On the heels of last week's Skyrim update, Bethesda has fired another volley of bug fixes over Steam today, with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions soon to follow pending approval by Sony and Microsoft. Patch 1.3 brings general stability improvements (no specifics here), optimized performance for Intel's Core 2 Duo processors and resolves the following issues:

  • Fixed Radiant Story incorrectly filling certain roles
  • Fixed magic resistances not calculating properly
  • Fixed issue with placing books on bookshelves inside player purchased homes
  • Fixed dragon animation issues with saving and loading
  • Fixed Y-look input to scale correctly with framerate

Along with announcing today's patch, Bethesda said it plans to release another update next week with support for 4GB Tuning (Large Address Aware) – though this is already available through modding channels if you're impatient. A resourceful modder released "Skyrim4GB" weeks ago, which lets the game access up to 4GB of memory instead of the current 2GB cap.

Speaking of community content, YouTube user KinectFAAST has uploaded a video of himself playing Bethesda's epic RPG with Microsoft's motion sensor. He uses a combination of physical gestures (with FAAST) and vocal commands (with VAC) to control his character. Different motions with his right arm lets him swing his sword or cast a spell, while his left arm controls his character's shield and point of view.

Other movements let him sheath his weapon, activate objects, move around at various speeds, crouch, jump and so on. Voice controls provide easy access to menus and hotkeys. Saying "hello" initiates a conversation with an NPC, "journal" or "skills" opens their associated windows, "left hand" or "right hand" shifts items to a particular side," and "switch view" toggles between first and third-person perspectives.

Although it's obviously not as fluid or precise as playing with a keyboard and mouse or a gamepad, it seems like the setup could provide plenty of entertainment. From our understanding, you'll have to download the software linked above and configure everything yourself if you want to give it a shot. It's an inconvenience, but KinectFAAST provides a detailed list of his software configuration to get you started.