UPDATE 26/03/2019: As you may have observed from the comments on this article, Bethesda's Morrowind giveaway didn't exactly go to plan. Users reported several problems with claiming a free copy of the game, including difficulties logging into Bethesda.net and problems with the code system. You may have seen the memes.

In any case, Bethesda acknowledged and eventually resolved the technical problems and has now extended the period for claiming a copy. If you missed out on the first round, you have from now until the end of Sunday 31st March to bag Morrowind for free.

The technical issues have been frustrating, but when all's said and dunmer, at least we (eventually) got a free game.

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Ever thought you could do a better job than Legolas at the Battle of Helm's Deep? Well now you can prove it, as the final version of this incredible Lord of the Rings Skyrim mod has just been published.

The Elder Scrolls V Middle-Earth began back in 2014 and has seen several updates, but Maldaran told me the Redone version adds new content, solves bugs, re-works the portal corridor and streamlines all the past versions into one neat package.

The remarkable one-person project, made by 26-year-old Maldaran from Germany, allows PC players to explore many of the most famous locations in Lord of the Rings, including The Shire, Lothlorien and Rivendell. You can re-enact the Battle of Helm's Deep, fight goblins in the mines of Moria and even battle the Balrog. Players can also craft Mithril armour, and Maldaran told me the latest version introduces even more craftable items, along with new spells to learn.

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The Skyrim Together mod is currently embroiled in a controversy that has seen its developers accused of stealing code. Meanwhile, there's increased scrutiny on the modding team's Patreon, which currently pulls in over $25,000-a-month.

Skyrim Together is an ambitious and high-profile mod for Bethesda's hugely-popular fantasy role-playing game that lets players play together. It recently held a beta open to those who backed the Patreon.

The recent controversy revolves around an accusation the Skyrim Together mod "steals" code from Skyrim Script Extender (SKSE).

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Viktor Antonov hasn't built a world like this before.

The games you know him for are bounded and largely linear. Every tiny detail has been touched by a human hand in Half-Life 2's City 17 or Dishonored's Dunwall, striking virtual places which Antonov has helped colour with particular social histories and inscribed with visual techniques that quietly guide the player to the next checkpoint. That's also true of other games that he's been involved with over the past few years, such as Wolfenstein: The New Order, Prey and Doom, on which Antonov acted as visual design director.

But Project C, as the game is currently codenamed, is very different. "It's one of the most ambitious projects I've worked on and, I have to admit, a fairly difficult one for me," he says.

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There is a saying in architecture that no building is unbuildable, only unbuilt. Structures may be impossible in the here and now, but have the potential to exist given enough time or technological development: a futuristic cityscape, a spacefaring megastructure, the ruins of an alien civilisation. However, there are also buildings that defy the physical laws of space. It is not an issue that they could not exist, but that they should not. Their forms bend and warp in unthinkable ways; dream-like structures that push spatial logic to its breaking point.

The Tomb of Porsena is a legendary monument built to house the body of an Etruscan king. 400 years after its construction, the Roman scholar Varro gave a detailed description of the ancient structure. A giant stone base rose 50 feet high, beneath it lay an "inextricable labyrinth", and atop it sat five pyramids. Above this was a brass sphere, four more pyramids, a platform and then a final five pyramids. The image painted by Varro, one of shapes stacked upon shapes, seems like a wild exaggeration. Despite this, Varro's fanciful description sparked the imaginations of countless architects over the centuries. The tomb was an enigma, and yet the difficulty in conceptualising it, and the vision behind it, was fascinating. On paper artists were free to realise its potential. If paper liberated minds, the screen can surely open up further possibilities. There's no shortage of visionary structures within the virtual spaces of video games. These are strange buildings that ask us to imagine worlds radically different to our own.

