children or deciding which team-mate to save in Mass Effect, is our brain’s essential What If impulse. We put ourselves instinctively through simulations from infancy onwards because each game has a lesson to teach us and it is through this that we learn and develop. The lesson might not be obvious: GTA IV is not teaching us how to murder criminals, but rather how to judge time and space in the driving. The lesson is the same as the Snake game you get on old mobile phones.
Koster suggests that through this system of practicing and learning, we use and even rewire our brains to help us to solve problems, and our brain rewards us for our efforts with endorphins when we succeed. This is why we enjoy playing games, and the essential driver of that enjoyment is of keeping the problems challenging and exciting but recogniseable enough for us to think we can succeed. Our brains make us seek the quickest, simplest solution – even if that’s “cheating” – and will tell us to give up if we predict failure in our next attempt. The role of the designer is to keep the challenges unpredictable so that the player thinks that they might succeed. A guaranteed outcome is boring, whether that’s to win or lose.
So how does that apply to mods?
This mod takes my Calvus and Rerlas companion mod, changes Calvus to female, and updates the dialogue accordingly.
(Adds modern ‘companion’ functions based on Grumpy et al’s scripts to Calvus Horatius (the companion in Tribunal), plus warping to the pets sold by Rerlas in the Great Bazaar in Mournhold. Calvus has more functions, more features and more personality. The pets can be retrieved if lost and resurrected if killed.)
DOWNLOAD from ElricM
DOWNLOAD from Planet Elder Scrolls
This is a really quick mod – a request by Enzo Dragon to rename the cell “Balmora, Caius Cosades’ House” to “Balmora, My House”.
Unlike Oblivion or Fallout 3, you can’t change cellnames mid-game, so you just have to plug this in when you’re ready and clean the save with Mash. If it doesn’t show up right away, try changing your load order.
DOWNLOAD from ElricM
One of the main challenges with modding is remembering to serve the game, as opposed to simply using it as a platform for my own ego. Of course, there’s a place for just making random things for the hell of it, and room for many wild flights of fancy, but the mods I like best revolve around plugging any perceived needs in the game rather than just adding stuff for the sake of it.
Whether or not you inwardly cringe (and many do) at the choice of furniture in Mournhold Expanded or the Dagoth Ur casino in Ghostgate, both were the result of my need to see a sprawling “city of magic”, and “what happened next”, respectively. Neither were produced because I thought it would be a really cool idea to add x, but because I assumed that with infinite time and infinite monkeys, those things would have been there anyway. Maybe not exactly like that, but something along those lines.
When I first saw Dominic and Machete’s House in Canterbury Commons, I was quite horrified by what I found. It was a total mess of rubble, litter, broken furniture and dirt. In order to be able to transform this into a believable living and working space, I had a lot of work to do: there was a burnt-out car in the living room, for heaven’s sake!
Dear YouTube
I made a video editing footage of the game Fallout 3 to the song Land of Confusion, because the lyrics of the song match the plot to the game.
When it was muted, I uploaded a version with a different track, used with the permission of the band/label.
As you can see, this version isn’t very interesting (no slight on the band!): without the context of the original song, the video simply makes no sense. It’s just a random collection of images set to music.
This ridiculous system of muting tracks means that a form of art – that of creating new videos to images collected from games – is impossible.
The software in YouTube is clearly capable of recognising which tracks belong to which artists, so would it not be fair, reasonable, and sane to simply annotate each video with the details of the track? I know you can do this! So why keep blocking my videos?
Read the rest of this entry »
Now that we’ve built two complete cells and got our town planned out, it’s time to tackle one of the existing cells: that of town leader Uncle Roe. The place he lives in isn’t very nice.
First of all, the beds and litter are removed from the kitchen area, and kitchen items put in. Litter is moved out of the way – but not deleted.
