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4′s graphics are so last year (which they are, if you possess the vision broken enough to believe that graphics become outdated in a short year’s worth of time), here’s ENBSeries.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.

It always makes me a little bit giddy when I see a singleplayer Half-Life 2 mod that doesn’t involve Combine, headcrab zombies and/or City 17 rebels shoehorned in some convoluted plot. Sometimes, I like to see action movie plots in Half-Life 2.

Not that I’m dissing on Framed, though. It’s a common plot (that of being blamed for murders and being forced to clear your name through gratuitous amounts of violence) but one that hasn’t been fully realized as far as I know of in Half-Life 2′s mod scene.

The mod itself is set in New York, present day, in which Ian, an office manager, is framed for several murders he didn’t commit. Faced with a life behind bars, Ian is forced to set off on an adventure filled with murdering people until he can murder the right people. As a summary, it seems rather trite, but as a story it’s going to have to come down to how exactly the story will unfold over the course of the game.

But it seems like it might turn out all right: as the mod’s development team (especially the writers) is filled with a rather star-studded cast. atis_star_tours, of 1187 fame, is one of the writers and voice actors, as well as Sir Elliot, a prominent GMod machinima artist. Roughly 2/3rds of the mod team is voice actors, so as to give the characters a more diverse range of voices. If I remember correctly, 8 voice actors is roughly half the entire voice acting team for Oblivion, so if 16 people can do it for Oblivion, 8 people can do it for Framed.

Here’s a gameplay video of old things:

Framed’s ModDB page

On the other hand, this is rather nice. I noticed horror-themed Source mod Visage before (I know all and see all) but I wasn’t sure it was going anywhere, despite some interesting early snapshots. Andrea also knows all and sees all! You can see his impressions of those first images here. But modder milo-rd just recently updated the team’s ModDB page and, well, while anyone can say they’ve changed their minds and are now going to make the bestest mod ever, these new screens, concept art and teaser trailer do go a long way towards backing that up.

Two friends discover something nasty deep in the forests surrounding the deserted Swedish town of Hovgård. Hardly an original premise, but this is slick, professional-looking stuff steeped in a grim, peculiarly Scandinavian atmosphere. No, forget pulpy crime novels like Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, this looks far closer to something like Pål Øie’s Hidden (Skjult) – yes, yes, he’s Norwegian, but these screens give off that same feeling of having been steeped in a toxic soup of fear and decay. (When apparently it was just Red Bull.)

I hate to make it seem as if I only care about Source mods, but when they’re this promising, I can’t just pass them up. Eagerly awaited indeed.

You can find Visage’s page on ModDB here.

Well this looks rather good. Dogfight is – like the name suggests – a giant furball of rickety World War I era planes circling endlessly above some forgotten battlefield, blazing away at each other with mounted machineguns until it all ends in tears. And flaming wreckage plummetting from the sky, naturally. Modder Ztormi’s not long released some footage of the alpha test he hosted, and it is this I wish to draw your attention to now.

As a longtime fan of Crimson Skies – yes, yes, the XBox version, stop booing me – I have to say I approve. The limitations are pretty obvious, from the way the planes turn in fits and starts to the low-poly landscaping to the dead planes bouncing merrily when they hit the ground, but it still looks a hell of a lot of fun, and for a one-man project this is mightily impressive. Ztormi admits realism isn’t the primary goal, beyond some snappy recreations of aircraft from the days when men went flying with the help of little more than canvas and string (guided what now?) so with that in mind the gameplay looks reasonably promising. Back from military service, he’s free to work on his virtual killing; improvements since the video was shot apparently include a general speed increase, map tweaks and player tags among other things.

It’s just been added to my bookmarks, and if you hanker for some simple, hopefully rewarding pick-up-and-play aerial combat I’d advise you add it to yours.

Dogfight’s page on ModDB can be found here.

Oh my. Looks like work on Tension is going forward at a fair clip. We’ve had mod team Cracked Glass’ slinging and swinging Half-Life 2 total conversion on the site once before, and I should hopefully have a Q&A with them to post at some point in the near future, but before I get to that a very interesting update appeared on ModDB not long ago. Seems they’ve been working on their planned time trial modes – grappling as fast as possible through fiendish arrangements of scattered blocks and walkways floating in the void – and they’ve kindly uploaded a teaser for it.

