You know, lately I've been feeling a little bit nostalgic for one thing in particular: game mods. It just seems to me that, over the years, the art of mod-making has diminished to the point of becoming extinct. This sounds silly though, doesn't it? Everyone and their dog is making user-friendly editors so that players can generate their own content and put it on the webs for sharing. Little Big Planet, both titles, rely specifically on that. Did you know that Infamous 2, a PS3 exclusive, single-player, sandbox game is coming out with a mission editor? Users will be able to create missions, place them on the sandbox map, add triggers to them and share them online. So what the fuck am I rambling about?
Well, even though the 'idea' hasn't died and as readily available and user-friendly as current editors may be, there just isn't the same kind of extensive and rich content as there used to be out there. I remember a time when mods were more than just maps and... maps and... well, everything that Activision is charging 20 extra bucks every other month for anyway. I remember a time when mods were the quintessential online shooter. When multiplayer games weren't dominated by corporate control and modders spiced up the shooter formula with each new mod. When Counter-Strike was played in internet cafés across the world. When new missions were made for Morrowind by the boatload. When mods were entirely new single-player campaigns made from scratch, either entirely original or remakes of older favorite titles. I remember a time when owning a game on the PC meant entire years of new and exciting content that would return you your money's worth thousand-fold.
I remember a time when I loved PC gaming and PC gaming loved me back.
Pretentious prologue aside, I came in mid-way through the days of the modification glory. It was way past its infancy, but a bit before it entered its twilight days. By the time I got wind of the entire concept, PC newbie that I was at the time, a crapload of mods were already out. I can't claim I lived the days of anticipating the great ones, but I did get in soon enough to know I should look forward to some of them.
The thing is, gaming is doing better these days and not just from a financial standpoint. PC gaming not so much, with everything being cross-platform and developed to fit the consoles, but gaming in general is. I bad-mouth it a lot, but my main problem is that the industry is becoming bloated and far too many insubstantial, similar titles come out. Still a majority of them are actually good games that a few years ago would be critically acclaimed for all they offer. However, they lack soul.
Older games of the late '90s-early '00s had soul. More than that, they gave their users the chance to expose theirs as well. It was creative spark that went behind the original titles, which the users saw and embraced and made sure it didn't die off for years to follow, all while exercising their own creativity and even making careers out of it.
Let's take Counter-Strike for example. That basic, for some even "dated" online shooter that Valve charges you 8 buck for on Steam (not that they shouldn't, mind you). We all know it used to be all the rage and that it pretty much made online gaming widespread and even somewhat more mainstream. Do you know how it started? A Vietnamese student, a modeller for Quake, sat down and made this little team-based game where one team would rescue hostages and the other one would try to stop them. He named it "Counter-Strike". It was released with something like 4 maps and 9 weapons and originally only featured the so-called 'cs' mode. Updates came, more things were added, bugs were ironed out. New modes were added, like bomb defusal and even the less-popular "VIP" mode, which is absent from the current commercial versions of the game. De_Dust, arguably one of the most-played maps of any online shooter, ever, was created by a nobody. A mapper. A modder. The mod was originally free and it remained so until the release of Counter-Strike: Source. People could download it and its updates and play, so long as they owned Half-Life.
Of course, the creator was eventually hired by Valve and they started working on its later versions as well, but not before the mod proved wildly popular. The most-played online shooter in existence was made by college kids. They poured their creativity into it, extended Half-Life's life-cycle by several years and got themselves a job at a respected developer.
The funny thing is that once Valve got complete creative control over the game, they cocked it up; and this is Valve we're talking about, one of the last few truly talented studios out there. Its final and current update, 1.6 amounted to a 650MB file-size, which supposedly overhauled the graphics (it really didn't) and added new gameplay features, like a stupid, game-breaking shield that was fortunately taken out later. I remember, a magazine actually had to distribute the update on a CD over here; remember, folks, that was 2003, 56K dial-up was still largely used.
