Yesssssss. Now those of us that wished for more Portal 2 faster can start to see some custom levels without resorting to playing through the co-op for the umpteenth time. Also, those of you that wished for harder Portal 2 levels (as it was several notches away from fiendishly hard) can start to see more of what you like, bless your masochistic hearts.

The Authoring Tools themselves look to be similar to the Authoring Tools released alongside (six months later than) Left 4 Dead, which in turn is similar to the Source SDK. Therefore, it has the full suite of various modding tools, such as the ever-so-elegant Hammer Editor, the Model Viewer and other such tools. The main bonus here is that you can actually make levels specifically for Portal 2, instead of resorting to the slightly-hackish methods of porting all of the content to the Alien Swarm SDK, which several enterprising modders figured out.

In related news, this looks to be the break the much-troubled Portal mod Portal: Awakening was waiting for. After several bouts of extreme developer drama, the new lead modder announced that they’ll be porting all of the Awakening content over to the Portal 2 engine, once the SDK is released. So, soon-ish, I assume.

The SDK itself can be accessed in the normal manner in which such materials are accessed, which is the Tools tab in your Steam library.

I bet that if you showed this article to someone in the past (circa 1998), they’d probably see it as either sacrilege or literally the coolest thing ever created. However, I don’t take stock in the activities of both past-people and errant time travelers, I only care about this custom campaign for Left 4 Dead 2: Kokiri Forest.

To a select few (the several billion people who have played Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, crossed with the significantly less who’ve played Left 4 Dead), this probably seems about as amazing as  Ocarina of Time getting a legitimate re-release on something that isn’t a $250 portable. To the rest, this will probably seem unnecessarily obtuse, broken and un-fun excuse for a custom campaign. Does that seem unnecessarily harsh? Probably, but in this case, it’s entirely justified. Away!

At its heart, Kokiri Forest is a rather faithful recreation of the Forest Temple segment from Ocarina of Time. The fact that one of my group told everyone to hold on so he can bust out the Ocarina of Time walkthrough is a testament to the campaign’s homage.  The first level starts with the players starting off in Link’s House, then progressing through the village to the entrance to the Forest Temple. The second map is where the campaign really hits its stride. In this level, the Forest Temple is represented in all of its key-collecting, Poe-capturing glory. Endless hours of fun await as players progress through a section, realise that they don’t actually have enough keys to keep going, back-track to the beginning, etcetera. The backdrop of a Left 4 Dead campaign really adds a sense of urgency because of the always-present Director tossing hordes at you whenever you find a locked door, or a sliding block puzzle, or when it’s bored.

In fact, the Forest Temple is so faithfully recreated, down to that damn music, that I caught myself idly wishing out loud for the creation of a Water Temple recreation. Blast you, NickNak, for wishing such suffering on myself. On the other hand, that would be hilarious with a group of Zelda-savvy people wandering about the Water Temple, raising and lowering water willy-nilly to figure out just how the hell you worked it out thirteen years ago.

However, despite the map’s quality showing through, there are a handful of issues that drag the campaign down from what it could be. My main complaint is the rather gratuitous use of color-correction. Once inside the Forest Temple, everything takes out a sort of washed-out, grey tone that really doesn’t fit the vibrant (or overly-green) feel of the first level. Second issue: the blockiness of everything. I know Ocarina of Time came out 13 years ago, but this is 2011. It doesn’t have to be blocky merely because the original was blocky. It would be loads better if there was less sharp corners on everything.

These two, coupled with various other niggling little issues like the lack of defibrillators and health packs, the overall darkness of everything and some rather bizarre artifacting (my temps were below 50C) I experienced in the third level, really bring down the overal quality of the map.

Despite these other issues, the main issue with this map could very well be the person playing it. If you’ve never played Ocarina of Time, or if you played and hated it, this very well could be an extremely frustrating experience. My advice is play the original game first, then try this. Once you know how most of the puzzles work and how the level is laid out, it becomes a significantly more enjoyable time, especially if you can snag two or three other friends to group with. If you do find other people equally as nerdy as you, Kokiri Forest is a flawed, wonderful, mysterious and maddening masterpiece of a homage to the original Ocarina of Time. If not, it falls way short of what the average gamer would consider a fun Left 4 Dead campaign.

