Mod News: End Of Term Report
Modders are generally students, it would seem. Which perhaps isn't too surprising, but is all too noticeable at the moment, as end-of-term exams and essays roll around. It means there's still comparatively little to talk about, and what is here is typically a bit Half-Life 2 dominated, as a portion of the scene is. Still, there's some reasonably decent mod news this week, for the first time in several BILLION YEARS, so I'll not complain too much.
- Big news! Which broke about three microseconds after I submitted last week's roundup! The long-awaited Black Mesa mod has revealed six brand new screenshots, here on CVG, who quote the devs as saying "a complete, polished game [will] hit your hard drives in the near future." Wow! The near future is near! Here's to hoping we're playing it before long, and that it's as good as it's been looking for several years.
- Firearms: Source, successor to the massively popular Firearms mod for Half-Life, will be released this July, its devs revealed to us this week. They've also unleashed a bunch of new screenshots and done a cute visual history of the first mod.
- Still on the Half-Life 2, Zeitgeist released some new screenshots. I absolutely love how this one's looking, so decided to explain a bit about why that's the case.
- Clear Sky Reloaded has hit version 0.8. Among the alterations is a "surprise" in the credits sequence. Which, unfortunately, means playing through the whole of Clear Sky again. Maybe this mod will make that less painful an experience. Grab it here.
- Hearts of Iron 2 mod 1964 releases some pics of its new tech trees, along with some info about the current internal alpha build.
- Company of Heroes: Vietnam is looking quite nice. Here's a big ball of fire falling from the sky OH NOES! Particularly lovely is the use of that track that's in Fallout 3.
- SHIFT, the HL2 racing mod, has decided to go down the simulation route rather than the arcade racing it originally planned. They've also been working on some new night lighting stuff. I'm really interested to see how this turns out, as a story-driven racer in the Source Engine.
- There's a lengthy new vid of Battle for Middle Earth 2's RC Mod.
- Hmm, there's a lot of Half-Life 2 stuff again this week. I do try to write about a spread of games here, but hey, if it's interesting, it makes the cut. Demons Vs Humans releases a new video of an interesting game mechanic, in which the demon can only be seen as a shadow form with the flashlight. A smart move which could open up some nice tactical play - hopefully it won't result in too much imbalance. This one's set for release on June 1st.
- And finally, the third part of Radiator - Yang's HL2 mod series - didn't release in April, because Valve very inconsiderately updated their editing tools which broke the mod a bit. May it is.
We've been a bit rubbish over at UserCreated lately, but do keep on checking there for awesome updates of the mod kind.