Then CS:S came along and it was basically 1.6 ported over to the Source engine. Call me a purist all you like, but 1.5 remains my favorite version of Counter-Strike and I'm not alone in this. People have actually gone to lengths to establish their own network, dubbed WON2 (after Valve's original WON, which was taken offline when Steam came on), just to replay 1.5-- and the funny thing is that there are many servers with several players who went for it. I'm not entirely sure what it is that bothers me with 1.6. When it was first released, I knew; the shield was stupid, the graphics looked muddy and murky and there was something off with the weapons... I could never quite put my finger in it. In addition, several great maps were taken off the standard map list distributed with the game (copyright issues, maybe, I honestly don't know), so I never warmed up to it.
CS: Source is easier to decipher. I did play a lot of that for a time, but it had been dumbed down a bit and I think that's what bothers me. Counter-Strike has always been a bit on the tactical side, so dying is easy and confrontation should be avoided if possible. But for some reason killing is also extremely easy on CS:S. Headshots are far easier to get and the drawbacks of being wounded have been lessened, if not completely removed. Granted, it does make it more accessible, but CS seemed to have been balanced from the start, like there was a reason it was the way it was. It's easier to pick up CSS and play, but you can never really become that good at it. With 1.5 it was different. You would get your ass kicked a lot at first, but after a few games you could progressively improve until you got to the point that you had to think through your strategies and moves if you wanted to survive. If you have 1.5 and WON2, just play a round of CS:S and then one of 1.5 and you'll see what I mean.
Let's take another popular game from the same company. Team Fortress 2, popular among gamers in both LiVE and Steam, with a myriad of constant updates that everyone rushes to snatch the moment they appear. It's a good game, no doubt; explosive action, balanced gameplay, tight controls and great visuals. Do you know the history of TF2 though? TF2 is the Source remake of "Team Fortress Classic" or "Team Fortress 1.5". Much like the original CS, TFC was created and released as a mod for Half-Life by a couple of modders, before they were hired by Valve and they started distributing the mod with the Half-Life updates (I think it was added in 1.0.0.6, but don't quote me on that).
What you may not know is that TFC was the logical update to the original Team Fortress. The original Team Fortress was one of the most popular multiplayer mods for the original Quake! It pretty much made the idea of the class-based, Capture-The-Flag gameplay widespread, if it didn't invent it altogether. Just wrap your head around this, folks; one of the most popular online action games traces its roots directly to a mod for Quake 1 in 1996, fifteen years ago! That's a big deal!
Day of Defeat also has a similar origin, if you're wondering.
Of course those are the big success stories, but they are not all that defined modding back then. How about the other online shooters that added much-needed variety to the scene? Take Science & Industry. It went as far as being adjusted to work in Steam, but it's pretty much dead now. Still, at the time it was a very fun, team and objective-based shooter, where two teams of scientists used insane weaponry to kill each other and secure their own research each.
How about Existence? It never caught on, unfortunately, but it was a Matrix-themed mod released at the perfect time, when the Matrix trick-pony was still riding high and before anyone bothered making a proper, licensed Matrix game. Two teams, Agents and Rebels, trying to complete their objectives with a variety of weapons and bullet-time tricks.
You wanted a super-hero mod? Earth's Defense Force. Superman, Batman, Goku and several others. Simple deathmatch with super-powers. The maps kind of sucked and not all of them complimented the theme, but it was played and it was fun.
Ever heard of Natural Selection? The mod is still played on Steam and it goes back to the days of WON. Completely redone textures and models, on a team-based online shooter. The twist? While most of the players are duking it out, each team's leader takes the role of the Battlefield Commander and relays orders to the other players, while he plays the game from an RTS perspective.
Bored of aliens and BFGs? Frontline Force, a team/class-based military shooter that utilized the 'checkpoint control' gameplay that you see everywhere these days. Great game, well-designed, well-balanced, insanely fun.
How about Co-Op? Sven Co-Op, still widely played, pits you and up to 32 players against the aliens of Xen in a variety of environments, from military bases to Super Mario Bros levels. Best part? It had its own, in-built music player.
