Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Making Left 4 Dead campaigns is an interesting challenge. You’re building levels for a game that decides when and where to attack the player, and you have almost no control over those moments. It means your focus is in creating the world and in making it an interesting space for the players to exist in. You can’t guarantee that the cleverly designed chokepoint you made will ever be used as one, but you can make it the prettiest damn corridor the player will ever see. The setting is one of the biggest considerations you have, and then you have to have the talent to pull it off. It’s why I think most L4D campaigns take such a long time coming. Dniepr’s a Left 4 Dead (1 and 2) campaign that’s set in the Ukraine, including Pripyat, and has been three years in development. There’s a quite startling pair of trailers below.
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I haven’t played The Witcher II, but I know at thing or two about it. The first thing I know about it is that it is good. The second thing I know about it is that it needed more content. I have today learned a third thing about it: the mod tools have been released. Hey, that might mean there’s more content available, which makes my second thing invalid, and the third thing has become the second thing, and I know less now than I did at the start of this paragraph. It’s making me dumber! Stop stealing knowledge from me, Witcher II!
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This Skyrim mod is actually called “Here There Be Monsters“, and it adds nine huge sea monsters into the Ghost Sea to the north of Bethesda’s chilly realm. But I’ve focused on the Horkers because, well, just look at that screenshot. It is a giant beast with a huge tooth. Look, though. Really look. See? He’s not a beast. He’s just a thing that society deems to be big and scary. And so he acts as society imagines he should, and tusks everything and everyone. To be fair, he is part of a society of angry Nords fighting dragons and in the midst of a civil war. He should probably move somewhere nicer.
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The first rule of the Just Cause 2 Multiplayer beta tests is you talk openly and honestly about them, and leave no detail out. So I thought I’d let you all know that this weekend the mod team plan on running a beta test this very weekend. It’s a remarkable mod that packs players from all over the world into Panau. Remember the chaos you caused as Rico in the single-player? Imagine that multiplied by a thousand players. You’re either grinning or flinching right now, so you’ll already know if it is for you. Whoops! It turns out the second rule is no lazy Fight Club references. Bugger!
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If you’re in the middle of a game of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and suddenly get the urge to play Super Mario Bros., there are a few options open to you. You could stop playing CS: GO. You could grab a nearby 3DS, perhaps yanking it from the hands of a passing four year-old, and balance it under your monitor, using a series of elaborate poking devices to manipulate the game. Or you could join Reflex Gamers’ CS: GO server, where they’ve created an emulated SNES within cs_office, complete with controllers and cartridges. You have to see this.
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Craig send me the video below with the line “this is Garry’s Mod“. After looking at it for a bit, I realised I didn’t understand what that meant, because it looked a lot more like Eve Online. So I browsed my way over to Facepunch for an explanation: “Devinity has been in development for a long time, going through many massive updates and overhauls, so much that you would barely be able to tell the new and old versions used to be the same gamemode. It is a unique combination of gameplay elements from games such as EVE: online and Freelancer, but with many of our own elements added in, further enhancing the player experience.”

Okay! So that means…? Spaceships, space battles, planets, NPC missions, NPC space pirates, asteroid fields, all in a game mode for Garry’s Mod. Clever stuff. Videos below.
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Winter Summer is coming. Hmm. It doesn’t have the quite the same power as “Winter”, does it? Shorts and flip-flops are hardly solemn. Basically, if you’re a season that encourages Cliff Richard songs, then you’re definitely not scarily atmospheric. You are lacking in portent. Which means that this impressive tropical overhaul of Skyrim might change the tone of the game. The dragon shouts will be a bit less gruff and a bit more “Fus Ro Ice-Cream!”. Instead of the aggressive mammoths, they might be frolicking in the meltwater, squirting each other with trunkfuls of water and grabbing tails. My magical renaming software is suggesting “Far Cryrim” as a suitable alternative, because Tropical Skyrim Overhaul is too boring for such a sunny delight.
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My absolute favorite thing in the world is when games existences somehow mirror their names. Seriously. I have very few other interests. I’m an incredibly boring person. But anyway, just as Duke Nukem Forever took forever to come out, Call of Duty is nothing if not dutiful in its adherence to a yearly release schedule, and Toilet Tycoon was awful, Left 4 Dead 2 has not, in fact, been left for dead. Sure, Valve hasn’t lavished it with quite as much attention as, say, Team Fortress 2, but it’s certainly attempted to empower the community’s efforts – first with Cold Stream, and then with full Workshop support. But those mods? They’re about to get seventy five point blue banana apple sauce percent modderier, because Valve’s put its Extended Mutation System into beta.

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Haha. Yeah, Garry knows what to do. I’ve posted videos of his Kinect experiments below, and you can see exactly why the infamously aberrant Half-Life 2 mod actually needs Kinect support by watching those. Readers with memories will recall that we talked to Garry about his plans for the mod earlier in the year.

The Kinect support will apparently arrive “this week or next”.
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