It looks good, basically. Very good, even. Though… well, me, I like time trials, but I’m really not that good at them so while I have the odd reservation about the level layout we’re seeing here I don’t know how well-founded those would be. Would people just blitz through this in seconds after only a couple of tries? Or would it be too hard? Cracked Glass say none of this is finalised, but at first glance it certainly doesn’t look anything as bad as Mirror’s Edge, where if you’re not doing the three-star, fastest route you’re basically doing it wrong, and if you slip anywhere you may as well give up. Not sure about the grappling hook noise, either! It must be a hard one to get ‘right’, though I can imagine that sound driving me up the wall after extended play. The music’s not my thing (though I can see people liking it), but that doesn’t bother me – it’s what volume sliders were invented for.

Still, overall Tension continues to look really, really promising. It’d be a great shame not to see this one get finished. Head over to ModDB some time and show Cracked Glass a bit of support, eh?

Tension’s page on ModDB can be found here.

It’s amazing when a single news post can get me from zero to GET HYPE! in literally three seconds. The only-slightly puntastically-named Overwatch just released their first news post, and it revealed that Overwatch is almost done. Well, it’s nearing its closed beta, which is development code for “almost done.” The first set of development invites are being sent out on July 14th, and then a bunch more are being sent out each week until the first public release. It should be exciting.

If you don’t know what Overwatch is (like me twenty minutes into the past) it’s kind of a hybrid real-time strategy/first person shooter dealie. The person playing as the Combine views the world through a overhead (hence the name, heh heh) viewpoint and he or she controls a bunch of troops, while the rest of the people play individual Rebel soldiers from the first person perspective. With the mod team’s pedigree, which consists of them working on Zombie Panic, Dystopia and Sven Co-op, they should be one of the few teams that would be able to pull something like this off.

While the very sleek ModDB page is a little light on actual gameplay screenshots, here’s a series of moving pictures to demonstrate how the Combine gameplay should work.

Or, if you want to look into it more, here’s the ModDB page or the mod’s official website.

Godawful wordplay aside, time for a tip of the hat to modders Cracked Glass games and Tension, their Source engine total conversion that’s currently looking very promising. First-person grappling hooks, basically. Sure, we’ve seen grappling hooks and rope-swinging on PC before, even leaping, falling and obstacle courses, but there’s a nice, clean simplicity to the preview screens and pre-alpha work that suggests this lot have their priorities down right. More thoughts, and the most recent trailer, after the break.

No complicated backstory – there is a plot, all about ecological disaster and rising sea levels, but to their credit they avoid rambling on about it at length before the mod’s even done. No laundry list of bigger and bigger guns, at least not just yet. What we’ve got is some impressively fluid movement swinging over, under and through their test maps that gives a strong impression this could be a lot of fun to play around with. They’re largely using placeholder textures but the arcade minimalism of the alpha levels is actually pretty attractive, too; they talk about puzzles, racing and time trials, so however much the artistic direction changes it seems they’re going for something of a pick-up-and-play approach.

Personally? Mod team or not, ancient engine or not, I’m still more than interested. Despite the obvious elephants swinging through the room, I don’t think even the professional competition is quite what it could be. Capcom and Grin somehow conspired to make the Bionic Commando remake, well, boring, with tiny, restrictive levels, instant deaths and not much opportunity to show off. Mirror’s Edge squandered a lot of its potential when it turned out it wasn’t a free-running game at all, really, more a racing game on foot – and whisper it softly; I don’t actually like Spiderman that much, so any of his games are wasted on me.

Cracked Glass have some concept art up, some alpha and pre-alpha screens, some music and a range of videos spanning the mod’s development so far. They’ve been going for a while, but the updates seem to have been coming reasonably regularly, and they’re (probably sensibly) not committing themselves to any firm release date just yet. Definitely one to keep an eye on, and fingers crossed they can eventually get this one out of the door.

The ModDB page for Tension is here. Go take a look.

Orion, the sci-fi multiplayer total conversion for Half-Life 2, has managed to get a ridiculous amount of coverage, but for some bizarre reason I haven’t quite figured out yet, we haven’t even mentioned it.  Thankfully, that’s changing, with the team announcing the release date for the upcoming beta 1.2.

It’ll include a ridiculous amount of changes, from optimization tweaks to weapon modifications, and you’ll be able to get your grubby, dirty hands on it next Monday, the 14th of June.  If you’re sceptical, we’ll try to review it as soon as possible and let you know if it’s as fun as I’m hoping it is.

