By Alec Meer on January 18th, 2010 at 11:58 pm.
The current Make Something Unreal contest is approaching its Grand Final, but in a way it’s more interesting to take a look at the winners of the penultimate round of Unreal 3 mod face-offs, Phase 4. It’s a collection of truly excellent mods, demonstrating both the power and versatility of the latest Unreal engine, and how much better still it looks when someone with more imagination/willingness to risk-take than creators Epic take a crack at making something with it. While obviously established names such as The Ball and Airborn are in there, there’s so much in the list that I’ve not previously heard of and am now itching to aim my graphics card at….
The psychedelic lineart didacticism of Hazard – The Journey of Life!
The alt-Victorian vehicular combat of Steamracers!
The RTS-FPS experimentation of Angels Fall First: Planetstorm!
There’s also a clutch of mighty fine machinima, such as this tragicomic tale of a videogame-obsessed Actionman:
Many more mods, maps and machinima movies here. Man, I wish I was talented.
19/01/2010 at 00:13 Jacques says:
I have no idea what’s going on in that Hazard game, but it looks amazing.
19/01/2010 at 00:19 Dominic White says:
I will eat my theoretical hat (in reality, I will probably eat a pie or some kind of flan) if Angels Fall First doesn’t win this MSU contest. It’s a spectacular piece of work. Everything from capital-ship level space combat to planetside groundpounding.
Edit: Also, there’s no RTS elements at play there – those big space battles are all action style, and each position on each ship (pilot, gunners, etc) are manned by either human players or bots.
19/01/2010 at 00:33 Brumisator says:
Damn, all of these had passed completely under my radar, since the actual UT3 game was so mediocre.
I bought the Unreal pack from Steam a while back, and UT1 (nostalgia helping), and UT2004 are far superior games.
Some truly spectacular stuff in there!
Come to think of it, I wish VALVe made some more obvious moves like this to support the mod community, since they speak of themselves like the messiah of modmakers, but in the end, they don’t really make any moves in that sense.
Obviously, they support them implicitly, and give a pat on the head to most good mods, but nothing really visible and great.
19/01/2010 at 00:43 Fuu says:
Man, Angels Fall First looks like the game UT3 should have been.
19/01/2010 at 01:15 Dominic White says:
AFF: Planetstorm is also going standalone later this year – they’re moving it to UDK, so that anyone can just download and play it.
And that, right there, is pretty rad.
19/01/2010 at 01:47 Ghil says:
AFF: Planetstorm really seems nice, but I am more interested in Hazard, and Airborn.
19/01/2010 at 02:25 Toeofdoom says:
I might be a little biased, but hazard is pretty damn cool. It’s being moved to the UDK as well, so hopefully we’ll see more of it. It’s been mentioned on RPS before, in fact.
19/01/2010 at 02:43 Bhazor says:
Dammit Unreal Tournament 3 not 2004!
I actually re downloaded that bally thing just for Hazard mod. I have to stop being so darned spontaneous.
Unreal 3 is like a million bajillion gigabytes according to Steam (I got it in the Unreal Deal 50% sale) and I’ve got a download limit.
19/01/2010 at 03:48 Kenny says:
Ended up buying UT3 just for AFF:PS – really cool mod, just a shame no one plays it except for the Sunday night 7pm GMT game night
19/01/2010 at 10:01 Dominic White says:
That problem (I’d imagine largely due to UT3 never having really taken off, thus giving mods a real table-scraps playerbase) should be rectified when the game goes freeware-standalone. Hurrah for UDK, eh?
19/01/2010 at 07:05 Vinraith says:
Hazard looks absolutely phenomenal, I’m going to have to reinstall UT3 for that.
19/01/2010 at 07:27 Alexander Bruce says:
Thanks for the mention again. As stated the last time this was mentioned on Rock Paper Shotgun, Hazard is still in development. The final commercial standalone release will be substantially different to the mod, so just a heads up that if you play the mod and find things a bit too frustrating / obscure / abstract, rest assured this is ALL being fixed for the final commercial version (without selling out as well!)
I have a clear slate this year with regards to anything else getting in the way of making this game as awesome as it should be. It’s all being devoted to Hazard as full time work, rather than as a spare time project.
Look out for more information in the future.
19/01/2010 at 07:35 Vague-rant says:
The machinima appears very Small Soldiers-esque…
19/01/2010 at 08:52 tom says:
Hazard looks like jodis wolfenstein hack to me!
http://switch.sjsu.edu/CrackingtheMaze/jodi.html
but less confusing (if thats possible!)
19/01/2010 at 09:20 Alexander Norris says:
No link to The Haunted? This saddens me.
Any particular reason why you picked that handful of mods and not another handful, Mr Meer?
Edit: oh hey, I do know how to do HTML links apparently.
19/01/2010 at 09:32 Alec Meer says:
I cannot tell you of The Conspiracy. You’ll just have to pretend I randomly picked a few things that sounded fun, difficult to accept as it may be.
19/01/2010 at 09:21 l1ddl3monkey says:
Some of the entries are superb but a lot of them look more like “Make Something That Looks A Lot Like Gears Of War” than something unreal.
19/01/2010 at 11:09 Lilliput King says:
AFF looks like my day dreams.
Hazard looks like the regular kind. I have doubts as to how much something like that can achieve, but I’m really looking forward to playing it nonetheless.
19/01/2010 at 11:58 ChaosSmurf says:
AFF has the greatest name of any mod ever made.
19/01/2010 at 17:30 Dethgar says:
The dude in The Plan title screen looks like a poorly done Bill Hader.
19/01/2010 at 18:03 Dominic White says:
UDK is the best thing to happen to these mods. It seems that almost all of them are making the jump to standalone projects, either freeware or retail.
Well played, Epic. Well played.
19/01/2010 at 22:56 Tyler says:
This is making me nuts. These look so great, and Fileplanet keeps telling me there was an error any time I try to download any of them, whatever browser I use.
20/01/2010 at 14:50 DK says:
For the people that want some AFF but don’t like shooters, there’s both Nexus and Homeworld 2 versions of AFF already out – as well as an AFF-universe space-racing game that’s standalone and an AFF MMORTS currently in beta.
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