Whilst many impossible formulations are orientated towards the future, there are also plenty from the past. The castle in Ico is one example of this. During the Renaissance, Europe was obsessed, not with future utopias, but with ancient Greece and Rome. While the box art of Ico is famously inspired by Giorgio de Chirico, the long shadows and sun-bleached stone walls only make-up a portion of the game's mood. It is the etchings of Giovanni Piranesi that best capture what it's like to explore the castle's winding stairs and bridges. Piranesi's imaginary Roman reconstructions were absurdly big - so colossal you could get lost in just the foundations. In a similar way, Ico's castle is impossibly large, the camera zooming out in order to overwhelm you and build up the unfathomable mystery of its origin and purpose.

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Sex. Speedrunning. Not two things you expect to hear in the same sentence - and yet here I am, writing an article about it.

Speedrunner tomatoanus, who you may remember from his world record Fallout anthology speedrun (and his rather colourful username), has returned with yet another wacky video. Not content with whizzing through Fallout 1, 2, 3, New Vegas and 4 in under 90 minutes, tomatoanus' latest speedrun is all about sex. Specifically, getting it as fast as possible. Like a night out in Magaluf.

Similar to his other world record speedruns, tomatoanus played through the games considered by the community to be the "main" titles in the Fallout series, with the goal being to have sex in each game as quickly as possible. This apparently has its own unofficial category, called a "sex%" run, and has already been attempted by a number of speedrunners in Fallout 4 (check out these ones by Jinjenia and Duchys).

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Imagination, not intelligence, made us human.

In his Foreword to The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Fantasy, the late Sir Terry Pratchett writes, "Imagination, not intelligence, made us human."

Most people know Pratchett as the author of Discworld, the famous fantasy series about a flat planet balanced on the backs of four elephants. However, what many people don't know is that the knighted author was also a massive fan of video games - so much so that he actually worked on mods for Oblivion, most of which were spearheaded by a Morrowind modder named Emma.

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There's a dragon near Bethesda - dubbed "the Dragon of Bethesda" by its creator - and it's causing a bit of bother.

No, not that Bethesda. The Bethesda in Wales, the one on the River Ogwen and the A5 road on the edge of Snowdonia, in Gwynedd.

The Draig Dderw (oak Dragon) stands 6ft tall and 12ft wide, and guards the A5, presumably from misguided Skyrim fans. It's quite the sight - perhaps too good a sight, because motorists are apparently slowing down, or even stopping, to gawk at it.

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An impressive Skyrim multiplayer mod enters closed beta soon, with an open beta to follow.

The eye-catching Skyrim Together mod is more than someone's pipedream - it's a functional mod that currently lets up to eight players play together in Bethesda's hugely popular fantasy game.

The mod is the work of a group of talented software engineers who have spent some time tinkering with Skyrim in order to get multiplayer working. The closed beta is for those who back the project on Patreon. The open beta launches immediately after the closed beta, which the modders said wouldn't last long in an announcement post on the Skyrim Together subreddit.

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It feels like an age since the last Elder Scrolls game was released (seven years, to be precise), and it's probably going to be several years more before we see the next one. It's an agonising wait, and for some older fans, it really is a race against time. But thanks to an online campaign, fans are hoping at least one Skyrim-playing grandma will be involved in the next game. In at least some sense of the word.

As possibly the coolest grandma on the internet, you may well have already heard of Shirley Curry. She's an 82-year-old YouTuber who primarily records herself playing Skyrim, and has pretty much won the hearts of everyone in the Elder Scrolls community. Referring to her subscribers as "grandkids", she goes out of her way to reply to every comment on her videos, and her let's plays are basically the most wholesome thing you can find on the internet. And, if you still doubted her credentials, last year she even made it into the Guinness World Record book as the oldest video game YouTuber. Here's her latest Skyrim video, should you want a look:

Her place at the centre of an internet campaign, however, began after a Reddit user spotted her comment on a YouTube video analysing the comments Pete Hines made to Eurogamer about TES6's release window. "I guess that puts the nail in my coffin," Curry wrote. "When Skyrim 6 comes out I'll be 88! So I probably won't get to play it."

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