Okay, yes, this is old, but as far as I can tell it’s not graced UserCreated before, so in case someone hasn’t seen it who’d like to…

I’m always wary of games the hardcore hold up as the second coming, because the hardcore have a tendency to blindly evangelise anything remotely iconic that only gets worse the older the game is. Doubly so for games written by Hideo Kojima, because he’s a bloody awful writer, to put it mildly. Nonetheless, out of all the fan remakes I’ve seen doing the rounds over the past few months, this has to be one of the ones I’d most like to see finished. Snatcher in the Crysis engine, anyone? Yes? Thought so.

Now the bad news, of sorts – it’s another mod (like Butterfly) where the creator’s put it on the backburner while he waits for CryEngine 3 to turn up. Understandable, but still, sniff. On the other hand, modder Ash712 is still working on those things not intimately tied into the engine’s nuts and bolts, such as modelling and animation. So there’s been the odd snippet of progress released all the same. Feast your eyes on these screenshots and video – I’ve never even touched the original game but this is the kind of fantastically distinctive worldbuilding I want to explore anyway.

You can find the ModDB page for Snatcher here.

So it seems that yet another venerated Half-Life 2 multiplayer mod has made the leap to the Orange Box engine, fancier graphics and eventual super-stardom. Well, probably only the first two. Dystopia is one of those fancy “team deathmatch as well as a bunch of other original game modes” kind of games, with a new update coming out September 10th (four days from now!).

It brings with it the usual bout of stuff that a Orange Box update comes with, namely the enhanced TF2 version of the engine, possible achievements/stat-tracking as well as a mountain of bug fixes, balance updates and a brand new map. It’s a rather impressively sized list of updates. The current news update doesn’t include the update list, but it does have a large amount of screenshots for the new map, titled Fusion.

For those of you that don’t know, Dystopia is a “cyberpunk themed total conversion of Half Life 2, created by an amature [sic] development team and released to the public for free.” It also happens to be a hard-to-explain game. Objectives are reached through the classic way of blowing everyone and everything up as well as hacking into the internets and blowing everyone and everything up. It’s like you’re playing on the internet whilst playing on the internet!

To sum it all up, the 1.3 update for Dystopia has all of the fanciness of the new Source engine. I’m looking forward to it even though I’ve played very little of the older version of it. So, Steam, September 10th.

Or, if you can’t wait, look at pretty pretty screenshots at the Dystopia website.

You can also get the jump on it by downloading the older version. It’ll update automatically once the new version comes out.

What can I say about GMod Tower? Well, it has a really good effect for being drunk, that’s one thing. Not that I would know anything about being drunk, anyway. But I did spend a sizable amount of time stumbling around aimlessly vomiting on things. Which, for some odd reason, was way more entertaining than it had any right to be.

The screen takes a green tint, your character stumbles around aimlessly and occasionally there’ll be an impressive sound effect that can only be summed up as HWORK that plays as your stomach rejects the half-barrel of alcohol in a last-ditch effort to save your liver. Now, as a last ditch effort to save my fragile integrity, let me talk about something that doesn’t relate to bodily fluids.

GMod Tower, as it can currently be described succinctly is a lobby system. You’ve got a large, interesting lobby, or the Tower, that has the ability to branch off into several gamemodes. I’ll go more in depth into the game modes later on. What makes GMod Tower interesting is that it actually makes the down time between waiting for games to open up (or fill up in my case) something you’d want to do. Besides puking all over the lobby, if I wasn’t playing a game mode, I was in the Arcade playing Tetris.

But the Suites are the standout feature in GMod Tower. They give you a space of your own, a place to decorate. I mean, the half dozen stores in the Plaza have to have some use. They’re use is for sprucing up your suite with various items and decorations. If you’re anywhere near clever enough you can dramatically change the layout of your rather cramped space. Or, if you’re like me and possess no imagination, you can simply use it as a space to store your trophies, hats, beer kegs and whatever miscellaneous knick-knacks you have floating around.

Now that I’ve talked a bit about the actual lobby, here’s a bit about the gamemodes. The two original ones are PVP and Ball Race, with Virus being added in much later. PVP is pretty much self-explanatory. The entire premise of the game, as the title suggests, is that you have guns and there are people who needs shooting. It’s not really your classic Half-Life 2 Deathmatch experience, though. I mean, there’s a lot of leaning side-to-side as you strafe, and it’s harder to kill people.