You don't want to shoot anything? How about some football? International Online Soccer, a first-person-perspective football game where you got to make your player and have matches against other players online.
Or maybe you're more of a WRC guy. Well, there was always HL Rally, which did the impossible by making a functional racing game on an engine that doesn't support vehicle driving.
Those are only the multiplayer ones. How about single-player? Many were released back then, some based on Half-Life's story, some entirely unrelated. Poke646 was a four-hour-long campaign with redone skins and weapons that put you in the shoes of a scientist trying to escape a city crawling with Xen creatures, while closing the portal to the alien world. The mod was short, but benefitted from brilliant map design, which in some cases even surpassed Valve's own work. The sequel maintained a great sense of level design and even though noticeably shorter, it was still fun as hell, certainly surpassing a lot of the "competent" first-person-shooters of today.
A much longer campaign, exceeding in length even Valve's own expansions (Opposing Force and Blue Shift) was Todesangst 2. Both it and Poke646 were nominated as the best single-player mods of 200x (I don't recall the year). Todesangst 2, which is German for "fear of death" is the sequel to what started off as a fun, after-school project; an hour-long mission that mostly reused the visuals of the original Half-Life and put you back in the Hazard suit of Dr. Freeman as you attempt to stop the menacing Dr. Jack Newell, an in-joke referencing Valve's president Gabe Newell. Todesangst 2 was a proper campaign, with new visuals, good level design, fun story and great length. It's more Half-Life inside Half-Life.
How about the less refined ones? Azure Sheep, an ugly mod reusing HL's textures rather carelessly still squeezed out a very long, very enjoyable campaign about Barney Calhoun, before Blue Shift was released. And then, POV, from the same mod team put you in the shackles of one of the alien slaves (those are the monsters that shoot the green lightning) and was also a full campaign.
These were the best, but there were a lot more single-player mods out there; like Deliverance, which ditched the traditional corridor-shooting of HL for a more balls-to-the-walls, explosive approach. Or Tactical Espionage Action, which as expected, made the gameplay stealthy and tactical in the vein of Metal Gear Solid. In addition, dozens of mods that ranged from other FPS games to adventure-style gameplay, to horror, to mystery novel-based games.
I'm mostly referencing Half-Life mods, because in my day those were the ones I played the most. But most PC games had some sort of modding community. In the years following Thief 2, when Looking Glass Studios closed down and the future of the series was uncertain, a team of modders gathered and made a standalone, full campaign on the Dark Engine. Quake 2, which used the same engine as HL (the GoldSource engine was developed by "id", then purchased by Valve for Half-Life) has a boatload of mods available, a great deal of which are mutliplayer and still played to this day. And since I have a horse in this race, remember TFQ? Transformers Quake, where modders designed five TF-related maps, a few models, added a transforming function and even allowed that to be passed on to the single-player, giving it a new dynamic as a lot of shortcuts were thus enabled.
We already covered that Team Fortress spawned on Quake 1, but it was far from the only mod. Unreal Tournament, a widely successful online shooter also had its share of memorable mods, one of them in particular, called Tactical Ops, even giving Counter-Strike a run for its money for a few gamers. Max Payne not only has some great mods attached to it, but it's also the first platform for a Matrix game in the history of the medium, before "Enter The Matrix" and " Path of Neo". Someone made a Kung-Fu mod and then several people took that and made their own Matrix mods, recreating scenes from the movie and while not all of them were great, they were all fun and unique in their own way. Max Payne 2 didn't starve for mods either.
How about the cases where modders took it upon themselves to support otherwise dead games? The modding community of Falcon 4.0 (before it was re-released in 2008) applied system and graphical updates constantly, making the game playable and easy on the eyes on newer machines. The community for the "Vampire: The Masquerade" games created unofficial patches that corrected most of the problems that Troika never had the chance to fix for both Redemption and Bloodlines.
And all of the above is without even counting the simpler mods that have existed for a couple of decades now, with models and skins and maps; things that if, say, Activision released a map editor, they couldn't really charge you extra for-- and they still get away with it, even though it's practice that dates decades back and they only got wind of it a few years ago.