Orion Homepage

Orion on ModDB

Orion 1.2 Preview on HalfLife2.net

It might be somewhat unusual to post eagerly about a single screenshot having been released, but I’m so enamoured by this new image from Opposing Force 2, the HL2-mod sequel to that most excellent of HL1 expansions, that I make an exception. The sense of scale and place created in this is just spectacular. This is games-screenshots-as-photography, if there ever was such a thing. I’m really looking forward to this. Click the picture to make it go bigger!

A heavily stylised mod for Half-Life 2, Zombie Zoo released its first chapter a couple of days ago. With its comicbook visuals and rather barmy story, it’s one of those releases that really could go either way. And it kinda has. Read on, good humans, to find out what I think.

So it’s kind of like this. Zombie Zoo is terrible. Really, excruciatingly terrible. The AI’s broken, the hit detection wild, the big beastly boxing gloves barely tapping your targets. At one point, even on a top-end PC, Zombie Zoo makes the Source Engine slow down to an excruciating slideshow, so badly optimised is the area. Its jokes are the sort you’d expect from a precocious high school kid making Flash animations. It’s terrible. It’s my favourite mod in ages.

It’s not that it hits that occasionally brilliant ‘so bad it’s good’ mark. It doesn’t, at all. When Zombie Zoo is bad, it’s really bad. Which is, if we’re honest, for much of this first chapter. While the amount of custom content is impressive (basically all the content is custom), most of it is abominable. Textures don’t sit together properly, with extreme-bump-mapped tarmac giving way to completely flat surfaces. Your set of big, begloved fists look awesome until you actually move them. Bears and rabbits sometimes don’t move at all, which is especially problematic in the latter case, as they’re the enemies of the piece.

Of course they are.

They look like this:

They are, for the record, absolutely no fun to punch in their zombified little faces.

That’s the story, by the way. The zombie rabbits have broken free of their pens, and are going around slaughtering the bears. You, an intern, have been tasked with fixing the situation. You must not kill the bears. You must kill the rabbit boss. And, well, quite.

And this is where I start to really like Zombie Zoo. It’s utterly nonsensical and stupid. But it delivers on that stupidity with such supreme confidence that, after a while, I stopped caring that the game was broken, and the jokes weren’t funny.

So you get things like a glorious, hand-drawn intro and outro animation, which left a big stupid grin plastered on my face. You get a voiceover whose gags are so bad you end up laughing along with them, perhaps realising the developers have been in on their own little joke all along. And you get one of the most utterly delightful boss battles I’ve ever seen in a game, which involves avoiding a sea of pirouetting bunnies before punching their leader – who hops around like a fucking mental – squarely in the face.

This is a stupid, stupid first part to what will surely be a stupid, stupid mod. Its hub area can be left in four different directions, three of which are blocked off for now. With episode one taking just fifteen minutes or so to complete, the full thing isn’t exactly going to be hugely substantial. Maybe it’s for the best that it’ll be a fleeting, surreal joy.

But it is a joy. Genuinely. Despite being wholly incompetent in a great number of ways, it’s a mod I came away from properly enamoured. It scratches an itch, and lets you punch rabbits in the face. Try it out.

Zombie Zoo’s developers have taken on board some feedback regarding some bugs in the mod, which I didn’t notice, as well as the problem with the extreme slowdown in the middle section. As such, they’ve removed the installer from its ModDB page for now. A repalcement is expected very shortly, which purports to fix the issues. Keep track here.

We’ve done a lot of HL2 and not much else the past couple of days, but one of the Firearms: Source devs drops me an email just now to tell me that they’ve gone and announced a release date. Well, a range of dates, at least, for this successor to the hugely popular Half-Life mod Firearms is to be launched in July. This July. The one coming up after June.

I’m hoping to arrange an interview with these guys in the coming [insert period of time here], but for now, here’s a tonne of new screenshots and here’s a cute visual history of Firearms.

I don’t believe we’ve really mentioned Zeitgeist before. Which is rather barmy, given how interesting it’s looking. Today, its team released a new batch of screenshots, so this seems as good a time as any to take a look at this vastly intriguing upcoming Half-Life 2 mod. Words and pictures follow.

Set in an alternative 1934, Zeitgeist’s world is not the post-war Europe we’re so familiar with from the history books. The screenshot above might look familiar enough, and the period vehicle and weapon models that have cropped up over the past few months don’t exactly hint at much else. Perhaps most iconically, there’s Zeitgeist’s enormous blimp – a Hindenburg model – flying valiantly over many of the mod’s scenes. Any allusion to the Hindenburg, and we all get the same image: one of fire, and of destruction.

