This was supposed to be a post on Grand Theft Auto 4, then I realized that there’s not much in the ways of mods for it. So, here’s ENBSeries a mod for a whole mess of games with the sole purpose of giving you more graphics. Not simply better graphics, but more graphics in general.

I’ve never quite understood the ceaseless quest for better and better graphics, especially when applied to Grand Theft Auto 4, which chews up and spits out computers before it begrudgingly runs. I’m playing it on all medium with no anti-aliasing and I’m enjoying it, gosh darn it. But for those of you who feel that GTA 4′s graphics are so last year (which they are, if you possess the vision broken enough to believe that graphics become outdated in a short year’s worth of time), here’s ENBSeries. Again.

What ENBSeries does is add a whole mess of acronyms specially designed to make your game look better.  GTA 4 in particular gets–but is not limited to–better anti-aliasing, a better blur filter (as seen from the above screenshot), better reflections, post-processing effects and possibly SSAO. I do love me some SSAO, especially in my Minecrafts. Of course, GTA4 is not the only game with ENBSeries support, and older games like Serious Sam, San Andreas and Deus Ex get the handy-dandy feature of actually running on DirectX 9, instead of DirectX less than 9.

A word to the wise (and not-so-wise): ENBSeries needs quite a handful of tweaking to get it looking just right. I’d recommend digging around for  config files, especially for GTA4. If you think yourself adventurous enough, the power is yours.

ENBSeries’s homepage. It’s a little sparse, but the download page has most everything.

Also, to those of you that sent in applications. Our editor, a Mr. Lewis Denby of PCGamer, is on a business trip in Holland. Once he comes back, I’ll start setting up worthy writers with wondrous writing accounts.

Recently, an update for space shooter Eternal Silence came out, bringing up the version number up to 3.5. Changes were made. Since the changes were only really noticeable to those who’ve been obsessively following Eternal Silence’s development, I won’t expound upon them. What I did do is get off my lazy behind, navigated to the store page and clicked the little green “INSTALL NOW” button. Holy moley.

Then I played it for a bit. When I was younger, I was a huge fan of the game Star Wars Battlefront II. Not the first one, mind you, I jumped onto the PC gaming bandwagon long after the first one came out. Anyway, Battlefront II stuck with me because it was… well, awesome. It was the perfect marriage of zero-G space combat and on-foot classic shooterfest. The fact that I could jump onto an X-wing, fly around, park the X-wing in someone’s face and jump out shooting was something that endeared very much to younger-teenage me. Almost five years later, here I am; I’m playing a similar game.

Eternal Silence is one of the flagship Source mods: a spaceship shooter on an engine that didn’t have any spaceship shooters. Six years later, it’s still only true space combat games out there, barring Garry’s Mod addons like Spacebuild. Sure, it’s starting to show its age since the developers haven’t made the jump to the Source 2009 engine, but it still stands alone among its peers.

However lofty the game’s origins are, it’s still brought to its knees by the community. Of the nine servers that were running a Eternal Silence game, one was populated. One of these one servers had over 200 ping. I decided to grit my teeth and bear it, since I didn’t want to be caught giving up on account of lag. Surprisingly, the ping was bearable (at least outside of any ships) and the eight people playing were not repulsive. One lamented on the lack of people, even though the eight-to-ten players that were on while I was playing still made for an interesting game.

Eternal Silence definitely subscribes to the Star Wars theory of space. Satisfying pew-pews and pwoooshes are heard while firing rockets, as well as the agonizing fiery explosions of failure when blown up. Come on, Eternal Silence; I like my space like I like my women: empty and soundless. Wait, that sounded less misogynistic in my head. Let’s move on, shall we?

The space, though being agonizingly sound-filled, does have that sort of feel that makes you think, “holy shit, I’m in space.” The several-ton spaceships woosh out of the hangers, then there’s that wondrous feeling when the spaceship settles just as it hits open space. It gives you a tingly feeling when you realize the trillion-dollar several-ton spaceship doesn’t weigh a thing. Remember this feeling when you smash the ship into a rock. A space rock! That never gets old.

The on-foot gameplay, despite being solid, is obviously dwarfed by the space combat. That doesn’t mean it’s entirely without merit. In fact, it’s actually improved by the spaceship bits. You and three other people hop into a dropship. Assuming you make it over the starry expanse of space with all of your limbs intact, you park your dropship in the enemy’s hanger (provided you’ve destroyed the corvettes protecting the hanger, of course). Then, you and your three comrades shoot some people and cap some points. Sure, it sounds formulaic in writing, but the spaceship segment is the icing on an oh-so-delicious cake.

Where there would have been you in a tank or jeep cruising across Nonameistan in any other FPS, there’s you and a couple guys in a mostly defenseless dropship, suspended weightless in space. Then, you pray that either the enemy’s team doesn’t notice your sneaky sneak into their hangar (and faces) or you hope that the tailing allied fighters actually back you up and fend off the attacking planes.