The mode’s main draw is the fact that you can get buyable weapons for it. Depending on how high you place, you get a cash bonus which can be transformed into PVP weapons, Ball Race cosmetic items, stuff for the Suites or miscellaneous items. This is true for all game modes. However, PVP seems to be the least played gamemode out of all three because it doesn’t add anything really interesting to the table. It’s simply the same deathmatch game we’ve seen for a while with some shiny bangles taped onto it.

The standout game mode in GMod Tower is Ball Race, hands down. It’s a rather shameless Super Monkey Ball clone with less manipulation of the gameboard itself. In fact, it’s so shameless, that the bonus level music is the same from SMB. I’m not complaining though. There’s been a couple Super Monkey Ball clones on the PC in years past, like Switchball and the Dreamball Source mod. This one happens to be the first that does Super Monkey Ball as a competitive multiplayer game. Surprisingly, it manages to do it well. The three worlds, two of which I tested, are quite inventive. This caused Ball Race to quickly become my favorite bit of GMod Tower, simply because it seems like the most “finished” game mode. The fact that it’s actually good was a nice bonus.

Ball Race has a similar draw as PVP, where money is given to those who collect the most bananas during the match. I thought this was kind of odd at first, since it’s Ball “Race” and you don’t actually get anything for placing first.

The third and final game mode is called Virus. This seems to be slightly more original than PVP, but more flawed as well. It’s basically a fancy version of Tag, where one person is predetermined to be the “Infected”. The Infected’s jobe is to run around and touch the gun-toting survivors, turning them infected. The game ends when all survivors are infected or when time runs out. I had some issues with Virus, and most of it is situational. It doesn’t work very well on maps with large sight-lines. While the Facility map from Goldeneye and that one from Unreal Tournament work very well, the Aztec map doesn’t because the infected player is gunned down fairly quickly before he’s even within range. Also, you can’t jump. I’m sure there’s a reason for this, but it seems a little odd.

It also doesn’t work well if you have less than four players. Games with four or more were plenty of fun, but once you only get three or less it’s a little tedious. Because the game starts with a minimum of four people, this normally isn’t much of an issue. It was for me because our fourth disconnected/crashed, leaving three of us wallowing in unhappiness.

I’m very impressed with GMod Tower. The GMT development team has managed to do things with Garry’s Mod that I haven’t ever seen pulled off with near enough polish. But after playing for a while I came to the conclusion that the best part of GMod Tower isn’t what is actually included in the game. It has this massive amount of potential for greatness, and it’s shown by the gamemodes that are currently in production–a half dozen of them. The only thing that could ever hold GMod Tower back is the lack of players that plagues so many other mods. It’s not really a problem now, since the main server hovers around 20 players and the game modes only need four. Once the mode that require 10 to 20 players on at a time start coming out, this might be an issue. But for now, GMod Tower is some of the best that Garry’s Mod has.

You can find the main site here . Because of the overlap in content, you need Garry’s Mod (to connect and load the content), Counter-Strike Source and Half-Life 2 Episode 2 installed before you load the game. If you don’t have one of these two, you’ll have missing textures and models all over the place and that’s no good. To connect to GMod Tower, filter the maps in Garry’s Mod by gmt_build, then join the Tower server. Alternatively, click here when you have all the content installed.

I think that I’ll be crushed if ModDB doesn’t vote this the Most Consistently Unreleased Mod of All Time. But, there may be a light at the end of the pitifully dark tunnel. Apparently, Black Mesa will be released from development hell at the end of 2010. Still, it’s not hard to be a little bit cynical about the whole thing. They did say something similar back in 2009, didn’t they?

The previous release promise didn’t have anything related to sleeping pill-infused Spaghettios, however.  And it’s nice to see that the developers have some sort of humor about the whole situation, by giving it titles that are criminally all capitalized, much like the one at the beginning of this article.

However, it seems like they really mean it this time. There are some development copies floating around, and some Half-Life fansites have gotten their hands on some of these. From what I’ve read, it seems polished but buggy, and could probably use the extra few months before the supposed release date to iron out the niggling issues. I’m not getting my hopes up for this just yet though. Unless the development team is kind enough to send me a preview copy, of course.

