Mod News: Everything Changes

Note from Jim: If any art-folk want to have a go at another logo for this, as we did for Bucket, then please mail them to usual address. Cheers.

It's a referendum! Sorta! A few people suggested in last week's comments thread that it might be an idea to rejig the format of Mod News, and by jove, I think you might be right. So, this week, things are a little different. Hopefully more organised. Hopefully tastier. Mmm.

NEWS

Doom 3 mod Thievious, which has the most ludicrous of names, has perhaps the most interesting update this week, in the form of a video of magic powers. While I'm not sure about the third-person view, I do especially like the scary monsters. Keeping my eye on this. If I don't go blind from all the HDR lighting in the meantime.

There's also been some activity for Dniepr, whose name, I suspect, I will never have a hope of pronouncing correctly. It's a very pretty Left 4 Dead campaign set in Ukraine, which rhymes. Here's three new screenshots and a video, along with an announcement that release should be some time during the summer months.

And, sitting all alone, there's a single new screenshot for Opposing Force 2, the Half-Life 2 mod which aims to continue the story of that most excellent Half-Life expansion. Which, okay, is something I wouldn't usually consider news. But I absolutely adore this image. The sense of scale is wonderful. This is about as close to photography as game screenshots get.

RELEASES

Not a huge amount has been unleashed on the mod community in the past seven days, but there are a couple that might be worthy of your attention. There's an Avatar mod for Crysis, which looks absolutely gorgeous. I particularly love the inappropriateness of the music in the video beyond that link. I've not played this mod, but from what I understand, it doesn't so much change a great deal of mechanistic stuff, but does paint the world a glorious technicolour.

Perhaps more interestingly, the first open beta of Resistance & Liberation launched this week. It's a hyper-realistic Half-Life 2 multiplayer mod that seems to have been stirring up plenty of interest. Despite being known as Beta 1.0, its developers are keen to stress that this is more a pre-beta bug test, but already it's getting some great feedback from players.

UPDATES

The Turnbased Mod for Fallout Tactics hit Version 1.3 this week. It's a mod that attempts to balance multiplayer games in turn-based mode. Version 1.3 adds a few new maps, tweaks some old ones, and "slightly adjusts" most of the weapons.

There's also a Beta 5.0b release for Battle-Force, an upcoming single- and multiplayer Half-Life 2 mod. I have to say, the description on the ModDB page doesn't fill me with confidence, coming across more like the HL2 Dramatic Reading vid from last year than a decent synopsis. Still, might be worth checking out.

And there's a small update to the Fallout 3 Warhammer mod. The eventual aim of this thing appears to be to just transform Fallout 3 into Warhammer. So far, though, it seems to just provide some new factions. But that's cool because /look at these orcs/!

AND THE REST...

Wow. This new format's getting lengthy. I'll move quickly through these. Alec already gave his thoughts on HL2 single-player mod Zombie Zoo, but since this went up too late to make last week's column, here's my review. Meanwhile, Andrea's been playing Civ 4: Beyond the Sword mod Dune Wars, which he reckons is very good. Over at Wired, Mark Brown's written a nice feature on modding with quotes from ModDB's Scott Reismanis and Radiator developer Robert Yang. And talking of Yang, here's his obligatory blog link: this time, he's worried about exploding the Source Engine with the final part of Radiator.

Awesome. Done. More at UserCreated.