It turns what would generally be a boring trek to the objective into an actually important segment. Sure, getting to the point is important because you need to do it to win. But turn the “getting to the point” part into an interesting adventure all in itself, and you’ve got a winner.

Man, I enjoyed Eternal Silence, and it’s a huge crushing shame that there aren’t more people playing it. Shame, Internet.

So, before the last remaining readership files out of the decrepit tower that is Usercreated, I’d like to call upon all of you to give me assistance in keeping this grand site alive.

You can help in two ways: by sending me links to cool things you find so I don’t have to spend an hour delving the internets trying to find stuff, or by helping me write.

First: the links part. I wasn’t kidding about the hour part. Yes, trawling ModDB takes a lot of work, and I’ve been coming too close to regurgitating news posts for comfort. I don’t want UC to degrade into a news robot, endlessly reposting news because it’s both not fun to read and it’s not fun to write. Therefore, if you see some sort of mod that looks really cool, some unpolished gem hidden in the depths of the ‘net, send it on over to contact[at]usercreated.org. I don’t actually have access to the email, so I can’t see what people send. To fix this, I’ll probably bother Mr. Lewis Denby or Mr. Andrea Varotsis for access. Please don’t send ModDB news posts. Chances are good that I’ve already seen it. If you must send ModDB stuff, say “Hey, I saw this really neat mod over at ModDB, have you guys seen it yet? [link]” and I’d say huh, that looks pretty neat and throw it on up for everyone to see.

Secondly: some writers. It gets a little lonely around here with just me around, after the other writers disappeared without a trace. Therefore, I’d like some assistance with the writing aspect of things. Not only is it boring to see re-written news posts, it’s also boring to only see one-to-three potentially interesting mods every week. I’ll probably use the same criteria that potential writers were graded by when I was accepted back in June of ’10.

1. A capable grasp of the English language, and a passion for writing. I don’t say this in the generally clichéd way: if you don’t like to write, you won’t have fun writing for UC. If you feel like pumping out a couple news posts a week is a huge chore, don’t bother applying.
2. You like mods. If you don’t like mods, or PC gaming, why are you reading this seriously.
3. You have a large span of games. I know this is my biggest problem with myself. I don’t have a whole lot of game (though by mod standards, my family would vehemently disagree). For example, I don’t have Crysis, which is why only one Cryiss post has been posted by me. Source Source Source all the time is rather dull.
4. Send us some samples of your work, please.

Like the email, I don’t actually have access to the admin panel so I can’t actually approve someone. I’ll add it to the list of things to bother Andrea about.

While I was typing this, I thought of a third thing. If you’re a server owner and you think that your unused CPU cycles could be better put to a game server for a mod, let me know when you get the hankering to do a game and I’ll post about it. I know the Steam group was founded for this very reason, but I’m not entirely sure that we actually did any mod gaming. Did we?

For all three of these things, you can contact me (once I get the barriers down) at contact[at]usercreated.org. Remove the spam filter thing and send some stuff in.

I was seized by a sudden impulse to check when Usercreated came into being, and it turns out that this wondrous day is today. January 6th. We are one year old today. Yes, one year ago on the dark days of January, 2010, Usercreated sprang into being from the dark folds of the Internet with one goal: to show how awesome mods are.

One year and 303 posts later, Usercreated is still going. While we’ve hit some bumps in the road along the way, and our writing staff has contained upwards of six people. Now, there’s me. I have no intention of stopping any time soon, so let’s keep chugging into a bright, mod-filled future.

You’re all awesome.

Yes, I have returned. While I was lazing about both at home and enduring the heaviest storm Los Angeles has seen in years (the pansies) exciting things were happening. Exciting as in having no dry clothes. Exciting as why do I have almost two hundred mod updates. Seriously, people. Since I didn’t want to miss any really interesting tidbits of info by splitting it into several news posts, I will condense the shenanigans that went down into one handy-dandy post for perusal.

-Mod of the Year awards concluded sometime last week, and all of the winners have been announced. Forgotten Hope 2 won the prestigious Player’s Choice Mod of the Year award, with the ArmA 2 mod Project Reality snagging Best Upcoming. It’s worth a look through the winner’s gallery to see what was the best of the best this year.

-The Fistful of Frags development team announced what they’re planning on doing after Fistful of Frags concludes development. It’s a mod in a mod. I don’t know really what it’s about; it sounds like Zombie Master, except it’s a team deathmatch and when a player dies they become able to spawn AI controlled players… It’s confusing now, but it’ll be interesting to see how it turns out in the future.

-Not content to sit on their winning of Best Singleplayer Mod, the Nehrim team announced that the new patch (which adds new quests) will be released “soon.” After that, a larger expansion will be released that expands the main story immediately after it ends.

-Company of Heroes: Modern Combat gives a Christmas present, and that is Alpha testing. D’awww.

-Blue Portals reveals a hint system that will make me feel less (or is it more?) stupid. Also, pictures of the wacky abstract DLC addition.

-Portal: Awakening gets pushed back into 2011, but they still aim to get it out before Portal 2 hits in April. Still not dead, it’s delayed. Right?