Anything less and I may need to eat some Spaghettios.

The Black Mesa site is right here. Not much in the way of news, though, since the “soon” announcement was in a forum post. The pictures are still worth a look-over, though.

Somehow, this came and went without a post on it, but I believe being three days late on a release is early enough. Maybe the Internet won’t hate me for being late on this. Anyway, DrGonzo said that this looks like an interesting “zombie mod”. Hmm. Personally, I think that anything with zombies in it could be classified as survival horror, which is apparently what this mod is going for.

It seems like most of these so-called “survival horror” games happen to involve zombies in it at some point or another. But from the screenshots, Nightmare House 2 seems to be delightfully monster-less. This means that I can hope that it’s merely a survival horror game that happens to involve zombies in it at some point or another.

Anyway, Nightmare House 2 seems to be a continuation of the Nightmare House story, except this time you wake up in a hospital with a vague memory of the girl from FEAR from the first game. She’ll probably show up later in the game.

Initial impressions seem to be overall positive, so it should be worth a download. I’m downloading it right now, but I probably won’t play it a whole lot. Let’s just say that horror games aren’t exactly my forté, and because of that I’ve only gotten through the first chapter of Dead Space.

If you have a more manly disposition than I do, you can download the mod at its ModDB page.

It appears that when modder keved tells you when something’s “almost done,” you better listen to him, doggone it, because he’s probably telling the truth. Not any more than twenty days after saying “it’s coming out soon”, keved’s four level campaign One 4 Nine releases onto the unsuspecting public. UPDATE: I actually review it.

I’ll spare you a lengthy writeup over the campaign’s features, since Matthew already did that in his original post. But one reason you might want to check this out, other than the unique desert setting would be the promises of a unique and totally new finale. We already know that it has something to do with aliens and tombs, so it’s hard to get anything better than that. Spaceships? Lasers? Spaceships with lasers on them?  Left 4 Dead in space?

Wait, this is good stuff. There really needs to be a campaign set entirely in space.

Anyway, One 4 Nine is only on Left 4 Dead–for now–but there will be a Left 4 Dead 2 version forthcoming. You know, if you prefer like to smack zombies with things instead of shooting them.

So you know how I said that I’d spare you a lengthy write-up? Well, I changed my mind. Consider the rest of this post a review of sorts. It’s not going to be a really long review, since it’s easier to write long reviews if the item in question has bad things that I’d need to nit-pick into oblivion. But, I will go as far as saying that this is one of the best Left 4 Dead campaigns I’ve played. Since that repartee only consists of the fabulous I Hate Mountains, that’s saying something. Or nothing at all, take your pick.

One thing that never ceased to impress me all throughout the campaign is the fact that it really seems like the abandoned Army base you run through for most the campaign had people in it before the zombies took over. Hastily-erected barricades, well-placed machine guns, evidences of firefights, it all seems like that there was people there, they were fighting for their lives and eventually, they lost. It’s a really nice touch and a nice change from office buildings that seem virtually untouched.

Because the doomed inhabitants of the base died fighting for their lives, there’s a lack of weapons and ammunition that takes some getting used to. Normally, in Valve campaigns and other customs, you’re basically tripping over weapons and ammo piles. There’s very few times in both Left 4 Dead games where you’re actually in want of ammo. This would be one of those times. The criminally overpowered pistol kept me through most of the first two levels, and it wasn’t until halfway through the second that I actually found an SMG. Zoey, though, had an M-16 at the end of the first. She was holding out on me, the fiend.

Visually, the map is quite a spectacle. In the outdoor areas (and a few of the indoors) keved seems to have gone a little overboard with the sepia tone filter, though it’s not quite as much as the color-correction/acid trip of a finale. It’ll be really difficult to explain the finale, because it’s rather odd and I don’t want to spoil it. I expected aliens, and keved delivered, but I didn’t expect those aliens. You’ll know when you play through it. It’s both a surprising and completely logical ending, though the actual end was kind of weak. I expected something a little meatier than what happened right before it cuts to the credits.

Is this worth your time? Yes, most definitely. In terms of quality and attention-to-detail, it rivals Valve campaigns. It’s a tad long for a four-level campaign though, but that’s something that’ll apparently be rectified in version 2.

