Among the other loot that I got for Christmas, my loving and oh so patient and understanding wife got me an EVGA Nvidia GTX-570 video card and a Collector's Edition of Skyrim.

I think everyone reading these words can see where this is going from here.

I vaguely remember my life before Skyrim. I remember concepts like "fresh air", "sunshine", "people" and, of course, "sex". I remember that I used to experience all of these things. Of course, these things all happened prior to two things:

1. My Christmas loot

2. The new "Nexus Mod Manager" and how unbelievably and tear-inducingly easy to mod games like Skyrim became.

But I fear that I am getting ahead of myself in my enthusiasm. Allow me to start from the beginning. Some of you may be aware that I could have certainly picked up Skyrim on release day, but that I am completely and fully aware of the fact that Bethesda doesn't exactly have a stellar track record for their games being, shall we say, completely ready to be played on release day.

Because of this, I decided NOT to pick up the game on that day and instead make the strategic decision to put the game on my Christmas list on the assumption that the game would have had multiple patches by that time AND that the game would have had plenty of attention from the modding community by that time as well. I'm pleased to report that these things are mostly true.

Skyrim is not fully free from bugs. I've encountered one, for example, in my playing of the "Companions" questline in Whiterun that prevents me from finishing the questline. I've also had "essential" characters die on me by accident due to their getting caught in the water on an object and drowning. The latter I managed to fix through the research of the appropriate console commands on the PC version of the game. The former remains a vast, throbbing, canker sore of irritation.

But what really differentiates Bethesda games on the PC is the mods. Dear. Sweet. Zombie. Savior. Jesus. On. A. Pogo. Stick. Eating. Blue. Twinkies. The. MODS!!!!

If you're anything like I was a couple of years back, then getting into the modding of games, even as a user and not a mod creator, can be more than a little intimidating. The instructions given for the installing of mods can be obscure and aren't always written with newbies in mind when the modder him/herself puts the mod out for public consumption.

'Lo and then the clouds did part and the angels did sing! For unto us, a Mod Manager is born to clense the world from the sins of computer savvy people assuming the rest of us know what the flying "purple gumdrops" they're talking about when they spout their arcane gibberish.

What I am about to give you, ladies and gentlemen, is the sort of thing that inspires the throwing of panties at rock stars. Yes, it's that damned awesome.

Nexus Mod Manager

It should be noted that if any of you feel the need to throw your panties or underwear at me after trying this thing out and seeing how easy it is to use (with a little help from the rest of this blog) please do put your name somewhere on them. I fully intend to start a collection on my bedroom wall beneath a nicely carved oaken sign that simply says "Conquest!" upon it. Having names attached will, simultaneously, make that both 10x more juvenile and 20x more awesome.

Okay, so, a little instruction. Here's how that mod manager works.

Here is a list of the current top-100 endorsed mods of all time for Skyrim. If you've downloaded and installed that mod manager above, then "modding" your Skyrim experience is as easy as taking the following steps.

1. Click on a mod.

2. Decide if you want it.

3. Select downloads

4. Choose "Download with Mod Manager"

5. Choose "Nexus Mod Manager" when the box pops up.

6. Wait for the download to complete.

7. Open your Mod Manager

8. Click "Mods" tab

9. Click button to install

10. Enjoy.

Seriously, it makes it that damned easy. Even an evil genius created Experiment 626 can manage it.

So, what are the things to consider as you're selecting and implementing your mods?

1. Keep in mind your system's capabilities.

Sure, swapping in High Definition resolutions for the "vanilla" (game default) ones anywhere and everywhere you can sounds badass. But the reason why developers go with lower resolutions is that they try and put out a game that looks good, but that the vast majority of people can actually have their computers run.

I'm lucky in that, due to my wife's OTHER gift, my computer can pretty much run anything I damned well please on Skyrim, but not everyone is so fortunate. Many modders out there have "Lite" versions of their mods for lower juiced PCs. Consider this and read the descriptions of the mods carefully when determining which ones to use.

If necessary, uninstall your mod (via clicking a single button in your mod manager) if you suffer an unacceptable performance hit.

2. Install ONE MOD AT A TIME.

As awesome as some of these mods are, they are not exactly professionally done and tested. The quality of the mods and the competency of the people creating the mods vary widely.

Some mods are relatively benign. For example, mods that replace the default textures in your game are relatively harmless on a game that is connected to Steam. Don't like the results? Undo and let the Vanilla stuff take over again.

But other things can cause unforeseen conflicts, bugs, unexpected quirks, etc. Mods that change dialog, or impact the storyline, for instance can corrupt things that you don't anticipate. Best advise is to do ONE mod at a time, start your game, see if the mod has caused any issues, and then move onto the next.

This way if something gets screwed up with your game you know EXACTLY which mod caused it and can go back and adjust as necessary. This is as opposed to downloading and installing ten different mods and then trying to figure out which one is causing the flying villagers with missing faces in your game.

3. Backup your save files

With a mod manager like the one I linked to earlier, your choices of causing irrevocable harm to your game are substantially reduced since it has you messing around with far less stuff than you would be if you were installing these mods manually yourself.

But "far less" doesn't necessarily mean you, or the program itself, can't cause an unforeseen fuuck up. As a general rule of thumb, back up your save files in a safe place every so often to avoid losing the hundred hours or so of your life that you've invested.

4. Understand what the mods are doing.

This can give you a general idea of when you might have a "conflict" between your mods. "Conflicts" occur when you have multiple mods trying to do the same thing. Let's take a depressingly common example to drive the point home.

Due to it's desire to avoid "NC-17" type ratings for its games, Bethesda makes some compromises with the content of its games in places. For example, children in their games tend to be "essential" which is a fancy way of saying "the game doesn't let you kill the little bastards no matter how annoying they are or how much you've been playing your character as an evil douchemonger".

Another example is that Bethesda games show no boobies. If you loot a corpse, it doesn't matter if you take everything on the corpse, it will be decently clad afterwards to avoid the inadvertent nipple making an appearance. To many modders (and frankly to this author) this, like unkillable children, is an insult that must not be allowed to stand. This is not because I can't stand to go without naked pixelated dirty pillows, but because it represents an outside interference with the choices involved in how I play the game and an offense against realism.

To put it a different way, I don't typically always play my rpgs as a child killing, nipple ogling psychopath but I will DEFEND TO THE DEATH my right to do so! Viva la revolution!

So a very common mod out there is to swap body textures for nude versions...or even nude versions with RIDICULOUS attention to detail being paid to things like nipples or genitals. If you download and install two different mods that both replace those textures, then you're not going to get both.

In the best case scenario, the most recently installed one will overwrite the existing one. (And the Mod Manager typically warns you when this is happening.) But in some cases this doesn't necessarily get caught. So, when you're installing your mods, think about what you already have in place and that will tell you the likelihood of causing problems.

So, with those simple rules in place I bid you the best of fun and experiences playing this, and other Bethesda games, with the benevolent help of the Nexus modding community. My wife just got home. I need to go pretend to pay attention to her for a few minutes and then go play more Skyrim.

In my next episode, I will talk about a few mods out there that I think very highly of and would recommend to my readers.