Doom III did a lot of things rather badly, but lights are something it did stratospherically well.  Thus, you too should be excited about Thievous, because if it’s half as good to play as it’s pretty to look at, we may have one hell of a little project on our hands.

Sadly, it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to get our grubby hands on this anytime soon, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.

ModDB Page

Latest News Update

PS: Sorry I’ve been so quiet :(  Blame British Telecom.

Zombies always attack the US.  This is a well known fact.  In fact, when supernatural creatures decide to end mankind’s existence – be they aliens, zombies, dragons, or some other generic fictional creature – they have a scary ability to speak English, land in New York, and abduct some Texan farmers.

Thankfully, Killing Floor takes place in our home sweet home of Blighty.  Bring on double-decker buses, bad cockney accents, and the SAS.

So, zombies have attacked Queen and Country, and your squadron of SAS is tasked with killing them.  All of them.   Hundreds up hundreds of them: big zombies, small zombies, explody zombies, spider zombies and rocket zombies – you’ll murder them all in a shower of blood and gore.

At this point, you’re probably thinking this sounds a hell of a lot like Left 4 Dead.  Well, you’re wrong: you’re not 4 desperate survivors here with whatever weapons you can scavenge – you’re a highly trained SAS operative, and thankfully, Her Majesty’s government seems happy to pay you in cold, hard cash for every zombie you kill, and you’ll be able to use that hard cash to expand your terrifying arsenal, by locating the trader – a semi-mystical figure who has the bizarre urge to wander around levels supplying you with your deadly tools of the trade instead of buggering off like any sensible person.

With your ever-expanding stash of guns, and a welding gun to try and direct the unending flow of zombies to convenient choak-points, your only hope of survival is to keep murdering reanimated corpses until you drag the ultimate badass zombie out from hiding: the patriarch, a hideous mix of undead flesh, slightly geeky glasses, and a rocket launcher.  Also, a minigun.

There’s so much that makes Killing Floor unmissable: a great perk system, some stunning level design, utterly mad enemies, and generally being more fun than a barrel full of monkeys.  Thanks to developer Tripwire’s win of the Make Something Unreal competition, it’s also now been released as a standalone title on Steam.  You really should pick it up – you’d be missing out on the unmissable otherwise.

Why is it on our list?

Hectic, polished, utterly crazy, and full of zombies, it’s up there with the best of them when it comes  to slaughtering pixellated monsters with some friends.  As a mod or a commercial release, Killing Floor is one hell of a game.

Get it from
While you can still use the ModDB page, I’m not sure whether it’s still played – the standalone release, available on Steam, is definitely worth your money.

Easy to install?
It’s a standalone game – pay, download, play.  If you insist on saving your pitiful amount of cash, it’s a simple matter of running the installer from the ModDB page.

We all loved STALKER.  We loved it like we love old horror movies – it’s a beautiful, haunting, slightly chilling experience, that wraps you in its hard, gritty Ukrainian arms and waltzes you to a world so desperate and miserable that you can’t help but fall hopelessly in love with it.

It’s also undeniably and hopelessly broken.  The AI is freakishly alien, it’s more full of bugs than your average Mississippi bog, and the entire experience is so blatantly cut down and unfinished; it’s hard to not feel a tinge of disappointment – nay, despair – at what STALKER could have been.

Until you install Oblivion Lost – and unleash the potential you’ve always known was hidden deep inside that bug ridden, many-facetted jewel of a game.

The first thing you should be excited about?  You can drive cars.  Fast, with scarily, reality-defying physics, but hey, I blame the Zone.  Afterwards, you know what you’ll be able to do with your newly acquired, shiny, rust encrusted car?  Drive it onto anomalies – new, enhanced, better than ever before anomalies, that’ll follow you around until they toss you and your ton of metal machinery into the air like some monstrous, mechanical ragdoll.

If, by some ungodly, superhuman miracle, you manage to resist the urge to grab the first vehicle you lay your eyes on and drive it as fast as you can into the distance – and impending, unavoidable death – you’ll find STALKER under Oblivion Lost’s new iron fisted rule is a whole new, far more open world to its predecessor – a living, breathing, MURDERING WORLD, READY TO CRUSH YOUR SOUL.  With far crazier mutants, far more intelligent enemies, and periodic radioactive storms – blowouts – the world of STALKER is a whole new scary place for your head.  Oh, and it has a night-time too, so you can have your own very little nightmares.

Thankfully, Oblivion Lost also kits you out to explore it, with what we gamers love the most: guns.  Lots of guns.  Hidden in lots of new stashes, so when you’re woken up from your horrendous, mutant filed nightmares – in your cosy new sleeping bag – you’ll have plenty to do, as long as you can survive the now regular faction warfare that’s all but guaranteed to explode around you.

It would take far, far, far too long to tell you everything Oblivion Lost adds to STALKER, and I couldn’t begin to start explaining every aspect of the original game it refines, perfects, and generally improves tenfold.  Suffice to say, if you’ve played the original STALKER and wished it was just that much better, then hit up this sexy babe of a mod, and it’ll blow your mind away.  With nuclear powered awesomesauce.

