Hey, Rest of the Gaming Industry, want to know how to support a PC game? Take a page (or a piece of mottled parchment or whatever they use around there) from Bethesda's book. For the low, low price of zero arms, legs, or firstborns (or dollars, we guess), you can now nab Skyrim's official mod toolset, a spiffy high resolution texture pack, and the Valve-created “Fall of the Space Core, Vol. 1” mod. It's an incredibly generous gesture, and one that – in hindsight – makes that ugly horse armor business from back in the day seem like some bizarrely specific bad dream. On that note, we're now off to create our first mod: Everything Armor. Mudcrabs, Silt Striders, children – the works. Also, we're bringing back Silt Striders, because there's no greener form of transportation than a giant horrifying bug creature.

My favorite games of the year were Bastion, Skyrim, and the Witcher 2. Wow, that was easy. And hey, I already wrote extensively about all of them. Convenient! So, for the next few days, I'm gonna discuss some of 2011's lesser-known greats. Last week, I turned into a quivering pile of mush on BioShock 2: Minerva's Den, and today, I'm taking a crack at Team Meat teammate Edmund McMillen's blood-soaked solo smash, The Binding of Isaac.

The Binding of Isaac is the game that finally pulled me away from Skyrim.

Like any gamer in the target demographic of Bethesda's behemoth (read: “a human capable of drawing breath”), I pretty much sacrificed my every waking hour on Skyrim's altar. Sometimes, it was 30 minutes here or there. Other times, it was 30 minutes here, there, and everywhere until a family of mice had taken up residence in my flowing gray beard. Point is, that game consumed my life. 

That is, of course, until I bought Binding of Isaac and learned a very valuable lesson: Most modern big-budget games? Yeah, they're kinda crappy.