Mod News: Hilarity Ensues
At the end of this week's Mod News, I will present you with the funniest thing I've read in ages. I'm mean, so you'll have to wait until right at the end, and I'm sure you wouldn't even think of scrolling down. First, you'll have to ingest and process the most interesting in this week's happenings from the mod scene. Laughs are a dessert.
NEWS
Alexander Lincoln can take credit for pointing me in the direction of this one. It's a CoH mod called Modern Combat, which last week released pictures of guns. Which, as we've previously established, is not news. Except it is when it's an awesome gun, and there's a video and everything. So that's just dandy.
Meanwhile, HL2 single-player horror thing Visage continues to have me very excited. For a couple of reasons, actually, but I'll leave that for another time. For now, it's because of this new teaser trailer, which arrives at the same time as this extraordinary concept art. I have it on good authority that its team members are ploughing several hours of their free time per day into Visage, and intend to continue doing so until release. It's phenomenal to see a team take their modding so seriously.
Here's a newly announced thing: Borderline, for Crysis Wars. Set in 2042, it begins in a military base codenamed "Cliché". Sorry, no. "Stigma". The "concept art" appears to be just be screenshots run through Photoshop. But I actually have a feeling this one might turn into something interesting.
And now something which made me very sad: UserCreated reports that Butterfly is on hold. Butterfly is the absolutely gorgeous Crysis mod set inside a gargantuan dome, and with a delicious floating 3D user-interface that appeared inside the game world itself. It's not dead, its developers cry: they're simply waiting to port it over to Crysis 2. But now Crysis 2's supposedly been delayed, so SADFACE. Hopefully it'll all come together eventually.
RELEASES
I missed Modern Warfare mod Frontlines R3L04D when it came out a couple of weeks back. This was either due to my being at the Develop Conference, or because it has a name so dreadful my mind suppressed it. I mention it now because its team have been churning out some game type overviews, and they look quite nifty. I especially like the idea of Airborne.
And that's about it, as far as I can tell.
UPDATES
The aforementioned Mr Lincoln deserves a prize, actually, because he also pointed me towards this: excellent Company of Heroes mod Eastern Front has released its 1.20 patch. The update features major design changes for the way the Soviets operate (they have the abililty to retreat, basically. Seem to remember it was someone else who did the retreating in that region), as well as... oh, just lots of stuff. Full patch notes are here.
Anyway, do you remember Half-Screwed, the very silly HL1 mod I mentioned a while back. Here's an update. New features include a new player model, new scientist heads, /replaced/ scientist heads (no idea if they're actually two separate things, or if the devs just accidentally wrote it twice), and the legendary more!
AND THE REST
Robert Yang's doing a series on his blog where he hypes up a load of other modders. Which is always the sort of thing I can get behind. Peers praising peers is ace. Here he is explaining why Brendon Chung is ace.
And now, ladies and gentlemen of Rock, Paper, Shotgun, I present to you the funniest thing I've read in ages. I feel for the Fourth Reich mod team, who're clearly doing their best to create an excellent Half-Life 2 mod. But things are against them in the most farcicle way possible.
Have a read of this, under the 'Bad News!' heading. It's absolutely priceless.