By Jim Rossignol on January 6th, 2009.
Modding mecca ModDB has announced its Mod Of The Year Awards 2008, and you lot need to get voting, especially since the awards seem to have expanded to include a gamut of beloved indie games, such as Mount & Blade. It’s all fairly easy – find the mod you want to vote for on the ModDB pages and click the rather prominent button.
Wait. What was mod of the year? If you guys have any nominations for the RPS crew to vote for then post their ModDB links in the comments below. Go!
By Alec Meer on November 19th, 2008.
Yep, Valve’s unfortgettable opening salvo officially gets a decade under its belt on this very day. This terrifies me in ways I can’t quite vocalise.
Said terror is not simply because it makes me feel so very aged, but also because it’s been so long and yet still most FPSes seem entirely ignorant of what HL did with setpieces, incidental detail, gaming-specific narrative style, pacing and world-building. The straight line to most of today’s shooters that started with Doom seems to almost bypass Half-Life. Fortunately, there is one huge, positive side-effect which does ensure HL’s legacy is unassailable: modding.
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By John Walker on September 29th, 2008.
Valve loves them some modders. In fact, a significant proportion of their employees come from modding backgrounds – it’s an area they take incredibly seriously, as a source for enormous talent. This goes a step further this Thursday, as Valve begins to host selected mods on Steam.
“As a part of our continuing efforts to support the MOD community, we will begin hosting selected MODs directly on Steam starting next week. The first five MODs to ship on steam will be Age of Chivalry, D.I.P.R.I.P., Insurgency, Synergy, and Zombie Panic. As always, owners of any Source game will be able to download and play all of these MODs for free.”
By Quintin Smith on June 4th, 2008.
[Since Quinns' last piece on a mod he loved went so well, he's done another one. Hurrah for Quinns! Also, Alien Swarm for UT2004. This article includes profanity and mild-bullying of PCG deputy editors]
Deep Space
The Sigma Campaign
Mission #3
23:49
For the first time in hours our squad was experiencing a period of speechlessness. We were all looking back and forth between the smoking barrel of Schach’s shotgun and the bloody smear where FiveEight used to be. The dismembered chunks of the alien that had been attacking FiveEight bounced away from us all into the shadows. Silence.
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By Alec Meer on December 23rd, 2007.
Over at Moddb, they’ve announced their not-that-shortlist of the 100 best mods released this year, as voted for by their readers. Or, more likely, by the various and rabid fanbases of the respective mods. Which sort of means that whichever mod has the busiest forum/ most militant fans wins. I guess that’s no different from any other form of modern democracy, really. Suggestion to Moddb: lock a load of PC gamers in your cellar, force them to play mods all day every day, but don’t let them anywhere near the internet. Then, each Christmas, tell them to vote for their favourite just before you treat them to their annual festive whipping. It’s the only way to be sure.
Anyway, there’s a load of excellent mods we’ve gibbered about on RPS over the past six months (goodness, we’ve gotten old. I hope the kids still think we’re hip) in the list.
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By Jim Rossignol on November 23rd, 2007.
This is reasonably amusing: a Half-Life 2 mod project that recreates large areas of central Toronto.
The website explains:
City 7: Toronto Conflict, is an action packed Half-Life 2 mod with a variety of unique levels and game play. Explore what has become of City 7 in areas like Dundas square, Eaton Center , Mel Lastman square, St. Michael’s Hospital and TTC system under the Combine rule. This version features Gordon Freeman as the main character, stuck in Toronto due to a teleporting accident in Kleiner’s lab. Try to escape this war torn city by finding any type of teleporting technology and send him back to City 17.
Next week: City 13 – Battle For Basingstoke.
By Jim Rossignol on November 19th, 2007.
Here’s an interesting FPS oddity: a mod created for training Canadian Federal Law Enforcement folks, now freely available for the Federal Law Enforcement training needs of you and me at home.
The project was created using the truly excellent SWAT4 (that’s an Irrational game, development-history fans) and includes a number of custom weapons and playable civilians, that training types can use to make the best-laid plans of their trainees go awry. The agencies responsible have even included their contact details for training tips for other police-folk to make the most of the mod.
The training project was created with help from the 10-David SWAT gaming fan community. Good work, chaps.
By Alec Meer on November 5th, 2007.
First, we had the tanks and the helicopters and the nukes and the aliens. Now, thanks once again to modders experimenting with the outer limits of the bundled Sandbox2 editor, we get the Crysis demo in a whole new, sparkly setting. Is this the best demo ever? Apart from the goof many years ago in which a UK magazine accidentally stuck, rather than the demo, the entirety of the game in question (wish I could remember what it was – I’ll try and find out) on its coverdisk, I reckon so. Details of the map and how to get it after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
By Jim Rossignol on October 6th, 2007.