Kokiri Forest can be downloaded off Left 4 Dead Maps, which I’ve handily linked to.

The main side-effect of the release of the UDK is that absolutely no one wants to release any mod for Unreal Tournament 3 anymore. That means that the only thing UT3 is anymore is merely a competent shooter. Is that a bad thing? I don’t know! To think I bought Unreal Tournament 3 for the mods! Anyway, next on the list of UT3 mods-turned-retail is the space shooter/man shooter Angels Fall First: Planetstorm.

Other than that, not many specifics on AFF Planetstorm’s retail jump besides the fact that it’ll be sold on Steam. There’ll be a boatload of changes from the December 2009 version, including an UI overhaul, new environments and gigantic stomping robots. Besides that, I can only hope that the retail release actually makes the game playable. Despite the effort it must have taken them to produce full bot support for their maps, it’s not terribly fun for anyone–least of all me two years ago–to download a 2GB install then find out that there’s six servers up, none of which have human players in it. Planetstorm is a game that demands 32 player servers, and if the final product can have the quality needed to get people interested in it, then it will succeed.

Then again, it’s harder to find people not playing a game they bought, unless it sucks. I don’t see that being a problem here. The future will tell.

Here’s the article. The announcement of the retailification is the first comment.

Way back in the distant past of June 2010, you may remember that my first ever article on this website was a rundown of a Something Awful walkthrough to making Morrowind into a game that is too stunning for its own right. From the screenshots I took of it, I failed to capture the dual senses of “why” and “where can I download this and will you take all of my money.” Actually, I think I captured the first sense fairly well, but the second sense suffered a bit. Coincidentally, the first two comments were one person wishing for a archive with everything, and the second saying that it would never, ever happen. Oh look, it happened.

All of the various enhancement mods have been contained into one easy-to-install but gigantic package (about 1.13GB zipped, 3.34GB unzipped). I say easy-to-install because you run the install program and vvwoop, it’s done, combined with the fact that you don’t need to plumb the dark and occasionally unsavory bits of Internet hell trying to find the right texture for your virtual garments.

All I can really say about this mod is that I like it. I usually can’t stand using texture packs for world terrain and things that change anything too drastically, lest I fall into apoplectic fits that generally leave at least one precious object in pieces on a floor somewhere. Morrowind Overhaul manages to fit in a texture pack that doesn’t anger the purist in me. Also, it gives you a fair amount of control over what it installs. You’re still pretty much stuck with the host of texture replacements and mesh enhancers, but you can choose if you want more trees or less trees in certain areas, more or less grass in similar areas, people running about in the nude or merely in their skivvies, or if you want your tea hot, cold or somewhere in the middle.

This all pales in comparison to my God, that depth of field effect is beautiful. Ahem. The depth of field in this mod is serious fantastically awesome. I’m extremely easily amused because oh man you can focus in on someone and it blurs everything else and when you look away it blurs what’s closer to you; this is the best thing ever.

Morrowind Overhaul is worth a download, I think. It doesn’t radically change everything visually, so it’s still pretty true to the original’s look and feel. There’s also absolutely no gameplay changes, so you can either not worry about that or install your own gameplay modifications if you so choose. The only real barrier for entry is the large download size and the slight (MGE-created) tweaking that you have to do post-install to make the game look perfect. It’s rather well documented, so installing it was easy enough. MGE was my hang-up, and it generally has been every time I’ve used it, sheerly because of the amount of stuff packed inside it. It only serves to stave off the so-called “aging” of older game graphics, so there’s really not much to lose.

Here’s the site.

I’m currently on vacation, but you wouldn’t know that if I hadn’t told you because I never post anyway. I’ve come down from my cloud of laziness to share with you something I’ve never thought would happen: A F.E.A.R. mod. Apparently it’s already happened, at least partially.