The twilight of the modding era came some time after 2005. It was unfortunate, because games like Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 continued the practice of allowing their games to be flexible for modding. Some great mods have come out for the Source Engine and even for newer games; a scroll through the tools list in Steam will confirm as much. But quick, tell me how many HL2 mods you remember, as opposed to HL1 mods? I mean, except Gary's Mod. Even I'm hard-pressed to remember many and I'm actually following the modding community!
It's not even a matter of quality. Quality mods still exist out there. A complete graphical update for HL2, called "The Cinematic Mod" gives the game a whole new look. Fortress Forever is a faithful recreation of TFC for the Source engine that veterans of TFC actually favor over Valve's own TF2. And so on and so forth.
The problem isn't quality, it's quantity. Too little for mods, too much for commercial games. With so many games coming out at any given time of the year, what gamer will just hold on to one title for long enough, on the PC no less, to allow a modding community to develop?
I know, I know. I'm a pretentious, over-dramatic douchebag. But I can't, in all good conscience say that this is something I like. The idea that even gaming, in all its popularity and success, is turning into corporate-control routine, while once it was inspiring to its audience... it's just sad. Fuck, Ebert was right; games cannot be art. Art needs to be inspiring. Find me one person who played Modern Warfare 2 or Bad Company 2 and tell me they were inspired to push their creativity to its limits and I'll blow a goat and then upload it in YouTube for your eyes only. The most we get in terms of creative inspiration these days is role-playing in MMORPG and if that isn't enough proof that something's wrong, we may as well start performing lobotomies on each other.
Honestly folks, next time you consider buying a new game you're not really set on, consider mods, even the ones I mentioned. They are fun, they're solid and the fact alone that they are made by people like you and me gives them a different kind of heart; a genuine appeal, a love for the medium that while not entirely absent from the industry these days, it's just hard to see it in the endless sequels and the over-pricing.
And because it has to be said, rest in peace my little "Curse of the Snakes". I wish I was a bit more mature when I started you.
----------------------------------------------------------
Mod resources sites:
Mod Database: http://www.moddb.com
Planet Half-Life: http://planethalflife.gamespy.com (use the link list on the left for other Planet- sites).
Well, even though the 'idea' hasn't died and as readily available and user-friendly as current editors may be, there just isn't the same kind of extensive and rich content as there used to be out there. I remember a time when mods were more than just maps and... maps and... well, everything that Activision is charging 20 extra bucks every other month for anyway. I remember a time when mods were the quintessential online shooter. When multiplayer games weren't dominated by corporate control and modders spiced up the shooter formula with each new mod. When Counter-Strike was played in internet cafés across the world. When new missions were made for Morrowind by the boatload. When mods were entirely new single-player campaigns made from scratch, either entirely original or remakes of older favorite titles. I remember a time when owning a game on the PC meant entire years of new and exciting content that would return you your money's worth thousand-fold.
I remember a time when I loved PC gaming and PC gaming loved me back.
Pretentious prologue aside, I came in mid-way through the days of the modification glory. It was way past its infancy, but a bit before it entered its twilight days. By the time I got wind of the entire concept, PC newbie that I was at the time, a crapload of mods were already out. I can't claim I lived the days of anticipating the great ones, but I did get in soon enough to know I should look forward to some of them.
The thing is, gaming is doing better these days and not just from a financial standpoint. PC gaming not so much, with everything being cross-platform and developed to fit the consoles, but gaming in general is. I bad-mouth it a lot, but my main problem is that the industry is becoming bloated and far too many insubstantial, similar titles come out. Still a majority of them are actually good games that a few years ago would be critically acclaimed for all they offer. However, they lack soul.
Older games of the late '90s-early '00s had soul. More than that, they gave their users the chance to expose theirs as well. It was creative spark that went behind the original titles, which the users saw and embraced and made sure it didn't die off for years to follow, all while exercising their own creativity and even making careers out of it.