Why is it on our list?

Because it made STALKER the game we all wanted it to be, and then some.

Get it from

Some random forum thread – or just FileFront

Easy to install?

Install.  Play.  I’d say it was, yeah.

From a team of modders who’s minds don’t work quite like ours, that includes members of the JailBreak: Source and Fragout teams, comes this utterly bonkers take on slingshot powered zero-g deathmatch.

While it’s only an alpha, it’s perfectly playable, and if my first impressions are anything to go on, great fun to boot – if utterly hectic in a maniacal sort of way.  It’s also entirely playable with one hand, which might be a plus, I suppose.  Or a foot, if  you’re feeling particularly brave.   Whether you’re the least bit interested or not, it’s only 30 or so megs, so you should have downloaded it by now.

How does it work? The only weapon, tool, or leverage you have are the deadly roller mines of HL2 – they’ll act as transportation, ammunition, and general havoc dealing tools in this mess.

You use the RMB to “grapple” onto the mines that float haphazardly throughout the levels, thus launching yourself at stratospheric speeds past your opponent’s stupefied faces.  LMB allows you to “absorb” a mine, then allowing you to fire it at your opponents, either in blue, low damage, homing mode, or red high damage death ball of doom.  Remember kids, red is bad, m’kay?

Frankly, I had no idea what was going on in my first game, but hey, I was travelling through space being assaulted by deadly flying death-mines.  If we can get some good servers up and running, this looks like it has the potential to be endlessly entertaining.

ModDB Page

Installer Download

Unlike Mr. Bond’s employers, the team are surprisingly open with priceless nuggets of information regarding their recreation of our much beloved GoldenEye 64, and have announced we’ll be seeing the release of Beta 4 in a couple of days, at 5PM EST on the 19th of February.

This is the first release we’ve seen from the team in nearly a year, so I think we can all be rather excited at the prospect of another build in which we’ll hopefully get the chance to get back at that Oddjob model for causing us so much hassle back when we were in the prime of our youth.  Or 12.

The full changelog is available at the GE: S Wiki here, and it’s looking like a ridiculously huge update.  If you’re a fan of the old N64 classic, or vaguely interested in the history of first-person-shooters, this is a mod to watch.  Read the update, and follow the countdown here.

WW1 was an incredibly unpleasant time for the human race, even by the standards of most wars.  Not only did it involve blood, guts, and needless violence, it involved hiding in small muddy holes while waiting to be shredded by an assorted buffet of machinegun fire and artillery shells. All in all, a horrendously unpleasant malarky that nobody really wants to go back to.

Pirates, Vikings, and Knights II has become the latest mod to succeed in being officially supported on Steam, adding it to the compact list of titles that have managed to bribe/befriend/threaten Valve enough to force their way onto the platform.

Thankfully, that also means it’s now completely Steamworks supported, so you get the beautiful benefits of achievements, complete ingame Steam overlay support, etc.  All in all, I’ll probably be playing this just because it’s there.  Hopefully, I’ll see you online!

Apparently, it involves Pirates, Vikings, and Knights. How bad could it possibly be?  Hopefully, we’ll be seeing more and more mods on Steam in the future :)

The raptor’s claws firmly clenched the diminutive SMG as bullets flew towards his bionic opponent, impacting with the satisfying snap of crunching servomotors as the robotic foe fell to the ground, the mechanical body fading into nothingness.  As the raptor roared his victory to the heavens like only a dinosaur can, a gigantic metallic ball suddenly crushed him, extinguising the reptilian life in an instant – and a moment later, the raptor awoke.  In jail.  With a sword.

Welcome to Jailbreak: Source.

Jailbreak: Source is the latest mod in a long, respected pedigree of Jailbreak mods, all of which were based on a simple premise: when you die, you go to jail.  If your whole team is imprisoned simultaneously, you’ll be executed by a variety of ingenious death traps – from duck cannons to laser fences and nuclear armageddon.  Realistic?  Hardly.  Amazingly good fun? Oh, hell yes.  Oh, and have I mentioned there is a rolling death ball of metallic destruction rolling around as well? You use it to score goals.  To lock people in prison. That’s how Jailbreak works: it’s full of ideas that aren’t so much original, as completely batshit insane.  At its heart, Jailbreak is little more than a deathmatch mode with a slight hint of crazy – but it’s that hint of crazy that makes the entire mod so endearing. It’s a world of maniacal, mind-boggling fun built around a solid team deathmatch core.

That core is simple, compact, and damn well built.  They’ll rarely be more than 3-4 weapons per map, and even those rely on stapple gaming convetions – expect SMGs, shotguns, sniper rifle, and possibly a mini-gun or rocket launcher if you get lucky – so expect to feel right at home.  The maps themselves also aim to please, often relying on the ever so satisfying model of a long, long corridor, with a complete bonanza of death-dealing tools lying between the two teams to quench your well honed thirst for multiplayer bloodshed.