- Jastian Summer announces a revolutionary new addition to the mod that will send shockwaves across the entire modding community. Who needs guns anymore when you can just tickle the aliens?

-Black Mesa gets voted as an honorable mention for Upcoming Mod. In other news, absolutely no one is surprised, as it has been winning similar awards for the past five years.

-Eternal Silence is getting a rather hefty update fairly soon, which adds new maps, a new ship and a new territory control gamemode. Will it be as awesome (and lengthy) as the under-respected Territory Control maps on Team Fortress 2? Hydro is the bomb, and no one cares. It looks to be more along the lines of capture-points, however. Still could be awesome. Just add space to anything and it becomes awesome.

-Speaking of space, Star Battle is a Starcraft 2 mod and it is awesome. It’s kind of like DoTA, except you’re gigantic hulking space freighters out to destroy everything. Also, Roach Snake is pretty awesome too. Get five or six of your friends, and your microphone becomes a vessel with which you can fling insults over the internet.

-Also, Pirates, Vikings, and Knights 2 got that 2.4 ginormo-update they were planning. I haven’t yet played it, because Steam Sales are made of monsters.

-That’s all I’ve got for now. It’s 11:30 and I’m tired, so I’m going to bed.

One of the best things about modding (and indie development, to a point) is the groups of developers that release a game, then once people actually play it they take the time out to say “this is how development goes and this is where we screwed up.” It’s always nice to see a sort of refreshing honesty come out of a few mod groups.

So, I’ve compiled a few development diaries that I’ve looked at over the last couple days. One will be really old (I think it was published in one of RPS’s Sunday Papers) but the others are fairly new. Go read!

First one would be the retrospective on Blue Portal’s release. Now, from reading over this I could see that I was much harsher with Blue Portals than most other review-peoples. I can’t pinpoint as to why exactly, as my main beef was the fiasco of Blue Portals’s difficulty curve–or lack of anything besides a difficulty mesa. From what I’ve seen, comments have ranged from “Blue Portals is really unintuitive” (paraphrased, obviously) to ”Anyone who thinks Blue Portals is difficult is a fucking tard and should uninstall Portal.” (not paraphrased).

But, at least the retrospective actually explains why the beginning chapters are so hard. The later chambers were hard, yes, but it was an intuitive hardness, one that comes out of actually being difficult. The earlier chambers were hard in a way that required physics to be warped, which ground my gears in several ways.

The article goes on to announce something about Blue Portal’s expansion pack which should be out in the coming months, as well as the Blue Portals SDK.

Next up is the First Strike article. It details the surprisingly difficult time that the developers had while creating their Star Wars meets Battlefield 2142 mod. There’s some interesting bits about detailing the maps and models to fit them into the Star Wars style, as well as the coincidentally-timed breaking of EA’s master servers in time for First Strike’s 1.5 release. Oops.

I tried First Strike several years ago, but it didn’t run well for me at all. I chock that up to several things: Battlefield 2142 has a poor mod system; I was running on a crap computer (haha! I’m using the integrated graphics chips!); and I didn’t know anything about anything ever.

Here’s the old one: Age of Chivalry’s End Development article. These are the ones I like the most, not in any small part because they’re easy to read. Age of Chivalry’s article is structured thus: 5 Reasons We Screwed Up, and 5 Reasons We’re Awesome.

The Screwed Up section is excellent because it shares some common issues with game development: e.g. how painfully awful it is to get people to want to help you with your game. Anyone who’s worked in the field (or has an interest in it) knows how long it takes to get someone who is skilled enough and shares enough passion to be able to work with you on your game. For free, nonetheless.

Also, game balancing is a horrible, horrible chore that takes years to get right (note, not perfect). Case in point, Starcraft 1. That thing came out twelve years ago and they just recently stopped patching it.

I might as well link to Blade Symphony MoTY posts. Even though they’re basically there to drum up attention to garner votes for, ModDB’s MoTY posts, they’re still interesting nonetheless. Which means I didn’t vote for them. No siree.

(curses)

ModDB’s been plastered with news and info about their new digital distribution system: Desura. I managed join 1,500 other mod peoples by  snagging a spot in the closed beta, so I can find out what all the hooplah is about.

The first thing to do is define what Desura is: it’s a digital distribution system that is heavily centered on the mods. Sure, it’s has the ability to allow you to buy indie games and in the future commercial games, but it’s all about the mods here.

In its basest element: Desura is pretty simplistic. It provides a unified platform that one could download mods for easily enough. You run the search wizard and it adds all of your installed games that have mods available. Then, you download mods that are already released through the handy-dandy “Mods” tab. It’s pretty slick, and a simple bypass for the often headache-inducing trials of searching for quality mods, downloading them, and installing them.

From my tests, it seemed to work almost flawlessly. I downloaded three mods: Dreamball and Empires from Half-Life 2, and Defend Unreal Territories from Unreal Tournament 3. All three started up decently enough through Steam: I double-click on the mod, and it starts up in Steam with Dreamball and Empires showing up as Source SDK Base. Uninstalling mods was easy as well; a simple right-click uninstall and it removes the game from both Desura and my Steam game list.