Let's take Counter-Strike for example. That basic, for some even "dated" online shooter that Valve charges you 8 buck for on Steam (not that they shouldn't, mind you). We all know it used to be all the rage and that it pretty much made online gaming widespread and even somewhat more mainstream. Do you know how it started? A Vietnamese student, a modeller for Quake, sat down and made this little team-based game where one team would rescue hostages and the other one would try to stop them. He named it "Counter-Strike". It was released with something like 4 maps and 9 weapons and originally only featured the so-called 'cs' mode. Updates came, more things were added, bugs were ironed out. New modes were added, like bomb defusal and even the less-popular "VIP" mode, which is absent from the current commercial versions of the game. De_Dust, arguably one of the most-played maps of any online shooter, ever, was created by a nobody. A mapper. A modder. The mod was originally free and it remained so until the release of Counter-Strike: Source. People could download it and its updates and play, so long as they owned Half-Life.
Of course, the creator was eventually hired by Valve and they started working on its later versions as well, but not before the mod proved wildly popular. The most-played online shooter in existence was made by college kids. They poured their creativity into it, extended Half-Life's life-cycle by several years and got themselves a job at a respected developer.
The funny thing is that once Valve got complete creative control over the game, they cocked it up; and this is Valve we're talking about, one of the last few truly talented studios out there. Its final and current update, 1.6 amounted to a 650MB file-size, which supposedly overhauled the graphics (it really didn't) and added new gameplay features, like a stupid, game-breaking shield that was fortunately taken out later. I remember, a magazine actually had to distribute the update on a CD over here; remember, folks, that was 2003, 56K dial-up was still largely used.
Then CS:S came along and it was basically 1.6 ported over to the Source engine. Call me a purist all you like, but 1.5 remains my favorite version of Counter-Strike and I'm not alone in this. People have actually gone to lengths to establish their own network, dubbed WON2 (after Valve's original WON, which was taken offline when Steam came on), just to replay 1.5-- and the funny thing is that there are many servers with several players who went for it. I'm not entirely sure what it is that bothers me with 1.6. When it was first released, I knew; the shield was stupid, the graphics looked muddy and murky and there was something off with the weapons... I could never quite put my finger in it. In addition, several great maps were taken off the standard map list distributed with the game (copyright issues, maybe, I honestly don't know), so I never warmed up to it.
CS: Source is easier to decipher. I did play a lot of that for a time, but it had been dumbed down a bit and I think that's what bothers me. Counter-Strike has always been a bit on the tactical side, so dying is easy and confrontation should be avoided if possible. But for some reason killing is also extremely easy on CS:S. Headshots are far easier to get and the drawbacks of being wounded have been lessened, if not completely removed. Granted, it does make it more accessible, but CS seemed to have been balanced from the start, like there was a reason it was the way it was. It's easier to pick up CSS and play, but you can never really become that good at it. With 1.5 it was different. You would get your ass kicked a lot at first, but after a few games you could progressively improve until you got to the point that you had to think through your strategies and moves if you wanted to survive. If you have 1.5 and WON2, just play a round of CS:S and then one of 1.5 and you'll see what I mean.
Let's take another popular game from the same company. Team Fortress 2, popular among gamers in both LiVE and Steam, with a myriad of constant updates that everyone rushes to snatch the moment they appear. It's a good game, no doubt; explosive action, balanced gameplay, tight controls and great visuals. Do you know the history of TF2 though? TF2 is the Source remake of "Team Fortress Classic" or "Team Fortress 1.5". Much like the original CS, TFC was created and released as a mod for Half-Life by a couple of modders, before they were hired by Valve and they started distributing the mod with the Half-Life updates (I think it was added in 1.0.0.6, but don't quote me on that).
What you may not know is that TFC was the logical update to the original Team Fortress. The original Team Fortress was one of the most popular multiplayer mods for the original Quake! It pretty much made the idea of the class-based, Capture-The-Flag gameplay widespread, if it didn't invent it altogether. Just wrap your head around this, folks; one of the most popular online action games traces its roots directly to a mod for Quake 1 in 1996, fifteen years ago! That's a big deal!