You can download the campaign riiight around here.

Okay, let’s get it out of the way – this is machinima, not a mod. But Armored Core: Limit Release is a fun little project, not least because its lone creator has been showing a lot more patience and attention to detail than any number of other entries on ModDB.

Armored Core is probably the most frustrating series I’ve always wanted to get into (I own every PS2 game but one, plus Armored Core 4 Answer, for reference) but simply can’t, what with the ludicrous learning curve, unfriendly control systems on the older games, confusing UI and those people in the community who don’t like anyone telling them what to do.  (I saw a pack of them tear a newcomer to shreds once on GameFAQs. Not a pretty sight.)

So I’m envious of someone who obviously loves the series enough to want to teach himself modding through the process of building an entire OVA in the UDK single-handedly. All the more so given that slowly but surely Moodydave is getting visibly better with each new snippet of material he posts.

It’s far from perfect, but every new batch of screens or video footage shows this guy improving, and it’s fascinating to watch. This is the sort of dedication the modding scene in general needs more of – the fact he’s working on animating honking big robots is almost a bonus, rather than the main course.

It’d be nice if someone offered to help him make this stuff into something playable (I don’t know how nasty FROM Software’s lawyers are, though) but I’ll still watch the animation if that’s ‘all’ this ever becomes. Drop by some time! Give the man a cheer.

You can find the ModDB page for Armored Core: Limit Release here.

Okay, I guess it had to happen; Team Fortress 2 fans may have thought they were having a bit of a laugh creating these pictures of the (non-existent) ‘Team Fortcraft’, but someone else saw them and thought ‘I could make that into a mod’. Modders JetDragonsLeague seem quite happy to invite mockery from every Tuftoo fan on the face of the internet, but at the same time it does look as if they’re taking Fortress Craft perfectly seriously.

The project’s not really any more than concept renders and developer notes at the moment, so who knows if it’ll get anywhere, but the StarCraft 2 editor seems more than up to the challenge and their modelling skills are certainly a cut above a great deal of ModDB.

Hey, sometimes even an idea’s worth making a little fuss about. Fingers crossed. I don’t know if I’d buy TF2: the RTS exactly, but I’d definitely give the mod a shot.

You can find the ModDB page for Fortress Craft here.

Everyone still wants to do the parkour, apparently. Or some kind of stylised, colourful urban obstacle course. We’ve had grappling hook racer Tension – no news from them in a while, I must try and follow that up – and now City Freerun, from modder Dosycool. Yes, it’s Mirror’s Edge in Source, there’s no getting away from that, but it looks like it could be a good attempt, and it’s coming along slowly but steadily so far.

The mod is set inside a simulator, apparently, with the surroundings becoming steadily more fully realised as the levels progress, something which does get it a bit closer to having its own identity. Knockoff or not, though, Dosycool has the aesthetic down pretty well. The visuals are hardly as crisp as DICE’s game, but they gain something from being simpler, looking weirdly like a Lego playset or the city as blank canvas in DeBlob.

To be honest, I almost like this more – I always felt Mirror’s Edge’s look was somewhat over-rated, with a lot of it seemingly just random splashes of primary colour all over the place. City Freerun – it’s a working title, don’t worry – is pretty rough around the edges in places but actually more polished in others.

It’s hard to get a handle on how this might play, given the video so far is mostly just running around, but consider me very interested.

You can find the ModDB page for City Freerun here.

Valve decided to make Left 4 Dead go the way of Team Fortress last week by way of highlighting some deserving custom campaigns. Two Evil Eyes is the first of these, so I decided to take time out of playing Self-Loathing Mode Iron Man Expert to test out the newish six-level campaign.

The only way I can sum this up is “Left 4 Dead: Greatest Hits”. As I ran through the campaigns six whole levels I couldn’t help but notice that it all seemed vaguely familiar. Familiar as in, “Hey, I remember that crescendo event in Left 4 Dead 1 where you have to start the van to have it crash through a wall! And that one where you have to shoot the gas cans to burn through the barricade! It’s like seeing old friends!” It was at this point that I realized that these events, that were so shamelessly ripped out of Dead Air from the first game, were juxtaposed pretty poorly into the flow of the campaign. The aforementioned gas can event was the worst of all of these homages. After hitting it with a melee weapon (which said it called the horde, but actually did nothing) then shooting it with my AK, it merely bathed the whole area we were standing with flames, incinerating every zombie that came in and winning the award for Most Disappointing Recreation of a Crescendo Event. No, wait, that’s the boat one. I get those two mixed up.