Or oilshed as the case may be, seeing the two teams are dinosaurs and robots.  Undeniably crazy and illogical, but also a great way to make the teams fun, diverse, and beautifully differentiated – friendly fire really isn’t likely to be a huge problem on this front.  I’m not sure causing dinosaur genocide is a great gaming moral incentive, but it sure as hell makes the shooty stuff in Jailbreak clean, clear cut, and fun.

It’s also an symptom of the sheer spirit of Jailbreak – a spirit based on fun, ridiculous ideas, and that’s probably rather enjoyable on a variety of illicit substances – that manages to so successfully permeate the entire mod. You remember the giant ball of death and destruction I mentioned earlier?  You roll it around the map – by smacking it with your sword – and crush the life out of your foes. It’s a crazy, ludicrous idea, that would make absolutely no bloody sense in any mod other than this – but here, it just seems to fit. Nearly more importantly, if you do somehow managed to propel it to the enemy starting zone through sheer force of will, explosives, and dinosaur sword pummeling, it’ll lock the enemy prison, condemning them to impotent flailing while you mercilessly hunt down their remaining brethren – denying them an otherwise all but inevitable escape.

The jail system is what makes Jailbreak so compelling – the inane, largely irrelevant, yet hugely addictive mechanic that focuses the mod’s ridiculous ideas into one coherent package. If you’ve ever played dodge ball as a child – and if you haven’t, you’re missing out, lost child that you are – you’ll understand the basic mechanics: any fragged players are locked in jail, hoping their teammates can break through enemy defenses to release them.  Unlike dodge ball however, every twenty or seconds, you’ll be given the opportunity to force your way out of jail of your own volition – assuming you succeed.

Each of Jailbreak’s diverse maps has its own prison system, but they’ll all give you a chance at freedom – the main difference being how easy you’ll find your escape.  Some maps will simply release you straight back onto the map, but most will make you work for your freedom.  A depraved, ludicrously difficult platforming section over deadly pits, or avoiding moving trains, or any other set of danger-filled trials the Jailbreak team will have come up with.  It’s a compelling, easy to grasp, yet still painfully harsh system for the new player.  Fail to escape for long enough however, and you’ll face Jailbreak’s most entertaining, yet heartbreaking sequence yet: your execution.

You may be incinerated by a rocket ignition, or sliced-n-diced by a moving death-train, or even assailed by a flock of canon-fired rubber ducks, but it’ll be ridiculous, funny, terrifying, and some of the most entertaining moments in a jailbreak game.  Often, you’ll be given one, last ditch escape route – an escape hatch, or conveniently placed ledge – and the sight of your entire team desperately scrambling to safety is somewhere between sheer schadenfreude gaming satisfaction and genuine comedy gold.

That line is always one that Jailbreak treads so expertly well, and a compromise that explains why it’s garnered such a secure place in the HL modding community’s heart.  Funny yet addictive, crazy yet balanced, ludicrous, yet so instantly simple – the Jailbreak team has managed to capture everything we love about HL multiplayer and mix it in with good, old fashioned fun – but at its heart, it’s still a damn good game of team deathmatch. You owe it to yourself to go play it.

Official Jailbreak:Source Website

ModDB Page

Installer Download Page

Installation of Jailbreak is about as simple as it gets: as long as you’ve got a Source game, run the installer, restart Steam, and you’re good to go.  Good luck, and I’ll see you online!

And hopefully, we’ll see you there!

We all know that maintaining a decent amount of server activity can be a struggle for any mod, and the team behind Jailbreak: Source – which we looked into last month – have taken the problem into their own hands by organising a “Big Breakout” event this weekend.

You’ll have the chance to talk to the developpers, and possibily even shoot them, and it’ll be good fun all around.  Far more importantly though, we’re hoping to hop on for awhile to bring the pain, UserCreated style!

Assuming no epic technical issues, you can probably expect a few of our staff, not to mention all the epic people on our Steam group, to be happily online and shooting developpers in the face.  So join us!  Come meet us, and prepare to be crushed beneath our terrifying dinosaur feet.  Alternatively, come teach us how these things are really done.

Either way, get online, and get playing!  We’ll see you there.  Or not.

PS:  They’ve also announced the details of an upcoming patch, but I figured you’d be far too thrilled with the anticipation of playing with us to be bothered with such information.  Information is in the ModDB link!

ModDB Big Breakout Weekend

I need to confess: I love Warhammer 40k.  I know, it’s childish, immature, and not particularly more inventive than any other bad sci-fi generic tale, but the nostalgic pull of little plastic soldiers has an nonsensical pull over me.

So understand when I say I’m excited about the new release of the beta version of Exterminatus, the W40k mod for HL2.  With 2 species (tyranids and space marines), 8 classes, and 4 maps, it’s quite an extensive beta, and as soon as I get over my current failtastic technical issues – oh, the endless fun of being a PC gamer – we’ll be bringing you a full review.

For now though, go download the installer, or, if you’re stuck in my boat,  just go check out the stunning videos and wallow in your inability to play the damnable thing.  Have a little cry.  It’s okay, you’ll be a Space Marine one day.

Trailer after the jump…

ModDB Page

Installer