For what Desura is meant to do, it does it extremely well. The mod page is nicely laid out with the most popular mods showing up; e.g. most of the mods that are awesome and I haven’t played much of like NEOTOKYO, Sven Co-op, Empires, Modular Combat, etcetera.

However, as with all betas Desura isn’t the shining paragon of software perfection. There are a handful of tweaks and changes that should be made before Desura goes gold. The most glaring of this is the menu interface. While it’s visually stunning and well-designed in terms of looks, it’s not exactly easy to use. It looks nice and all to have my avatar blown up in the corner, but I don’t really need a low-resolution Link scowling at me over a button that may or may not take me to my profile page. There are a half-dozen buttons and things that can be removed, or at least given the ability to be toggled on or off, like the Mod Watch, the Thread Watch, the Shopping Cart.

The library is nice though. I have to give props for that. It’s good to see that the mods are grouped by game instead of spread willy-nilly like they are on my Steam. It doesn’t give how fast you’re downloading things at in the main library window, though, and there’s no option to reopen the download progress window if you close it. From my experiences, though, speeds seemed to be bouncing between 500 and 800 kilobytes per second. They aren’t mindblowing speeds on my 1.5MB/s line, but they’re decent enough.

What seems to be the worst thing about Desura is the community and speculation surrounding it. I’m not dissing the ModDB community when I say this: it will be significantly more professional if comments are disabled on the mod pages. Leave the commenting to the ModDB pages and have the Desura pages be what they should be: semi-professional displays of what the mod is, not several hundred pages of people speaking in broken English about it. Forums, and ModDB’s main site is where those types of things should belong.

In conclusion: it’s good at what it does. It fails at what it tries to be. Currently, it’s the best mod distribution platform this side of the internets. Also, the fact that it seems to have a well-established niche as a distributor of the lesser-known indie games is several points in its favor. But Desura attempts to be similar to Steam: a social network built around a distribution platform. It’s not, and it shouldn’t be compared to Steam. It’s a companion to Steam. Desura will not replace Steam, and Steam will not overshadow Desura because they have two different purposes.

As always, the intrepid mod squad are at it again. For a game that isn’t even released yet–and hasn’t had official texture pack support until last week–it sure has a staggering amount of mods for it. I’ve picked out a few of the most promising ones to highlight in this here news post.

hMod and MCAdmin

They aren’t really mods for Minecraft, per se, but they’re some of the most important ones that have come out right now. Any server owner has known the horror of watching their creations be swallowed whole by the unending hordes of griefers armed with TNT and lava. hMod and MCAdmin are mods for the server software, which was admittedly lacking and is still lacking as of now. What hMod adds is the normal slew of admin related necessities, like a whitelist, bans, kicks, usergroups and player kits.

Of  course, TNT is a bad thing to give to any average person. On my private server (no, I’m not giving out the IP), only a handful of people had access to TNT, maybe three people including the two admins. One day I log in and suddenly two mountains that used to be there are gone, and suddenly someone’s at fault. Luckily, MCAdmin as well as hMod have item-specific banlists. TNT’s off limits now.

hMod’s download link and MCAdmin’s download link.

Word of warning: There’s been a bit of a snafu with MCAdmin’s privacy settings recently, so download at your own risk. The developers have stated that all of the developer-specific admin controls have been removed from the software, however. Still, exercise caution.

BiomeTerrain Mod

Yes, Minecraft’s levels are randomly generated. Yes, sometimes you get visually stunning levels with interesting mountains and caves and whatnot. But for others (like me) get bland levels 99% of the time. That’s where BiomeTerrain Mod comes in. It gives a bunch of different values and commands that you can change before you generate a world, which allows for some control over the chaos. Unfortunately, it’s rather obtuse for the first-time user, as the commands are in a text document with little to no clarification over what controls what. The thread is helpful to a point, but you’ll have to generate a couple worlds before you know what’s going on.

BiomeTerrain Mod’s download link

Recall

Sure, the Nether is cool and all (wait no it isn’t, it’s pretty warm in there) but as a fast travel system, it isn’t terribly useful until you get to the point where breaking a diamond pickaxe doesn’t make you cry inside. Recall allows you to make a simple block-based teleportation system to aid in your explorations. Use a recall stone where you’d want to teleport to, make a scroll of the same color, and when you use the scroll you’ll be instantly teleported to the block of that color. Different colors are made by mixing ingredients, like coal, redstone and lightstone dust, or cacti. It’s a rather elegant solution to an annoying issue: you’re lost in your extensive and highly deadly cave system and you don’t have the gumption to find your way back out.

Recall download link.

Hoverboats

I’ve been loath to mention this, but it’s a mod, albeit a hacky one at best. It makes your boats fly, jump and go super fast. Only works in Singleplayer at the moment, though it used to work in multiplayer.

Hoverboats’ download link

Ambient Occlusion

Hey, a graphical enhancement mod that isn’t a high resolution texture pack. This mod adds ambient occlusion to Minecraft, which makes the shadows better and more realistic. It adds some depth to things.

