I've spent the last three weeks getting married, going on a honeymoon, diving The Great Barrier Reef and getting The Bends. It seems a lot went on while I was gone, but rather than spam your RSS, Twitter and Facebook feeds with a dozen new articles, I thought a summary of those stories would be best, prior to business as usual.

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I enjoyed Morrowind, Oblivion and indeed Skyrim. But there are few games that leave me feeling like it wouldn't have been better if I had a friend along for the ride. I'm not the only one with that thought, but "AwpSoLeet" is the one with the enthusiasm and talent to make it a reality. Skyrim Online, currently in alpha stages of development, adds co-op to the game and supports voice chat! We've embedded a video which may illustrate why you might want to wait for a beta release, but there's rea...

Care of Koroush who runs tweakguides.com, NVIDIA has published a Skyrim tweak guide at GeForce.com. "The aim of this guide is to allow you to better understand and utilize all of the configuration options available in Skyrim, as well as a selection of advanced tweaks to enhance the game." It's a good one to check out for those PC gamers wanting to squeeze as much joy as they can from Bethesda's acclaimed RPG. You can find it by clicking here.

Thanks to AusGamers for the heads-up, and...

After the blunder that was Skyrim 1.2, Bethesda has quickly struck back with another update for the massively popular fantasy RPG. Of particular note: dragons should not longer fly backwards and player resistances should now be working again. There's a couple performance tweaks in there as well.

• General stability improvements
• Optimize performance for Core 2 Duo CPUs
• Fixed Radiant Story incorrectly filling certain roles
• Fixed magic resistances not calculating properly
• Fixed issue with

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Unfortunately for our PlayStation 3 brethren, they may never see a fix to the biggest issue plaguing their Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim experience. Fallout: New Vegas director, Joshua Sawyer, says the 'PS3 lag' problem is an "an engine-level issue with how the save game data is stored" and would take a "large time commitment" to fix. Elaborating, he said "the longer you play a character, the more bit differences on objects (characters, pencils on tables, containers, etc.) get saved off and carried aro...

Bethesda has announced that the Skyrim development tools used to create the game will be made available to players during January, titled the Creation Kit. In conjunction with its release will be the Creation Kit's release, we will roll out a new Wiki and videos to help you get started." You will also be able to publish your work to the Steam Workshop.

Source: Bethesda...

Yesterday's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim patch has fixed some issues but created a whole lot of new ones, players are reporting. Character resistances no longer work in post-patch, meaning you'll have no protection from fire, ice, magic and so-forth - leaving you to take full damage. Oh, and dragons can fly backwards now.

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Nvidia's GeForce 290.36 Beta drivers have just been released, adding some gorgeous ambient occlusion tweaks for Skyrim, which appear to make a hell of a difference. Screen flickering and artefact fixes have been implemented for Battlefield 3 as well, while Nvidia also recommends the driver update for owners of Batman: Arkham City on the PC.

Here's are the release notes:

NVIDIA Ambient Occlusion

• Adds NVIDIA Control Panel ambient occlusion support for The Elder Scrolls

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Skyrim is awesome. But sometimes more frustrating than awesome. Thankfully, an important patch for the acclaimed RPG arrives tomorrow and it includes slew of important fixes and improvements for the Xbox 360 and PC. PS3 owners already have their patch which dramatically raises performance on the system. Here's some of what you can look forward to:

• Improved occasional performance issues resulting from long term play (PlayStation 3)
• Fixed issue where textures would not properly upgrade when installed

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Skyrim is the latest installment in the Elder Scrolls franchise, and after over 40 hours of play, we finally feel we have seen enough of the game to justify a balanced review. While it received almost universal praise from critics in early reviews, Skyrim is not a game without issues. But whatever its flaws, the scale of the world is undeniably impressive, with enough content to rival many MMOs. Almost unbearably slow to start, you are eventually introduced to a world filled with the type of adv...

Skyrim is out and boy is it creating some waves. A quick round-up of reviews reveals that it already has over half a dozen perfect-scores, amongst many others that are very near perfect. Here are just a few of them with some choices quotes that should get even those not particularly interest in the RPG genre excited about this game. Eurogamer: 10/10 - "It evokes a word that's overused in reviewing of all kinds: one that's best kept in the cellar in a plainly marked box and reserved only for th...

Skyrim's release date has been broken and is now being sold at EB Games, Game and Harvey Norman. For now, Harvey Norman is by far the best deal, but let us know if any other retailers such as JB HI-FI have gotten in on the action. Unfortunately for PC gamers, you'll still have to wait for the game's midnight unlock for Steam....

If you've pre-purchased The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on Steam, using a VPN so as to avoid region price gouging I would hope, you can now begin pre-loading ready for the game's release in t-minus 34 hours. If you haven't yet bought it and don't know what I'm talking about regarding prices: please don't buy it for $90 on the AU Steam store....

For those who love Steam you'll sure to love the news that Skyrim is Steamworks integrated. For those that don't, well, too bad I guess. Bethesda's Pete Hines has confirmed to PC Gamer that Skyrim will use Steam, not GFWL (Games for Windows LIVE) as previously rumoured. This confirmation was then syndicated on the official @ElderScrolls Twitter account.

[PC Gamer]...

Straight out of San Diego's Comic-Con is some Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim gameplay footage to sink your teeth into. Notable moments are going toe-to-toe with a dragon, and stealthily putting an arrow through an unsuspecting victim's chest from the shadows. Skyrim arrives on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 this November.

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