This is not the mod I intended to write about when the day began. I had great plans to write about “kitchen sink” mods, which abandon narrative coherency in favour of cramming borrowed ideas into a joyous, lunatic mess. Then I couldn’t get my key example to work, and spent four hours stumbling over error after error until I was forced to give up. I’m telling you this now because it seems like a worthwhile lesson if you’re going to attempt modding beyond the safe boundaries of the Steam Workshop; sometimes it requires patience, sometimes it creates nothing but frustration.

Quick pivot. What can I get running now which will be fun? Think, think, got it: the Supreme Commander 2 Revamp Expansion Mod. Wish Gas Powered’s robotic RTS sequel had been more in-line with its predecessor? This is the mod for you.

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Total Converts is a new weekly column about mods, maps, models, and anything player-created which you can use to amend or append your games.

Modding used to suck.

Back in 1999, I became hooked on Half-Life. Hooked in the way only 14-year-olds can, with a pure, uncritical love. The problem I had – familiar to many today – was that Half-Life was finite and I had no idea if more would ever be made.

So in between rounds of laggy, 56k deathmatch with a friend, I turned to mods, custom maps, and anything else I could find which would allow me to wring more from my investment in Black Mesa. I hung out in IRC rooms, read map review sites and slowly downloaded files from Fileplanet. It felt like I was crawling through obscure corners of the internet, at a time when the internet seemed to inhabit a strange corner of the real world.

Imagine my surprise when I walked into a gift ship while on holiday in an English seaside town and found the CD pictured above. A collection of Half-Life add-ons for sale in the most ordinary place.

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Total Converts is a new weekly column about mods, maps, models, and anything player-created which you can use to amend or append your games.

I stopped playing Grand Theft Auto IV’s missions at the moment where they became too objectionable and turgid to continue. I started to enjoy playing Grand Theft Auto IV almost immediately afterwards, when I began to experiment with the mods available for the game. Without any tools, and with a barely functional Games For Windows Live-cripped PC port, the game’s community had introduced dozens of new ways to toy with the parts of the game I enjoyed: its city, its physics, the rambunctious silliness of its free-form multiplayer.

You can fly and fire lasers from your eyes like Superman. You can flank Nico with a phalanx of baby Star Wars Walkers. You can introduce a police notoriety system, or play as a police officer yourself. You can introduce GTAV style character switching, or make the game prettier than GTAV (from particular angles) with a set of ENB Series tweaks.

Or, like me, you can just go for a walk.

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