Day of Defeat also has a similar origin, if you're wondering.
Of course those are the big success stories, but they are not all that defined modding back then. How about the other online shooters that added much-needed variety to the scene? Take Science & Industry. It went as far as being adjusted to work in Steam, but it's pretty much dead now. Still, at the time it was a very fun, team and objective-based shooter, where two teams of scientists used insane weaponry to kill each other and secure their own research each.
How about Existence? It never caught on, unfortunately, but it was a Matrix-themed mod released at the perfect time, when the Matrix trick-pony was still riding high and before anyone bothered making a proper, licensed Matrix game. Two teams, Agents and Rebels, trying to complete their objectives with a variety of weapons and bullet-time tricks.
You wanted a super-hero mod? Earth's Defense Force. Superman, Batman, Goku and several others. Simple deathmatch with super-powers. The maps kind of sucked and not all of them complimented the theme, but it was played and it was fun.
Ever heard of Natural Selection? The mod is still played on Steam and it goes back to the days of WON. Completely redone textures and models, on a team-based online shooter. The twist? While most of the players are duking it out, each team's leader takes the role of the Battlefield Commander and relays orders to the other players, while he plays the game from an RTS perspective.
Bored of aliens and BFGs? Frontline Force, a team/class-based military shooter that utilized the 'checkpoint control' gameplay that you see everywhere these days. Great game, well-designed, well-balanced, insanely fun.
How about Co-Op? Sven Co-Op, still widely played, pits you and up to 32 players against the aliens of Xen in a variety of environments, from military bases to Super Mario Bros levels. Best part? It had its own, in-built music player.
You don't want to shoot anything? How about some football? International Online Soccer, a first-person-perspective football game where you got to make your player and have matches against other players online.
Or maybe you're more of a WRC guy. Well, there was always HL Rally, which did the impossible by making a functional racing game on an engine that doesn't support vehicle driving.
Those are only the multiplayer ones. How about single-player? Many were released back then, some based on Half-Life's story, some entirely unrelated. Poke646 was a four-hour-long campaign with redone skins and weapons that put you in the shoes of a scientist trying to escape a city crawling with Xen creatures, while closing the portal to the alien world. The mod was short, but benefitted from brilliant map design, which in some cases even surpassed Valve's own work. The sequel maintained a great sense of level design and even though noticeably shorter, it was still fun as hell, certainly surpassing a lot of the "competent" first-person-shooters of today.
A much longer campaign, exceeding in length even Valve's own expansions (Opposing Force and Blue Shift) was Todesangst 2. Both it and Poke646 were nominated as the best single-player mods of 200x (I don't recall the year). Todesangst 2, which is German for "fear of death" is the sequel to what started off as a fun, after-school project; an hour-long mission that mostly reused the visuals of the original Half-Life and put you back in the Hazard suit of Dr. Freeman as you attempt to stop the menacing Dr. Jack Newell, an in-joke referencing Valve's president Gabe Newell. Todesangst 2 was a proper campaign, with new visuals, good level design, fun story and great length. It's more Half-Life inside Half-Life.
How about the less refined ones? Azure Sheep, an ugly mod reusing HL's textures rather carelessly still squeezed out a very long, very enjoyable campaign about Barney Calhoun, before Blue Shift was released. And then, POV, from the same mod team put you in the shackles of one of the alien slaves (those are the monsters that shoot the green lightning) and was also a full campaign.
These were the best, but there were a lot more single-player mods out there; like Deliverance, which ditched the traditional corridor-shooting of HL for a more balls-to-the-walls, explosive approach. Or Tactical Espionage Action, which as expected, made the gameplay stealthy and tactical in the vein of Metal Gear Solid. In addition, dozens of mods that ranged from other FPS games to adventure-style gameplay, to horror, to mystery novel-based games.
