What is the weekend for if not banter, antics, and japery? Go on, round up the lads and hop in the bantmobile to speed smash boat bash plane dash around Just Cause 3 now that its multiplayer mod [official site] has left beta and exploded onto Steam. The unofficial (but sanctioned) mod lets hundreds of players lark about in the explode-o-sandbox world in battles, races, and just plain tomfoolery. Here, check out the antics in this launch trailer: Read the rest of this entry »
A new mod for Dark Souls mixes the brutal action-RPG with Counter-Strike’s mod Gun Game (or CS:GO’s Arms Race mode, if you’d rather). Much as Gun Game rewards Counter-Strikers with new weapons for killing other players, the DaS_GG mod gives the Chosen Undead levels and fancier weapons for whacking folks. Oh, but it takes them away as you get hit. Even if you know Lordran upside-down and inside-out, this should certainly make Dark Souls surprising. Read the rest of this entry »
Viva La Revolution! The Just Cause 3 Multiplayer [official site] mod is ready to come out of its six-month-long beta, and version 1.0 will blast onto Steam next week (20th July). Essentially, it allows 100 players at a time to muck about in Medici, racing cars, dog-fighting jets, pulling off stunts, blowing up buildings and crashing boats. It’s going to be absolute carnage, isn’t it?
This is not a fully online version of Just Cause 3 or anything like that – there’s no NPCs or story. It’s basically a sandbox, and a tool with which the community can create custom game modes that others can then play through.
RPS Feature Horrors and heists
I have this clear memory of playing the first Thief, crouching against the wall in a dark stairwell as a guard walked closer. I held my breath until he passed, hidden in a shadow inches away. The games in the original Thief trilogy were all about light and darkness, with a “light gem” at the bottom of the screen to indicate whether you were really in the dark, reducing the guesswork created by the oddities of first-person bodies and your own screen settings. It’s an obvious idea more stealth games should borrow.
A a lot of things from the original Thief games didn’t become standard in the genre, and even the 2014 reboot/sequel didn’t pick up on some of them. For that we have The Dark Mod [official site].
Hurr hurr. Inspired by the name of Bethesda’s upcoming method for selling bespoke mods, the ‘Creation Club’ is a weapon mod for Fallout 4 in the form of a golf club that spawns random items, enemies and NPCs when you swing it. It’s a silly jape taken to its logical conclusion – one that the golf club’s creator says isn’t intended as a criticism of Bethesda’s plan. “This mod is based on a pun,” he says, “A wordplay… It’s just a simple joke.”
Read the rest of this entry »
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Lost Alpha [ModDB page], the fantastic free standalone mod inspired by bits of Shadow of Chernobyl that appeared in alpha versions but were cut for the final release, is now properly out. Craig adored the version released in 2014, so a big update is fantastic news. You might remember Dezowave reluctantly released 2014’s unfinished (but still great) version after scamps leaked a rough development build. Now they’ve launched what they’re calling the Developer’s Cut of Lost Alpha, fixing bugs and making it even bigger. Have a look: Read the rest of this entry »
The winners of a Superhot [official site] fan game contest are in and… no, that ↑ Superhot mod for Quake did not win but I couldn’t resist the screenshot. No, the actual grand prize winner was Peer-2-Pizza, a first-person obstacle course platformer about using slowmo powers to deliver pizza. Chasing that are two top-down demakes of Superhot, then- look, the precise placings of everything in the Make It Superhot contest don’t really matter. A load of games and mods and bits inspired by Superhot are out for free, and you might dig some of ’em. Read the rest of this entry »
The Resident Evil 4 HD Project [official site], a hugely impressive fan project painstankingly prettying-up Capcom’s classic spooky shooter, has released its overhaul of the Castle chapter. Unlike many ‘HD’ mods, this one is so faithful to the original look that the makers even track down Spanish buildings that Capcom had photographed for texture bases. It’s a cracking update to a smashing game. The modders haven’t finished overhauling the whole game yet, so they’re releasing it chapter-by-chapter. Here, check out how much nicer the castle looks: Read the rest of this entry »
Introversion Software’s seminal hacking sim Uplink may be fifteen years old but it’s still one of the finest hacks ’em ups, Brendan will tell you. It’s now looking super-fresh too, thanks to the amazing makeover mod UplinkOS [official site]. Along with a new look, UplinkOS brings fab features like support for opening multiple windows at once, now draggable and with tabs. Fancy! We’ve mentioned UplinkOS before but now, after several months of beta, a final release has arrived. Here, look at this swish style: Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature It's Stellaris, Jim, but not as we know it,
Everything was in place for the Romulan invasion of the United Federation of Planets. Warbirds screeched out of the shipyards of Romulus and Remus on a direct course for the closest Federation worlds, those belonging to the chilly Andorians. The real goal, of course, was neighbouring Vulcan. This was a symbolic war.
As my jade vessels bombarded the frozen Andorian homeworld, the Tal Shiar informed me that yet another Federation ship had been successfully sabotaged. When my Reman shock troops’ boots hit the icy ground, I realised that Star Trek: New Horizons, a Stellaris [official site] mod, was my favourite ever Roddenbery-flavoured game.
