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I don’t know about you, but playing Skyrim, I hardly ever used the Dragon Shouts given that they were a third layer of powers after inherent racial powers and magic– the menus to sort through, even with mods installed, broke action far too long and often for me to use them enough, not to mention the hard-coded global shout cooldown timer which, depending on which Shout you used beforehand, took your Voice out for the length of the entire fight. It was nice, but ultimately a story-related contrivance that had little impact on gameplay.

Enter DeadlyAzuril and PsychoHampster on Skyrimnexus.com.

Their mod: Thu’umic, Real-Life Dragon Shouts, relies on your PC microphone and a neat bit of voice-recognition tech to pick through your utterances, normally guttural, but in the case of the Thu’um cleanly enunciated and with vigor, to find the Words of Power necessary to set someone’s face on fire or toss thousands of goats off of a mountaintop. The result is quite striking. After you train the voice recognition software and to an extent your own voice for a while, the process gets surprisingly intuitive and responsive, allowing you to trigger a Shout effect in the middle of combat and keep moving, where at least on the PC version this gets difficult to do given the demand for your fingers on WASD and then mashing Z.

Now, actually learning the syllables involved in the Dragon tongue is a necessity (not unremedied by a cheatsheet, mind you, but still faster memorized), and the satisfaction of actually screaming FUS RO DAH to knock someone off of a cliff is pretty hard to beat.

Suggested modifications: removing the hard-coded Shout cooldown by fiddling with the console. This ensures that the only realistic limits on the poewr of the Thu’um are your aim, the endurance of your vocal cords and the electricity surging into your machine.

The mod is also tagged as “100% FREE,” which, as a mod by a third-party author, would make sense since they’re not legally allowed to sell it without express authorization by Bethsoft. Whatever the case, you’d be crazy not to at least try this mod once… just make sure it’s a private environment you have to make a fool of yourself in. Or a very public one. No such thing as too public.

UPDATE: One funny side effect of having tried this mod; if you sneeze while playing, you will knock someone off of a cliff. It’s hilarious.

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