Ambient Occlusion (along with some other stuff)

3d Model Converter

This one isn’t a mod, so I’ll await the angered mod brandishing torches, but it’s a pretty neat idea. It converts 3D models to a block-type form, which allows one to build it in Minecraft. By hand, of course, like all real men do.

3D Model Convertor link and download

That’s only a small amount of the mods out now. I could devote several posts solely to the various texture packs and other mods. There’s even mods that add new monsters.

Welcome to Gigantomods, a new feature that begins now and ends when I say so. In this semi-often feature, I will detail out some megamods: mods that change literally everything about a game (or adds a crapload, like the one today). These mods are often really famous, but sometimes people don’t tend to notice them as they get overshadowed by newer mods. I’m here to rekindle interest in these gargantuan beasts.

The first one is Company of Heroes: Eastern Front. It’s a mod so big it eclipses one of Company of Heroes’s own expansion packs. This mod has done what no other Company of Heroes mod has yet: add an entirely new playable faction. We’ve already visited the snow-swept fields of the Eastern Front back when it came out in January, but it’s worth revisiting both because it’s good and because they’ve announced more goodies to come in the future.

It’s currently the only mod that’s actually succeeded in pulling something like adding a new faction off! Most of the other mods focus more on reskinning original units, adding new maps or new ways to play, but as far as I know Eastern Front is the only mod that actually pulls something like that off. What Eastern Front adds, if you haven’t gathered from the name, is a full playable Soviet Russian faction, with race-specific units and actual full Russian dialogue. I was actually a bit disappointed with the latter bit, as the whole “English with German accents” that the classic Germans and the Panzer Elite has was charming, in a homicidal kind of way.

Naturally, with something this big I would be doing it a disservice to not try it out. So, I downloaded it (all 643MB of it), dug up my copy of Company of Heroes and was ready to crush some Germans as the glorious Soviet Russians. Well, the crushing was conspicuously absent on the Germans, as it was me that was rapidly losing terrain and resources trying to keep up with the German onslaught. I don’t pretend to be a good strategy gamer, here.

The Soviet faction plays like a mash-up of the Americans and the  Wehrmacht. When starting out, there are only four buildings to place: basic infantry barracks, advanced infantry barracks, tank workshop and an upgrades building. Unlike the Americans, the Soviets have three tiers of infantry. The almost comically-equipped Conscripts are easily the best unit out of all of these, because they rely on the fact that you merely have to spam as many of them as possible. It’s the World War II equivalent of the Zergling rush, where you take a couple dozen soldiers with maybe ten rifles for all of them, and you fling them at whatever immovable object you can find. Then, they gleefully run at it, screaming their defiance at the German oppressors… as they’re brutally cut down by the oh-so-superior semiautomatic machine gun. You have to hand it to the guys, they have heart, even though over half of the group can only fling insults while the others fling bullets. Or, if you hate the fact that your little pixel-men don’t have a chance of surviving, you can try the hardier Strelky or Guards.

The largest difference is the upgrades building. While the other factions have a meager amount of upgrades for their units, the Russians have a whole building dedicated to making your units better. It’s not like in other strategy games though, since the upgrades need a fair amount of both munitions and oil, you’ll have to pick and choose which ones would be better suited to what you’re up against.

In less words, the Russians are a more expansionary faction than the Americans are (when comparing Allies to Allies).  Their ability to get units out really really fast (whilst stockpiling enough oil and munitions to get the more powerful upgrades and tanks) is almost unmatched, but the comparative weakness of the infantry units, as well as the weakness of all infantry except Guards makes playing against the Panzer Elite a challenge. It’s balanced, you see.

If you don’t think that a whole playable faction isn’t enough, there’s always the obligatory handful of Russian-themed maps to whet your appetite for new battlefields to fling your virtual soldiers on, from the dank and rainy Russian forest seen above to the shelled-out ruins of Stalingrad.

But you’ve probably already read through this review and the one back in January to know that Eastern Front is what it is: a quality mod for a quality game that both significantly adds to and improves the game it was based on.

What you probably didn’t know at this point is that the next major update of Eastern Front will include a second playable faction, the Ostheer, which is essentially the German’s eastern army. With it will come the usual plethora of new units, buildings, etcetera. So, not only has the Eastern Front team managed to make a Allied army that’s actually fun to play (I’m looking at you, British Army), but they’ll do it again in the eventual future.

Have Opposing Fronts? Download this. Now.

Hello, Usercreated. I’m back, or should I say, I never left. Or maybe I left for an hour or so, at which point you could technically say that I left, but now I’m back from whatever I was doing during my ever-so-brief time away. Therefore, I’m back in time to post this discussion article with a surprise twist! It’s like a thriller novel or an M. Night movie.

So we’ve talked about genres, we’ve talked about genre, we’ve talked about playercounts, and we’ve talked about things that scare your pants off. Now, we’re talking about characters. By this I mean which is your favorite character (in a mod, of course)? Multiplayer or singleplayer, it doesn’t maaaaatter!