Nevertheless, Zeitgeist’s world is different. It’s a 1930s fresh out of the First World War, the conflict having bloodily continued for 15 years. It’s also a 1930s in which the struggle for supremacy within Europe has led to numerous technological advancements, propagating at an alarming rate. So sure, the screenshot above might look typical of the era. But a glance at others demonstrates subtle differences: architecture atypical of the period; science just that little bit advanced.

It’s already shaping up to be a vivid and rich world, one endlessly more fascinating with each new batch of screenshots and each new snippet of information released. “Iconic” seems to be the right word: in the London scenes alone, red London buses circle around roundabouts; the Underground logo glows in the night; and Paddington Station stands proud, its trio of curved roofs striking to anyone familiar with the English capital and its history. London’s not the only place appearing wildly beautiful and evocative: the screenshots of Stuttgart, Germany, paint an equally glorious picture.

Despite the fictional elements, Zeitgeist’s attention to historical detail is breathtaking. Today’s update offers a handful of screenshots of the Three Golden Oaks pub – where, if the PR release is accurate (and I have no reason to doubt it is), revolutionaries involved in the Gunpowder Plot drank into the night. And each new screenshot has one thing in common: even without motion, every single beautifully crafted location is utterly dripping with atmosphere.

While little has been revealed of the mod’s play mechanics just yet, we do know that it will be an expansive single-player experience set in a partially non-linear environment. We also know that the London segment comes equipped with a fully functional underground rail network, with players able to catch any train to any destination. There’s no hand-holding, either: if you want to end up in the right place, you’ll have to check the tube map to work out where your connection is. It’s all very ambitious.

And that’s kind of my only worry. Even though not a huge amount of detail has been released (we’re hoping to extract a little more information from Team Zeitgeist in the very near future, so watch this space), it’s already evident that this is a project of an extremely large scale, one exceptionally difficult to execute well in the Source Engine. The team’s claiming not to be using any original HL2 content, as well. What’s in the public domain is vastly promising, but whether that promise will transfer over to the final mod is another thing entirely.

Still, with a good track record behind them – project lead Til Sichel also works on HL2 mod Raindrop and upcoming Source-powered shooter Nuclear Dawn – the Zeitgeist team’s loft aims could well be realised. We’ll be keeping you posted as soon as we hear anything new – it’s a mod I’m certainly going to be following very closely indeed.

Well, would you believe it? After months upon months of waiting, the Black Mesa team have finally unveiled a bunch of new screenshots to CVG.

Equally exciting, CVG reveal the developers have said to expect “a complete, polished game to hit your hard drives in the near future.” Just how near-future they’re talking remains to be seen, but after six long years, it seems as if this mammoth project might be heading towards the finish line.

This is interesting stuff. I emerged rather fond of HL2 mod Human Error, even though it had a bunch of problems which left it decidedly less brilliant than it showed hints of being. To take a break from working on Episode Two – which I’m eager to see how pans out, its big twist seemingly have happened at the end of Ep 1 – its developers have been working on a co-op mode based on the first instalment’s characters, incorporating a new L4D Director-esque AI system and allowing four players to battle against it at any one time. But that’s perhaps the least interesting facet of the upcoming release.

On top of standard co-op mode, there’s also something called Traitor mode. This takes the standard co-op game, but every so often assigns one player at random the role of Traitor. It’s then his or her job to do their best to sabotage things for the rest of the squad, namely by helping the opposition to destroy the Combine mainframe while your Metrocop pals aren’t looking. It’s a game of stealth, since if you reveal yourself – which is possibly via a simple key press – you’ll be shot to bits on sight. But if you don’t reveal yourself, the people you’re actually trying to help will probably shoot you as well, and oh it’s all very difficult.

Human Error revolved around its careful (and occasionally unintentionally careless) narrative pacing, so it’ll be interesting to see how it translates to a multiplayer environment. But this is a smart concept. It’s also set for release sometime “before summer” according to the devs, although they acknowledge this could change.

The friendly DuckSauce points out we missed this yesterday. Battle Grounds, the rather respectable HL2 multiplayer mod, will hit Version 2.0 this weekend. The update goes live at midnight on the 24th, Eastern US time. Which I can’t be bothered to translate into UK time, but you can safely assume “some time before you’re awake.”

What’s new? Quite a lot, according to the devs. Too many to list, they say! Crikey! But among them are changes to weapon and ammo selection, a new British Infantry class, a bunch of new animations, new maps, improved historical accuracy and a big graphics and audio overhaul. There’s also new player skins, including this delightful one.

Here’s the website. I expect that’s where you’ll be able to grab the update on Saturday.