The setting is a bit of a mixture between the first half of the Parish, Hard Rain Death Toll, and the first half of Swamp Fever. This makes it a rather odd amalgamation of settings and set pieces, with suburban towns blending in with swamps and then the rather bafflingly short thunderstorm on the fifth level. It can’t be explained very well, and it does little to draw away from the fact that this entire campaign seems to be a hodgepodge of the creator’s favorite areas.

The mapping, though impressive in parts, really leaves something to be desired. It could have benefited immensely from custom props, but instead it merely borrowed everything from other campaigns: the crashed airliner from Swamp Fever, the whole bridge from The Parish, the yacht from The Passing, and–oddly enough–the ‘Welcome to Riverside’ sign from the first game. Some portions of the campaign are quite well designed, but it’s completely overshadowed by the parts of it that don’t work very well. Not to mention the developer-added tips, which really sparked all of my complaints with this map.

The most glaring of these so-called tips are in the second level. As you’re walking out of the saferoom you’re greeted by a tip that says ‘health pack over here’, which doesn’t go away until you actually go over to that out-of-the-way area. Upon walking in front of the health pack, a gigantic boulder rolls down the hillside, flattens the house the pack is next to, then continues to jovially roll for a bit until it parks itself in front of a ladder. This boulder ended up incapacitating two of my teammates. Awesome.

The second of these tips has to do with the factory area. Well, saying it’s an area would be a tad bit of a stretch, as all you do is run in, press a button and run the other way. But upon pressing the button, a notification pops up saying ‘go here, the gate is open’. Unfortunately for you, it doesn’t let on where you’re supposed to go after you press the button.  It’s little niggling details like this that sour the experience for me. Not all of the campaign is bad, but the bad bits tend to outweigh the good bits until it turns into a mediocre mess. It’s rather short and not straight-forward, especially for six levels, and some of the balancing is off, because every melee weapon I came across was a chainsaw.

But I imagine that this would be leagues more fun in Versus. It’s filled with many little causeways and catwalks that are just screaming for Chargers to run down, and there was, at least for me, a tank or three on every level. It’s just very dull in Campaign mode and brings nothing really interesting to the Left 4 Dead table.

You can download the campaign over at L4DMaps.net. Valve’ll have the servers for it up until next Thursday (August 26th), so it shouldn’t be too hard to find a Versus game for it.

I haven’t even started Men of War yet – I’m sorry! Please don’t hurt me! – but this still got my attention. While the next official instalment takes DigitalMindSoft’s cult favourite RTS off to the jungles of Vietnam, modder volchonok is hard at work dragging the original game back to the Great War.

I’m aware there’s a whole separate modding scene for Men of War and no, I’ve not been following it that closely, but a few projects have turned up on ModDB, none of which really struck me as particularly interesting. Men of War: World War I seems different, and while volchonok’s arguably stretching himself a bit thin – four whole campaigns, plus bonus mini-campaigns? Single- and multi-player? – he’s still producing some relatively meaty updates, all of which look pretty special.

Snappy modelling, historical detail, bold mission design – it’s all here, and he’s got plenty of video and still screens to show you how it’s coming along. This wouldn’t be the first time a mod’s sold me on a game. Though in this case I’ve bought the game already. Still! Random internet people keep wishing for a World War I FPS – this could be the closest (particularly with Men of War’s direct control mechanic) anyone’s yet come to that.

The ModDB page for Men of War: WWI Mod can be found here.

Finally! Okay, let’s try this ‘posting about mods’ lark again – how about starting off small? Say with a nice little bit of mapping? Sometimes it can feel a bit self-serving writing something up that merely says ‘Hey, look at this guy! He can… build things! In Hammer! That look great!’ but hey, there’s enough rubbish around that good level design still stands out a mile. Take Biohazard. No, go on, take it. You’ll thank me.

Nothing to do with Resident Evil – this is an action-oriented map pack, it seems, sounding a little like Slums 2 with its terse description, [sic]: ‘You won’t find here much logic puzzles or a good story. My main goal’s to make movie-like battle scenes on pretty nice maps with a slightly stylized colors and awsum HDR’.