I’m going to be radically different and go with the protagonist from Minerva: Metastasis. Sure, he lets his bullets do the talking for him and he’s never actually had both a name and gender established, but the glimpses that Minerva shows of his or her past throughout the mod was masterfully done. I’d like to see a sequel happen, with or without Minerva.

You know how several years ago people were looking at Bumptop and saying, “gee, in the bright, illustrious future, all computer interface systems will be full 3D experiences!”? Well, that hasn’t quite happened yet, but here’s a good start.

Source Media Arcade aims to be a way to marry the many, many art assets that the Source engine has with the ability to have your content, be it games, videos, music, pictures etcetera, represented in the map as interactable objects. It’s certainly one of the more original mods, and an interesting step in mod development. I’m just not entirely sure if that would be a step forward or simply a step sideways.

Modding has always been more of a way of improving upon or telling new stories on top of the games that we already have. But here’s a mod that has very little to do with actual games, except for the fact that your games can run overtop of them. Suddenly, the world’s gone all topsy-turvy. Though SM_Sith_Lord, the creator of this… application, isn’t aiming it to be a wholesale replacement of Windows Explorer, it does provide an interesting proof-of-concept of how a fully three dimensional operating system could work, in the bright illustrious future, of course.

But would it be worth it to have a fully 3D operating system? Sure, we’ve already seen the likes of it with Bumptop and those have ranged between catastrophic failures and mild success, as they haven’t really added much of anything to the tried-and-true file explorers that are already widely available.

That’s not what modder SM_Sith_Lord is getting at with this, though it seems to work as what a fully 3D operating system could work like. What SM is hoping to get with his creation is “a mix between productivity and entertainment,”. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s entirely there yet. The parts are there, they just aren’t in the right orders yet.

For instance, the way one organizes the content is somewhat bizarre. It’s all done through menus, so actually getting the content up into the 3D space is about as intuitive as getting a square block through a round hole; you can do it, but you need to break out the power tools to get it done. It’s certainly not an elegant method of doing something like this, which is unfortunate because to design user interfaces you need a certain amount of elegance to get it done. Therefore, I went with one of the preset arrangements, which worked as well as I could have hoped.

For the most part, Source Media Arcade works. It’s really snappy, starting up in under fifteen seconds for me, then having no noticeable load time upon actually starting the map. It did seem a little sluggish when loading the arrangements as well as actually loading files. Upon loading files, it didn’t load them in front of the game window like the features list said that it would. Source Arcade pushed itself to the back of my desktop, then called the files, which after some pondering eventually loaded. When switching back to Source Arcade, it didn’t hilariously break like many Source engine games do when I try to alt-tab. Kudos, Source Media Arcade.

But as I’m sitting here pondering this I’m struggling to find any sort of way this can be actually useful. Sure, it’s a neat little toy. But is it really worth sacrificing the ease of use for something that may give you very little benefit? If it could be appended onto something like GMod Tower, where one could be constantly connected to a social (albeit somewhat small) world, then I can see how it could have some use. But for now, it’s merely diversion. There’s just not enough meat on its bones at the moment to provide any sort of noticable improvements. So, I’d say that it’s a side step in mod development.

If you want to view the FUTURE (imagine more italics here) you can download Source Media Arcade at its ModDB page.

It’s currently Friday for me, and if the counter at the bottom of this page is correct, 1:00am. Happy Saturday morning, you all!

As you’ve no doubt heard, either from me in Wednesday’s Left 4 Dead article or one of your friends/family/colleagues/co-workers/acquaintances, this weekend is Halloween weekend. Which is a holiday. You should celebrate it, either from the normal means of dressing up or by sitting at home, pelting children with sugary goodies. And it wouldn’t be the weekend without some video games, so I pose to you all a question: What spooky games are you playing this weekend? Bonus points for spooky mods, obviously.

Myself I’m going to continue to spend too much of my life playing Team Fortress, but I’ll also pop in to check on the Minecraft festivities. I’ve also caught wind of a Dungeons and Dragons Online thing, but I’m probably too bad too low-leveled to join in. Sadness. Whilst none of these games are considered “spooky” in their own right (with the exception of Minecraft, that stuff is terrifying), I’ll be damned if I’m not celebrating properly.

It’s Wednesday! That’s probably significant in some ways to some peoples, but for all intents and purposes it’s significant here because it’s four days from Halloween. Yes, that most venerated of holidays where its socially acceptable to dress up, gorge yourself on candy and watch horror movies. Though every day is zombie-killing day, Halloween is much more so because… well, I don’t know, but there are zombies and they need killing.

Because there’s a disappointing lack of horror-themed mods coming out this week (you can all play Nightmare House 2 and imagine that it came out this week), here’s some Left 4 Dead related stuff that’s both too small to put in separate post and too awesome to combine together.