F.E.A.R.: Resurrection is a rather ambitious mod that aims to be what the expansions should have been: bigger maps, additional, improved effects,  and a whole mess of new sounds, music and textures. I can’t really tell what the story is supposed to be, but it looks to be more chasing of nigh-unkillable Paxton Fettel with some overlap with the Condemned: Criminal Origins story. I guess I can see that, besides the obvious connection in the fact that they were both developed by the same person. In one game, you’re punching smelly hobos in the face while in the other you’re violently murdering super-soldiers with failing ninja-kicks. That’s the same thing, right?

As of now, there’s a couple beta versions of the first, second and sixth level. Russian developer sadobash hopes that the mod will be completed by the end of the year; hopefully it’ll be significantly better than the rather bizarrely-made expansion packs.

Oh oh oh, here’s something before I forget: it’s a gameplay video from level seven of Resurrection. It looks to be the same gloriously runny-shooty F.E.A.R. gameplay.

ModDB page for F.E.A.R. Resurrection

While on one of my now-daily ModDB content expeditions, I discovered this: I WORK ALONE. The capital letters are necessary I guess, to convey the amount of working alone you’ll do, not that I actually remember any times I’ve actually worked with other people in STALKER where my mates didn’t fall over dead before the end of the mission. Depriving one of his teammates is merely depriving one of another additional source of glorious, glorious loot, I say. 

I WORK ALONE says that it downplays the gunplay while making STALKER more of a thoughtful, exploration-based game, in addition to the usual mix of stupidly high-res textures and graphical improvements. Because of this, the survival aspect of the game has been brought into the forefront. I played through Shadow of Chernobyl and I was basically a butcher shop filled with bandages. So, so many sausages I never ate. Maybe this mod will make it so you actually need to eat these sausages to survive instead of smearing them all over yourself in a sort of makeshift bullet repair? Unfortunately, I don’t own Call of Pripyat, so I can’t actually play this.

I can, however, appreciate the wonderfully moody trailer, which then shifts to men looking moody and holding guns for some reason.

I WORK ALONE is actually out right now!

It appears that it’s the end of an era here, folks. Fistful of Frags just got updated to version 3.5, which adds the much publicized overhauled dual-wielding system, various massive AI improvements, new guns, maps and a mode. Unfortunately for all of us, 3.5 is (from what I can gather) the last major update in the Fistful of Frags development cycle.

I’ve already downloaded it and intend to play it over the weekend; maybe I’ll see some of you chaps online in this world where men are men, women are manly and horses are feisty and kick people in groins.

Download it here for your executable-types or click this link if you like your mods in Desura-shaped packages

It appears they’re serious about waking up this time. Portal: Awakening, the Portal mod that rather famously collapsed after its lead modder complained about all of the haters, has risen from the ashes of crushing defeat like a proper metaphor illustrating rising from the ashes in crushing defeat. In his place is a person that seems to know his stuff and seems to have the thick skin required for mod-making on the internets.

The mod is go for a Spring 2011 release, though if it will be released during the month before Portal 2 hits remains to be seen. In the meantime, there’s a rather decent trailer showing off the Portal 2-esque aesthetics embedded below.

Portal Awakening on ModDB.

I was going to post this yesterday, but I’m horrendously lazy and I fell asleep. Why am I posting this over a week after they actually announced this new feature? Because it made me laugh my ass off. I could have just imagined some Cry of Fear developer saying out of the blue, “hey, let’s do a co-op feature.” Then, they all code it in, snap some pictures, back-flip into their sports cars and drive off into the sunset. This is where I imagine that e-fame produced by making pretty Half-Life 1 mods grants you sports cars, because alas it doesn’t.

Also, they’re selling shirts.

It seems like the trailer for Skyrim being released (I know that was weeks ago, I live weeks in the past, man) has brought my hype-o-meter for Oblivion up to an all-time high, and it seems like that is true for others. I’ve been watching Dibella’s Watch for the past couple weeks to see if it would live up to my lofty standards for Oblivion moditude, in that it looks pretty, looks meaty gameplay-wise, and doesn’t look like the bad parts of Japan’s animation industry walked over and sat on it. Fortunately, from what’s been released so far the first and third criteria have been met with a promise that the second criterion will be fulfilled soon.