Not really anything wrong with someone saying that if he can deliver, and from the look of these early screens, it seems modder Dabu[PL] might just be able to.

Like Slums, it’s still very much a Half-Life 2 mod in that all manner of recognisable assets are immediately present and correct – but where Slums had a dark, grimy, Silent Hill aesthetic going on, Dabu seems to be going for cold and clean with ever so slightly blown-out lighting, a sort of vaguely sixties futurist look (check those two big white buildings, for example). Very impressive stuff, and this is definitely going in my bookmarks. (There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?)

The ModDB page for Biohazard can be found here.

Now isn’t this charming? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen people attempt to imply that arcade racers with shooting basically got made because someone wanted ‘Mario Kart, only with weapons’, and Supercars II is… well, Mario Kart with weapons, basically. In Half-Life 2.

Okay, let’s have the correct description this time, now it’s been pointed out I should be registered legally blind. It’s a remake of a game which originally appeared on the Commodore Amiga some years back, a top down racer in the grand tradition of Super Sprint – see, I do know what I’m talking about, honest – where you drove your fancy ve-hickle contraptions round and round a track and shot repeatedly at each other.

It’s… I really don’t mean this to sound patronising, so sorry if it comes across this way! But the way it’s cheerfully slapped together any old how genuinely feels like part of its charm, from the Mode 7 graphics to the Outrun-esque splash screen to the lack of any collisions to the way the weapons are literally Half-Life 2 rocket launchers bolted onto the (totally incongruous) car bodies (much like the original box art way back in the day).

It’s been going a while, and the latest improvements involve a comprehensive overhaul of the scoring system, which supposedly frees up lots more resources for better performance overall. You can take a look at the current trailer, like so:

and dream of someone sticking that fat little plumber in there, so you can treat him to the business end of a heat-seeking missile. This is how we do it outside the Mushroom Kingdom! Snarl.

The ModDB page for Supercars II can be found here.

This would be for those of you crazy folks that see 32 players limits as an insult to such a loaded game mode name as “Warfare.” Enterprising modder ambershee saw that the 32 player limit of offline Warfare just didn’t cut it, especially when compared to the 64 player limit of online Warfare, a gamemode for Unreal Tournament 3. Therefore, the only possible solution to this dilemma would be to increase the player limit to 128. Apparently, even this isn’t good enough.

In what was a deceptively large mod to complete, ambershee increased the player count of offline warfare to a staggering 1024 players. That’s about 512 players on each team. For the unenlightened, Warfare mode is basically the same thing as the Onslaught mode from Unreal Tournament 2004, or the Conquest mode from Battlefield, where you capture all the points in order to win the game. Except now you can do it with a couple hundred computer players, and the added fun of hoping your computer doesn’t blow up from the strain.

There’s only a beta version of the mod out right now, which allows up to 128 players. If you wait until November 9th, you’ll get the full thing with 1024 players.

The Warfare++  ModDB page is here

What is it about people wanting to run zombies over? Someone resurrect Dead Rush already! There’ve been a number of mods trying to force vehicles into existing games, whether it’s games that were meant to have them but then someone took them out (like the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. alpha), or games where people just thought adding cars would be a right laugh. Such as Killing Floor. Left 4 Dead doesn’t have cars. Not ones you can drive! Take that, Valve!

The Killing Floor vehicle mod does exactly what it says on the tin. Cars! (Hilariously all but one of them various cor-blimey-guvnor skins for a Mini Cooper.) A forklift! A truck! A choppah! You have to keep them topped up – the in-game traders will now sell you petrol, should you need it – and you can also keep them in tip-top condition with the new welder (which yes, also doubles as an instrument of death-dealing).

The current trailer basically shows off the handling, which looks suitably nice and arcade-y, though it does beg the question of what the maps are going to be like. Not having played Killing Floor I can’t speak for the regular levels, but this looks like the kind of thing that’d really need some custom maps to do it justice and probably, as one ModDB commenter observes, lots more zombies.

Still very impressive, though. I was being facetious above, obviously, but this really is the kind of thing that’d get me to buy a game, if it comes out in good order. You may want to keep an eye on it.

The ModDB page for Killing Floor: Vehicle Mod is here.