-Personal favorite Left 4 Dead mod One 4 Nine has been finally released in Left 4 Dead 2. Yes! Currently supported is campaign, versus and survival. It’s basically the same as the original release of One 4 Nine, but you get to enjoy the slightly-better Left 4 Dead 2 engine as well as the exclusive Left 4 Dead 2 melee weapons and pickups.

-The obligatory mention of the Valve-recommended Left 4 Dead 2 campaign follows: Haunted Forest. It’s a forest, and it’s haunted. Zombies AND ghosts! It’s like a dream come true, if all of your dreams are terrifying nightmares that you can’t wake up from. Anyway, this seems like a fairly short campaign, topping out at three maps. Consider this the appetizer, then.

-I feel like I should mention Dead Before Dawn (considering that it’s the title image). The much-criticized Dawn of the Dead remake has recently been updated with a bundle of new fixes, which apparently solves many of the issues that people were having with the first release.

-I don’t know what to think about Crash Bandicoot Course 2: Electric Wumpaloo. On one hand, it’s Crash Bandicoot in Left 4 Dead 2. On the other hand, it’s Crash Bandicoot in Left 4 Dead 2. I have a feeling that this will be mentioned in a therapy session somewhere down the road.

-This isn’t technically out yet on L4D2, but I’m going to remind everyone anyway because it’s quality work. I Hate Mountains, the Land of Francis’s Eternal Chagrin, isn’t done for L4D2 yet as the developers were waiting on some fixes introduced in the Sacrifice, but it’s still on Left 4 Dead 1, and it is still so, so good.

-Also not out, also good. Back to School has sent out a bunch of drool-inducing screenshots of the now-complete first level. Woah.

-But this one is out, if you want to add it to your playlist. Be warned, there’s some talk about how it’s not entirely compatible with the new Sacrifice update, so play at your own risk. Freezer Burn looks like an interesting collision between “everything is snow” and “everything is fire”.

Zombie-killin’.

So you say that the city’s been overrun with zombies and creatures from another universe, and there’s hardly anyone living in sight? I’m assuming that the chance of survival is slim to none, right? Sounds like a challenge.

1187: Episode 1, which for some reason I keep typing 1887 (probably a result of my subconscious wanting of a decent steampunk shooter),  is supposed to be a episodic shooter set in the same universe as Half-Life 2, although set in what I assume to be the Netherlands, due to the constant mention of Amsterdam.

I’m not entirely sure what to think of 1187. It’s pretty much a straight-forward Half-Life 2-esque  shooter. This is where it succeeds. Where it fails is where it actually tries to do things differently from HL2.

What 1187 manages to succeed at, it succeeds with flying colors. The level design is fantastic in most places, especially the sewers and the apartment building at the beginning. The only niggling issue with the level design (which could have easily been my own fault) was the one time when I got trapped underneath a door, at which point I was promptly electrocuted to death.  Other than that, it’s a pretty convincing representation of a small town. The levels aren’t obviously designed to make it easy for you to hide and take cover; a lot of the maps are wide-open streets and sewers that prevent you from finding a good hidey-hole. Unfortunately, this also makes it incredibly frustrating, especially during chapter seven. My word, chapter seven. I have never thrown up my hands that many times, due to me dying too much on chapter seven.

Which brings me to my next point: the AI. You have an AI partner, John, that follows you around and occasionally blasts monsters with a shotgun, which he “found in his butt”. Stay classy, John. In the dreaded hell-pit of chapter seven, you’re tasked with shooting down a helicopter with a rocket launcher found conveniently lying around. I ducked into a garage with John in tow, hoping to hide for a bit from the one thousand, one hundred and eighty seven soldiers wanting to kill me and only me. John then decided to glue himself to a wall and not move for anything until I had removed that helicopter from that plane of existence.

This includes when enemy soldiers poured into the garage, killing everything except John, who ignored and was ignored back. When I ventured out into the deadly streets, John remained in the garage with his back to the wall while I was turned into silent protagonist  confetti.

It would have been fine, seeing as John, though a step in the right direction for AI companions, was almost utterly useless in combat. He still shot the enemies, but I was ending up shooting them so much faster that at the end of the battles I had killed the vast majority of the enemies. It also would have been fine if I could have taken more damage, since John was nigh-invulnerable. I can see the reasoning behind this: instead of being a space marine or a suited lab technician I was merely some smuck off the street hoping to pave my way in a world gone mad. It still irked me that John, self-professed as “not handy in a fight” would be able to take several magazines in the face, both by enemies and myself without so much as shrugging.

It’s not bad, it’s just incredibly hard–but an artificial hardness. Zombies take up to four shotgun blasts in the face, while vortigaunts take up to six. Ammo is pretty scarce, so you have to juggle between running for your life and defending yourself, because melee is next to useless against vortigaunts and soldiers. But the problem is that it’s so heavily scripted that you often have to clear a room of its enemies before you can progress. You shoot everyone, John says something worldly and philosophical and the door can open to the next room. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s a kind of monotony that is only slightly alleviated once you get out of the sewers.