And with the pace that Antiscamp (creator of Fairy Tale and Hundred Years War, both for Civilization IV) has been setting, I’d say with a fair deal of confidence not attributed to my latent clairvoyant powers that the final version will be out well before Skyrim comes out, which happens to be his deadline for completion. Seriously, he’s averaging about a release a week at this point.

With that, I realize that I haven’t even explained what the dealio is with this mod: it adds a large landmass accessible from the Anvil ports. It’s not a total conversion like Nehrim is and MERP will be, so you can gallivant around in it with the Oblivion character you already have. As for the lore-friendliness, Antiscamp assured me that it will be lore-friendly, but the landmass itself is not based on any part of the continent of Tamriel. It’s new and mysterious.

If you really want to, you can download it right now. It’s on the fifth beta so far, so there’s only a sparse offering of quests and it’s probably going to be hilariously buggy, so play at your own risk, I guess. I’d play, but FCOM decided to laugh in my face when I tried to get back into Oblivion.

Go for it!

It seems that the cycle is complete, then. Call of Pripyat Complete, part of a series of mods designed to make STALKER not look like it took a tumble off the ugly wagon, is nearing completion. Call of Pripyat was easily the prettiest STALKER game (probably due to the fact that it’s the third one), but by jove I think Mr. artistpavel and his cadre of modding cohorts have stumbled onto something magical. It must grant wishes or something.

I’ve embedded the trailer for Complete below this handy dandy Read More tag, just so you don’t have to trawl the depths of ModDB for it. Dang, that is one beautiful trailer. It’s been rather enigmatically tagged as “the official trailer before release.” How much before? Days? Weeks? At least it won’t be as unbearably long as the equally pretty Skyrim release.

Or, you can trawl the depths of ModDB.

Swords are kind of the video game allegory to guns; if you have a game that has guns, it generally doesn’t have swords and if you have a game that has swords it generally doesn’t have guns. Obviously there’s the odd combination, but it works out like that most of the time. Blade Symphony, if you haven’t gathered by reading the title of the game, is the latter.

To put Blade Symphony in simpler terms: you have a sword and you orchestrate peoples’ deaths with it. I was able to have some time with the closed beta over the weekend (and also the future!). I’ve also played it a bit, and I’m here to pass on to you, the reader, what I thought of it.

I quite enjoyed it! Yes, I know extremely little of the Fighting genre, which as a name sounds like schoolchildren having a scrap behind the school, but I know enough of Half-Life 2 mods to know that Blade Symphony fills a niche that has as yet been unfilled. And for being the first of its kind, it fills this niche spectacularly. Blade Symphony is a game that prides itself on it simplicity. There’s not ludicrous seventy-button combos. You’re not spending most of the game spastically flipping about whilst juggling people. Your feet are firmly planted on the ground, and your combos are easy enough to pull off because there are no set combos.

Which brings me into Blade Symphony’s biggest feature: the stance system. The best comparison I can think of for Blade Symphony’s stances is the stance system from Jedi Academy. You have three stances: light, medium and heavy, which I then assign arbitrary names to. Light, predictably, allows for the quickest strikes while heavy, also predictably, eschews speed for power. Where the combos come into play is mixing and matching different types of stances to chain together attacks. It’s elegant in its simplicity, and it definitely shrinks the learning curve enough that I was able to actually be able to not be terrible.

As a beta, it’s surprisingly polished. There’s no glaring gameplay issues besides the odd bug here and there. It’s easy enough to find a server to join in, the difficult part is actually finding someone to play against (which I don’t fault it for, there’s only ~300 people in). Once you do find someone to fight, you’ll have a hard time putting it down–I kept saying that I’d quit “after this next round”… then the round would start as soon as I said that. Guess I have to fight again, writing this article can wait.

While the beta only contains two maps, one to test water reflections and the above map Winter, its release is set to contain two or three more maps. The mapping and art is easily the mod’s strong suit, everything’s crisp and clear and provides an interesting backdrop to the bloodless carnage that unfolds on each of the arenas. Except Puny Human is going to have to come up with a hell of an interesting story to explain the reason why I’m a samurai in plate mail fighting a ninja robot from the future. Impress me, Puny Human!