Inspired by the highly enjoyable Minerva, I spent a few hours this afternoon playing through Half-Life 2 mods. I was a little disappointed with the limited farming action in TractorSource, but nevertheless pleased that the ongoing intimate relationship between games and tractors continues apace. I look forward to the completed mowing add-on.
Far more satisfying was the single player Half-Life 2 mod Riot Act, which is set in Nova Prospekt at the time of Alyx and Gordon’s original hell-raising. You play as an escaped prisoner fighting his way to freedom, and fight alongside other prisoners and so forth. There’s a bit of shaky pacing and some annoyingly narrow corridors in there, but mostly the design is up to a professional standard. The scene setting visual effects as you fade in and out of consciousness in the opening moments are jolly impressive. Riot Act also boasts the third prettiest mod website I have ever seen. These chaps will soon be in gainful gaming employment, I’d wager. (If they aren’t already.)
By Kieron Gillen on September 14th, 2007.
So, Valve have announced that anyone who preorders the Orange Box will get into the Team Fortress 2 beta which starts on the 17th. That’s Monday. Now, great and all, but that does leave a weekend. If only there was some kind of new Team Fortress style game you can play in the meantime.
Why – what’s this? It’s old PC Gamer running joke Infofly. What’s that, infofly? Little Betsy’s stuck down the well? Oh, who cares about Little Betsy. We’re amoral PC gamers, desensitized to horror. Tell us something about games, my insectoid chum. What? Fortress Forever’s been released? That sounds like a cue for a screenshot.
Fortress Forever is a Source-based mod, basically, and is more heavily indebted to Team Fortress Classic than its true successor. I haven’t actually had a chance to play it yet, so I’ve turned to what will surely be the new exciting shortcut when pitiful journalistic laziness strikes: the RPS chatroom on Steam. “I’d imagine it’s like taking methadone the weekend before you start a serious heroin addiction,” noted Dartt, who hadn’t actually played the game, but came up with the best metaphor. Luckily, giving weight to the quote, was the ominous figure of SteveTheBlack who has both played it and agrees with Dartt. “It’s pretty much the same as TFC but with new maps and slight tweaks,” he notes, before expressing mild annoyance with an auto-reload feature if you don’t fire your gun for a few seconds. Then conversation turned to who wants to play a rousing game of Defcon.
In short, you have a few days before TF2 Beta. It seems a fine way to spend it. And if you’re the sort of person who rolls their eyes at the new cartoon look, clearly, you’ll be there for much longer.
By Alec Meer on August 28th, 2007.
Cheerful ska helps anything, and the more sax the better. Take this mod, Gateways, which seemed to be fairly unremarkable “let’s just throw as many Combine in as possible!” Half-Life 2 fan-faffery. Until, that is, I was being chased around giant cubes of light suspended in the sky by all the antlions in the world, to the sound of very cheerful, very saxy ska-lite. It’s basically Benny Hill with giant angry insects, and it’s very funny, exactly the sort of “what happens if I do… this!” that modding is, at heart, about. There’s some ridiculously over-the-top guitar noodling in another level, too.
The concept is you’re a Combine prisoner (in a familiar orange suit, natch) who breaks out into a room full of portals. Each of these portals takes you to a psychotically designed mini-level that bombards you with waves of braindead foes in massive numbers until they’re all dead. There’s some button-pushing. And, well, that’s it. While there’s a certain admirable surreality in the odd-hued, physically impossible levels, at lot of the fun comes from HL2 bads being placed in situations they can’t really deal with. An antlion placed in a giant chamber with a thin, spiral walkway reaching up to the ceiling will, for instance, attempt to land on it but repeatedly and comically fall off. A Combine soldier left on a 3-foot square floating platform just that little bit more than grendade distance from you will somehow manage to look hilariously frustrated despite there being no new animations. And, as has been proven many times but is always good to see again, something explosive thrown into a pack of a dozen zombies is always value for money.
It’s not actually a good mod. Despite sounding fairly serious about it all, really this is just a bunch of guys dicking around in the way anyone would with plenty of time and a rough guide to building HL2 levels. But they’ve gone that extra mile into occasionally pushing the silliness just as far as it’ll go, and that makes for a half-hour of play that’s at least partly screamingly entertaining. I’m not entirely convinced its makers realise how funny Gateways can be – not that it matters.
Oh, and it’s also a perfect delaying tactic from the just-released overhaul of Ultima Online, which I feel oddly compelled to look at but at the same time am a little bit scared of. More on that tomorrow, anyway, and in the meantime there’s a 14-day trial of it here – 2.3Gb, mind, which by my maths is equal to roughly 153 copies of Doom 2. Now there’s a useless fact I really hope someone accidentally remembers forever.