I'm mostly referencing Half-Life mods, because in my day those were the ones I played the most. But most PC games had some sort of modding community. In the years following Thief 2, when Looking Glass Studios closed down and the future of the series was uncertain, a team of modders gathered and made a standalone, full campaign on the Dark Engine. Quake 2, which used the same engine as HL (the GoldSource engine was developed by "id", then purchased by Valve for Half-Life) has a boatload of mods available, a great deal of which are mutliplayer and still played to this day. And since I have a horse in this race, remember TFQ? Transformers Quake, where modders designed five TF-related maps, a few models, added a transforming function and even allowed that to be passed on to the single-player, giving it a new dynamic as a lot of shortcuts were thus enabled.
We already covered that Team Fortress spawned on Quake 1, but it was far from the only mod. Unreal Tournament, a widely successful online shooter also had its share of memorable mods, one of them in particular, called Tactical Ops, even giving Counter-Strike a run for its money for a few gamers. Max Payne not only has some great mods attached to it, but it's also the first platform for a Matrix game in the history of the medium, before "Enter The Matrix" and " Path of Neo". Someone made a Kung-Fu mod and then several people took that and made their own Matrix mods, recreating scenes from the movie and while not all of them were great, they were all fun and unique in their own way. Max Payne 2 didn't starve for mods either.
How about the cases where modders took it upon themselves to support otherwise dead games? The modding community of Falcon 4.0 (before it was re-released in 2008) applied system and graphical updates constantly, making the game playable and easy on the eyes on newer machines. The community for the "Vampire: The Masquerade" games created unofficial patches that corrected most of the problems that Troika never had the chance to fix for both Redemption and Bloodlines.
And all of the above is without even counting the simpler mods that have existed for a couple of decades now, with models and skins and maps; things that if, say, Activision released a map editor, they couldn't really charge you extra for-- and they still get away with it, even though it's practice that dates decades back and they only got wind of it a few years ago.
The twilight of the modding era came some time after 2005. It was unfortunate, because games like Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 continued the practice of allowing their games to be flexible for modding. Some great mods have come out for the Source Engine and even for newer games; a scroll through the tools list in Steam will confirm as much. But quick, tell me how many HL2 mods you remember, as opposed to HL1 mods? I mean, except Gary's Mod. Even I'm hard-pressed to remember many and I'm actually following the modding community!
It's not even a matter of quality. Quality mods still exist out there. A complete graphical update for HL2, called "The Cinematic Mod" gives the game a whole new look. Fortress Forever is a faithful recreation of TFC for the Source engine that veterans of TFC actually favor over Valve's own TF2. And so on and so forth.
The problem isn't quality, it's quantity. Too little for mods, too much for commercial games. With so many games coming out at any given time of the year, what gamer will just hold on to one title for long enough, on the PC no less, to allow a modding community to develop?
I know, I know. I'm a pretentious, over-dramatic douchebag. But I can't, in all good conscience say that this is something I like. The idea that even gaming, in all its popularity and success, is turning into corporate-control routine, while once it was inspiring to its audience... it's just sad. Fuck, Ebert was right; games cannot be art. Art needs to be inspiring. Find me one person who played Modern Warfare 2 or Bad Company 2 and tell me they were inspired to push their creativity to its limits and I'll blow a goat and then upload it in YouTube for your eyes only. The most we get in terms of creative inspiration these days is role-playing in MMORPG and if that isn't enough proof that something's wrong, we may as well start performing lobotomies on each other.
Honestly folks, next time you consider buying a new game you're not really set on, consider mods, even the ones I mentioned. They are fun, they're solid and the fact alone that they are made by people like you and me gives them a different kind of heart; a genuine appeal, a love for the medium that while not entirely absent from the industry these days, it's just hard to see it in the endless sequels and the over-pricing.
And because it has to be said, rest in peace my little "Curse of the Snakes". I wish I was a bit more mature when I started you.
----------------------------------------------------------
Mod resources sites:
Mod Database: http://www.moddb.com
Planet Half-Life: http://planethalflife.gamespy.com (use the link list on the left for other Planet- sites).
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