Back to the graphics. The graphics themselves, stemming out of the level design is quite nice. The walls of the sewers look appropriately slimy, the guns are well designed enough and the plethora of custom models make the game seem unique. But here comes the nitpick train, and its stop is the first-person viewmodel animations. I’ve only occasionally had a game make me feel queasy after playing it, and the normal cause of nausea is motion blur. In 1187′s case, it’s the viewmodels. Running with a gun out is enough to make me feel sick, as the protagonist flails it around like he’s having a spasm attack. The knife attack animation is one of the prime culprits in this: hit something with it, and the entire screen gives a sickening lurch.

Also, the flashlight sometimes refuses to turn on, forcing me to flail around in near-pitch darkness every once in a while.

Now, some might interpret my nitpicking as evidence that I disliked 1187. I didn’t. It was fun; not a particularly polished experience but fun nonetheless. Aside from some rather baffling design decisions, the end product was fun. It’s decent at best, mediocre at its worst.

You can download 1187 Episode 1 in this corner of the internets. It’s rather hefty at 1.2GB, and you’ll need Episode 2 to play it.

Serpent: Resurrection was a game that I really wanted to love. I’m just not entirely sure if it wanted to love me back. I don’t think that I’ve ever played a game that is so blatantly off-putting, but well crafted.

Okay, I’ll admit it: I only played for about two hours. It bothers me a whole heck of a lot, since I really wanted this game to be fun. I wanted it to be the same game as Doom was, just with a coherent, well-told story and some RPG elements. But, after playing this mod for those two insufferably long hours, I’m not entirely sure that was a good thing.

After the introduction, which to my mind was quite impressive, you’re plopped into a house in the town of Dull Urbanness. I bet that this town had a name defined for it somewhere along the lines, but when every building is five stories tall and painted the same way, it quickly collapses into a dull, humdrum mess of similar buildings, similar people, similar settings.

The population of Dull Urbanness is separated into two gangs: the Orange-clad Punching Bags and the Dirty Jerkfaces. I spent a good ten minutes wandering about Dull Urbanness, gleefully smacking the Orange-clad punching bags into messy red smears in one of the many warehouses in Dull Urbanness, a city of warehouses. Suddenly, my mass homicide was stopped when one of the Dirty Jerkfaces (dressed all in black, probably a social commentary of some sort) shanked me to death.

At this I had to sit in stunned bemusement for a while. The Dirty Jerkface gang freely wanders the streets, shanking intrepid adventurers but leaving the oh-so-punchable working class people alone? Facing no other choice, I restarted the game and attempted to find my way out of this urban hellhole.

After a few minutes of wandering about, I found that the warehouses actually served some sort of purpose. A sprawling dock system was hidden from view, probably on account of the numerous five story buildings. Upon walking up to the closest boat (and murdering a couple sailors and deckhands on the way there) I discovered that this was where I was supposed to go the whole time. The captain of this stately sailing vessel took no notice of the fact that he was short about half of his crew, and immediately whisked me off to adventure.

By adventure I mean the longest, most insanely boring cut-scene I have ever witnessed in a game. The captain telepathically spoke to me through the onscreen dialogue. I couldn’t be bothered reading any of it. It’s not that it was boring, but it was set up in the most uninteresting manner I could think of. Also, the dialogue didn’t differentiate between the captain, you or one of the many now-replenished deckhands. You’re just supposed to assume that who’s talking is the person you’re hoping is talking.

Just then, the least interesting dragon attack. The fog rolled in, the captain complained about the fog. Then, the captain says something about a dragon attack. I could see the dragon off in the fog flying around, and I prayed to as many deities I could think of that finally–finally!–I could actually do something worthwhile. But alas, all that happened was me running all over the deck of the ship in mute panic whilst the cannons moved back and forth and the sailors strolled around in unconcerned boredom.

Finally the boat dumped me off with a friendly comment: “You can buy stuff from the shops as long as someone’s still alive!” To my dismay, no one was still alive. But, I was finally set free from the trappings of the plot and was able to wander around the countryside murdering things.

Or so I thought. It should have occurred to me back in the town with the stab-happy muggers: this game is unforgivingly hard. One chomp from a plague rat, a stereotypically weak monster, and a sixth of my health is gone. Couple this with the fact that roving bands of monsters spawn randomly as a bid to emulate the old-school RPGs of yore and you have a game that hates you and everything you stand for. I wandered into a house to kill some of the hulking troll-things and steal their pants and magical paraphernalia. As I walk out of the door, there’s three more troll-things, two rats and a pack of German Shepherds. This is not “hard difficulty”. There is no universe in which this would be considered hard difficulty.

Upon writing this, I realize just how much I disliked Serpent. I like to say that if the first hour or so of a game doesn’t capture your attention, then there is no reason as to why you should continue playing it. I gave two hours to Serpent, and I came out with two hours I could have spent doing something else. It’s not a bad game, but its beginning is not good. It’s ambitious but ultimately fails to achieve its ambition. Some people may like it, and some people do like it. I’m just not one of those people.

You can download Serpent: Resurrection hereabouts. You need the latest version of GZDoom and a copy of Hexen to play it.