Speaking of story, that would be an interesting offshoot of Blade Symphony. The final release is, I’m assuming, mostly focusing on the duel gameplay, but they can easily spin it off to a linear hack-n-slash type game. Just a thought.

Blade Symphony is currently in closed beta. If they give keys out, it’ll probably be on their ModDB page. Or, you can go on their official website.

If you haven’t sent in an application and want to write to us, I’d recommend you send your stuff to contact[at]usercreated.org! Applicants must be prepared to be awesome every day of their lives.

Having things to do means I have a massive list of mods to test and/or write about but a lack of time to do so. That being said, I spent the evening throwing knives at farm animals. Extended 2×2 Grid Crafting, despite being one of the largest and most uninteresting mod name I’ve ever seen, had me unfortunately cackling madly as many a farm animal got shivved with my dagger-throwing skills.

This particular mod, if you haven’t gathered from the name, makes the 2×2 crafting grid less useless. Generally, the 2×2 grid in the player’s inventory is used for such mundane things as crafting sticks and torches. With this mod, you can craft adorable little pickaxes, adorable little boomerangs, adorable little trowels and adorable little daggers that you use to cut open adorable little monsters.

Each tiny tool can be used as a hoe, which is good because hoes are terrible and almost useless. I mean, who farms anyway? Get your food like a man–murdering pigs and stealing their bacons. There’s also a tiny stove that you can make while in the depths of a mine; good for the all-to-common scenario of being stuck down in a cave without a pickax and nowhere to go, no way out then suddenly you have no items because creepers blew your face up which you could have prevented if you had say a sword or a pickaxe to escape or something. I’m not bitter.

It adds a handful of other useful, small items to the pack, with another handful on the way. Like satchels, so you can finally live out your Indiana Jones fantasies, or torch arrows.

You’ll need ModLoader to play, there’s a link in the Minecraft forum thread about 2×2 Grid Crafting. Download, open up minecraft.jar in 7zip, and overwrite some files for the mods to take effect.

In the great, glorious past of six days ago, a group of intrepid modders decided that those darn, uppity mountains weren’t getting quite enough hate. The only remedy for this was to port the huge and gorgeously-detailed Left 4 Dead campaign I Hate Mountains to its sequel, Left 4 Dead 2. This took about eight months, all said and done; one would think that porting a campaign from one game to another, similar game would be easy. However, Valve does some wacky, wacky things with their SDKs, and makes supposedly simple things crazy difficult. But, at the end of the eight-month-period, here’s one of the most quality Left 4 Dead campaigns… ever.

When the first version of the campaign was released early last year, I played the heck out of it. It had several really unique stand-out moments, like the entire third level with the catacombs and the mansion defense in the second level. It was pretty much flawless, which is saying something because it was one of the first Left 4 Dead campaigns that I played. Congratulations, I Hate Mountains developers, you’ve officially spoiled me. How dare you.

The second campaign, officially titled “I Hate Mountains 2″ is basically the same thing, except in Left 4 Dead 2. There are several things they can improve with this new version. First, they dropped the ball on their sequel naming. Here’s some suggestions: I Still Hate Mountains. I Hate Mountains Again. The Sight of Mountains Continues to Fill Me With Homicidal Rage. Come on! I guess simply adding the 2 makes it more succinct or something.

Anyway, for those who are planning on downloading it, the Left 4 Dead 2 version is basically the same as the Left 4 Dead 1 version, except you get the Left 4 Dead 2 goodies like better gore, melee weapons, and the uncommon and special infected. The same survivors are there, and the maps are pretty much the same. So, the version you download is pretty much based on which game you have more of a preference to. Do you like the rapid-fire machine pistols that fire faster than any conceivable gun ever? Go for the Left 4 Dead version. If you like the more polished gameplay, go for the second version.

Although, a word of warning. This campaign, as an unfortunate by-product of its absurd detail, ran incredibly slowly on my modest, five year old rig. Where I would get 40FPS or higher in any other campaign, I was getting 25FPS tops, dipping down into 15FPS in intense firefights.

Go download it! There’s a huge button that says CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD. Wonder what it does?