So having stopped playing WoW for the time being and whilst eagerly awaiting the release (or at least a Beta invite to) Mechwarrior Online I've decided it time to clear the massive backlog of games I have.  Five years of crawling around a dungeon in Azeroth has left me with a great many games I've purchased but just really haven't had time to delve in and play.

Top of my list?

Playing a mage and dungeon crawling in Skyrim of course!

But life as a Dovahkiin can be a little laborious at times; the default UI is awful, some of the textures are dull, the world map makes it difficult to chart your course along roads to see if you're heading the right way and you keep getting funny looks from Lydia as you make her run behind as you gallop off into the sunset on your horse.  Lydia is smarmy enough when you ask her to carry stuff, she doesn't need any more excuses for her to hate you... seriously sleep with one eye open.

So let me introduce to you the humble collection of mods I've found on Steam Workshop that should hopefully make life a little bit easier for you.  I've tried to select mods that enhance the vanilla experience as best as possible or just make life a little easier rather than selecting mods which add new armours, weapons or content.  Whilst there were a few other mods I perhaps would've liked to have added I've tried to keep this list as conflict free as possible.

Paradox Interactive have released their latest trailer for A Game of Dwarves which gives us a bit of backstory on the whole thing.  If you haven't seen Game of Dwarves yet, basically it looks like a graphical, more user friendly version of Dwarf Fortress (something I have a deep longing for) mixed with a Dungeon Keeper style level structure.  It's kind of like Dwarf Fortress 'Lite' I guess and as glad as I am to see games like this and Towns gaining a lot of support from players (seriously these genres have been lacking serious attention from developers and studios for a long time) I can't help but draw those inevitable comparisons with DF and find myself feeling a bit underwhelmed.  This is a personally thing as I enjoy the depth, complexity and soul crushing futility of Dwarf Fortress, I just wish it wasn't done in ASCII and required you to remember a million and one different hotkeys.  Stonesense with mouse control and commands; sadly that game still isn't here but I'm still excited to see how far A Game of Dwarves carries that concept.

Also, is it me or does it look like those loveable Wizards from Paradox's other awesome title Magicka have abandoned their heroic path and just completely embraced their otherwise accidental homicidal activity?  Say it ain't so!

If you are on the League of Legend's EU-West or EU East and Nordic servers you should have, by now, received an email from Riot regarding a potnetial security breach of your account.  It would appear that hackers managed to gain access to Riot's Database and compromise account details.

If you play on the North American servers then you were not affected.

Among the information hackers got away with was email addresses, Summoner names, Encrypted account passwords, date of birth and -  for a very small number of users - First and Last Name.  Although the stolen passwords were encrypted, Riot is advising that all summoners check their account and change their passwords as a standard safety precaution.

Starcraft 2 Arcade is currently available on the Patch 1.5.0 beta; the patch introduces a new Arcade button at the top left of the interface, this will now give access to all the custom games available for SC2.  A Starcraft 2 button has also been introduced which leads you to the standard SC2 and Multiplayer.  The Arcade is set to make sharing custom maps easier and allow greater feedback by allowing rating and reviewing of submitted maps by users.  This has been done in conjuction with updates to the map editor to make it even easier for players to turn modders and start creating their own maps.

Blizzard have also imported a feature first seen in World of Warcraft with their streaming downloader for shorter update installation.

Full patch notes are available here.

Just remember that this is still a beta patch which is available to download under your Battlenet account management page, there are likely still bugs to fix before it's put out for general release.