Half-Life 2: Episode 3 [official site] came out one year ago and I never even noticed. It wasn’t an official release from Valve, for well-known reasons, but instead a player-made mod. Yet surprisingly, Episode 3: The Closure is not a fastidiously faithful extension of Valve’s world by super-serious fans. Instead, it plays fast and loose with Half-Life by introducing everything from Star Trek bits to cutscenes showing Gordon. In a hugely fascinating post, the mod’s creator has looked back on the (often furious) response from Half-Life fans and explained some of his curious decisions, all of which I adore. This has truly made my day. Read the rest of this entry »
Yeah, you see a lot of these kids around these days, telling everyone they’re Pokémon Masters. Poképosers, I call ’em. A true Pokémon Master dedicates their entire life to defeating and capturing every last Pokémon. Not just in one game, nor the core games, nor even all the official games. A true Pokémon Master masters every last fan game and mod too, from Pokémon Doom to, now, Pokémon Cobalt and Amethyst [official site]. Launched over the weekend, it recreates a full singleplayer Pokémon game inside vanilla Minecraft, complete with capturing, battling, an annoying rival – the lot. Read the rest of this entry »
The next chapter of the hugely impressive Resident Evil 4 HD Project [official site] will arrive on March 31st, its makers have announced, overhauling the game’s castle areas. This is possibly the best fan-made overhaul I’ve seen, and certainly goes far beyond Capcom’s work in the official HD re-release. Working with unofficial tools, the RE4HD Project’s makers have added more 3D detail to the world, relit areas, and taken such care in recreating textures that they even track down buildings Capcom photographed as source material. Check out this new comparison video showing off improvements: Read the rest of this entry »
A new unofficial patch has arrived for Deus Ex: Invisible War, bringing widescreen support and a few fixes to the game that I still think would be remembered quite fondly if it weren’t named ‘Deus Ex’. I found Invisible War technically fiddly and sloppy when I replayed it a few years back, and it sounds like the Visible Upgrade patch by ‘snobel’ fixes most of my gripes. It supports modern aspect ratios, including for folks who tape a dozen screens together, has an adjustable field of view, and fixes a few bugs. Oh, and it includes an optional high-res texture pack. Good stuff! Read the rest of this entry »
The new Fallout 4 mod Revolted [Nexus page] combines past and present in an impressive yet horrifying combination by adding a rude ‘tude ’90s FPS to the apocalyptoworld as an in-game video game. The checklist:
A growling protagonist? ☑
With politeness issues? ☑
And a cigar welded to his teeth? ☑
Crates? ☑
Barrels? ☑
Colour-coded locked doors? ☑
First-person platforming? ☑
The nuked-out world of tomorrow is more grim than ever before. Read the rest of this entry »
The big silly sandbox of Just Cause 3 is a fine place to dick about, driving and gliding and exploding all over for giggles, but it was sorely lacking the option to muck about with your mates. That’s now resolved with the beta release of Nanos Just Cause 3 Multiplayer [official site]. The unofficial mods adding multiplayer with potentially hundreds of players per server, chasing and racing and exploding together. Just Cause 3 is chaotic with only one play so with hundreds, oh my! Read the rest of this entry »
A new Grand Theft Auto 5 [official site] mod will add the whole flipping city from GTA 4, the developers of GTA modding tool OpenIV have announced. Liberty City will be added to GTA 5’s world, rather than replacing it, appearing just across the sea. Crumbs! Given Rockstar are seemingly more interested in expanding 5’s multiplayer than its singleplayer, it’ll certainly be nice to have a huge new world to play in with GTA V’s toys. Read the rest of this entry »
Bloated blood-burping bumbleflies, electrotears, and so many more secrets are now buzzing around the basement in The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, thanks to the release of a huge and hugely impressive community-made expansion. Yes, the second official expansion launches in a fortnight but before then absolutely do check out the free Antibirth [official site] mod. Antibirth is mahoosive, adding new characters, new enemies, new bosses, new items, new music, new… it’s really big, and really well-made too. Also, this trailer is all sorts of creepy: Read the rest of this entry »
SureAI’s huge Skyrim total conversion Enderal: The Shards of Order [official site], which builds a whole new game upon Bethesda’s foundations, is getting an expansion of its own in 2017. Enderal’s launch this year was dang impressive – “play this excellent mod,” said Cobbo – but a few bits were cut from the initial release. Now the game’s lead writer has picked those up off the cutting room floor and is polishing them up for Forgotten Stories with 10-20 hours of new quests and new quest lines, along with a few other nice odds and ends. Have a peek in the announcement trailer below. Read the rest of this entry »
I adore mods which give new life to mundane objects. Every crate in the crate-filled warehouse of CrateDM is potentially a player waiting to frag you. Prop Hunt modes put us in the mindset of level designers placing rocks and buckets. In Run For It!, a new mod for old Doom, objects which didn’t have legs do now have legs. Ammo packs, lamps, trees, barrels, weapons, corpses and goodness knows what else have sprouted arms and legs to run around. Yup, it’s as daft as it sounds. Watch this trailer, which comes complete with Doomy Yakety Sax: Read the rest of this entry »
