Tag Archive

Left 4 Dustbowl

Written by Alec Meer on November 18, 2008.

We had said, amongst ourselves, that we probably had enough Left 4 Dead coverage today already. This one’s just far too epic not to report, though. Via Castle Crecente, it’s Left 4 Dead played happily in Team Fortress 2 maps:

Man! Fast work, modders. There’s safe rooms and everything. It also supports Hl2 maps, apparently - there’s a guide on how to do it yourself here. So, within less than a day, there being only four official L4D campaigns has stopped being a problem. Happy Zombieday!

UT3, Now With More Dinosaurs

Written by Alec Meer on October 20, 2008.

Unreal Tournament 3 remains an oddly ugly game, which always seemed a bewildering misfire on the part of an FPS that, so it seemed, existed primarily to pimp an engine. It’s like a milkman painting a picture of a cow with tortured, bleeding udders on the side of his van. While UT3 plays okay (the highlight being its agreeably ridiculous vehicles), its look is just visual noise, a mess of vague, clashing aesthetic ideas that somehow manages to seem devoid of colour despite drawing a silly neon border around everything. What a shame. What I’m still hoping - as a long-term UT player - is that the mod community can yet rescue it from the drab, tokenistic fate Epic themselves damned it to.
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Portal Prelude Mod Sort Of Released

Written by John Walker on October 9, 2008.

Portal Prelude has been released. The uber-mod that everyone seems jolly excited about is officially out tomorrow, but is already ready for download. Hurrah! Except it’s one of those 24 hour preview deals with FilePlanet. So if you want it today, you’ll have to crawl through their tunnel of blades, spikes and fire, ending in a half hour wait for the download to start. Man! Anyway, rise above it: good news. We’ll offer thoughts on it soon.

Fallout 2.5

Written by Alec Meer on October 7, 2008.

These’ll be of little interest to the more ardent Fallout 2 vet, who’s doubtless played all of these long ago, and is already preparing to spam-cry ‘OLD!’ below. If, however, if you’re coming to the game fairly fresh or are replaying it for the first time in ages due to excitement about Fallout 3 or because GoG.com’s made it so cheaply available, you might find much to delight and enrapture your young mind here.

It’s Moddb’s round-up of the best Fallout 2 total conversions, from the quest-expanding Restoration project to the tri-part Wasteland Merc series. Oh, for more free time.

Half-Life: The Lost Chapter

Written by Alec Meer on September 28, 2008.

Did you know there’s an official slice of the Half-Life saga that never found its way to PC? Decay was a bonus game mode in the Playstation 2 port of the first Half-Life, much as Blue Shift was supposed to be the exclusive extra bit in the ultimately canned Dreamcast version. But while the latter saw its own PC release (replete with the at-the-time ace High Definition pack) and can be had to this day from Steam, Decay seemed damned to dwindle into olden console game obscurity. Oh, the irony of its name.

Which is odd and sad, as it was developed by Gearbox and is, to the best of my knowledge, the only official attempt to make something other than a straight FPS out of the Half-Life series. Fortunately, a Ukranian team have painstakingly recreated Decay as a free mod for the original Half-Life, even grabbing the original sound files off the PS2 disc (hope they don’t run into any trouble for that) - which means new voicework from the chaps behind Barney, Kleiner et al, plus a couple of new characters, so this really does feel like Official Half-Life. More importantly, it’s your first and only chance to get chatted up by Barney. Well, unless he has an ulterior motive behind that drink he keeps promising to buy Gordon.
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Fallout Made Modern

Written by Alec Meer on September 16, 2008.

We’re not far off Fallout 3 release day, which means now’s a fine time to revisit the first two games in the revered RPG series - whether it’s to bring yourself up to speed with what went before, or to better prepare yourself to gripe that Bethesda have done terrible things to your childhood.

If you are pondering reinstalling one of the old dears, I can strongly recommend NMA chap Mash’s excellent High Resolution Patch.
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Portal: Prelude

Written by Alec Meer on September 16, 2008.

Oh, your face just then. It was all like WTF ZOMG NO WAY!!!!!! Like, rilly.

Sorry, but this isn’t a reveal of the rumoured official prequel to the gamette that stole our hearts and minds around about this time last year. Instead it’s a mod, but considering pretty much every other Portal mod has been little more than a level pack, this is a particularly ambitious one.

Specifically, it has a storyline. It even has NPCs that aren’t cubes or turrets.
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How To Make Far Cry Look Like Crysis. Ish.

Written by Alec Meer on August 11, 2008.

Once upon a time, Far Cry was the great hope of modders everywhere. Its paint-like world-building tool appeared joyously easy to use, and its incredi-graphics seemed malleable to all sorts of visual experimentation.

That didn’t really happen. Half-Life proved a more suitable mod-foundation, and any number of mooted Far Cry efforts didn’t make it far past the drawing board. So it’s great to see one finally make it out the door (though worth noting we’ve had two other splendid FC mods in the last year.)

The Delta Sector is both a single and multiplayer mod, but its main goal - and its greatest accomplishment - is to squeeze every last drop of pixel-juice out of Crytek’s now-aged first engine. The results are incredible:

(Click on the pic for a big’un).
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Half-Life Wars

Written by Alec Meer on July 23, 2008.

Older and more spiteful readers may immediately be thinking “but Meer already wrote about the RTS mod for Half-Life 2 months ago. Let’s burn his house down and tell his mum that he’s rubbish.” It’s true. I did. But! Stow those Molotovs, for I thought it well worth checking back in with HL2 Wars, what with the last version I squinted at being little more than a proof of concept.

Its development’s been ongoing, and now, three of four iterations down the line, it’s really starting to come together. V0.5 was released a couple of weeks back, and saw a shift to The Orange Box evolution of the Source engine - making for ultra-pretty. It’s still very early days for the mod, but if you’re any sort of Half-Life 2ophile, you really should go look-see.
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MINERVA Goes Pro: Valve Hires Ultra-Modder

Written by Alec Meer on July 17, 2008.

We’re far too late with this, and we feel extraordinarily bad for it - E3 has an unfortunate tendency to possess games journos body and soul for one mad week a year. But it’s never too late to celebrate, and so we shall.

Adam ‘Cargo Cult’ Foster, the delightful fellow behind what’s comfortably the finest singleplayer HL2 mod in the ‘verse, MINERVA: Metastasis, has snagged himself a job at Valve. Let there be much rejoicing.

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