If you're like me - and, frankly, who isn't? - you're a big fan of open-ended, sandbox-esque RPG's like those of the Elder Scrolls series, and were in fact so excited about the release of Oblivion that you went out and bought it for your PC only to find that your PC wasn't able to run it, at which point you sold your PC to your roommate in exchange for the money to buy an XBox 360 and Oblivion because you were broke, and then, after beating Oblivion, traded your XBox 360 to someone over craigslist for a crappy laptop because you needed a computer seeing as how you write for a living, and then that computer broke because it sucked, and then later you got yet another laptop which you assumed would be able to play Oblivion but it didn't, and then you convinced another roommate to buy an Xbox 360 so that you could play Oblivion on it, and then later you decided that you wanted to be able to play Oblivion on a PC so that you could use all the cool mods and whatnot, so you went out and bought the best one possible and now you're finally happy. Clearly, you and I are not exactly financial geniuses, and, quite frankly, I blame you for this.

Oblivion and other games of the sort are swell and whatnot, but they can always be better. For instance, there are never enough PCs running around doing random things for my tastes. When I'm walking through the woods with my female Dark Elf rogue/magic user, for instance, I want there to exist the possibility that, over the next hill, I'm going to encounter some Nordic merchant battling an ogre who was himself being chased by an axe-wielding Argonian bandit and that an Imperial guard might show up and try to rescue the merchant but then he actually shoots an arrow at the merchant who responds by attacking the Imperial, and that everyone's all like, clink click, phew phew, zap, kablooey! Also, I want my female Dark Elf rogue/magic user to be entirely naked, which is why I have the nudity mod.

But man does not live by nudity mods alone, and if you want your game of Oblivion, or Morrowind, or S.TA.L.K.E.R., or whatever else to involve unpredictable wackiness of the sort described above, you're going to need some swell, NPC-enhancing mods. So, here they are:

For Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, your best best is the aptly-monikered Morrowind Comes Alive, which "randomly adds over 1000 types of NPCs to over 300 cells to bring Morrowind to life" and simulates their gradual movement across the game world by providing a 20 percent chance that each of these added NPCs will be shifted to another area when the player moves on from any given cell.

For Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the intrepid geek would be amiss in not downloading Tamriel Travellers, which performs a similar function, adding not only randomized merchants, but also rogues, bandits, bards, and, where appropriate, pack animals and bodyguards. Happily, it's also compatible with popular mods like Martigen's Monster Mod, which itself adds a great degree of new variety to one's Oblivion game.

For S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the most comprehensive available NPC overhaul is the aliVe mod, which enhances the game's nifty "alife" AI with new NPCs, creatures, and AI behavior as well as less scripting for NPCs in general, thus adding a huge degree of freedom and possibilities. I'm not sure how much better it is than the vanilla game, because S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a piece of crap that was programmed by a bunch of amoral Ukranians who could care less about whether or not people who purchase their game will actually be able to play it due to the terrible, terrible coding involved therein. My advice, then, is to not actually buy S.T.A.L.K.E.R., but rather to download it off The Pirate's Bay, spend an entire afternoon trying to get it to run properly, and then delete it. That'll kill some time while you wait for Fallout 3 to come out in 2043.