Posts tagged mod
Oct 8th
As Portal comes to its first anniversary today, the one of the first full mods for the game releases in its full glory. Portal: Prelude puts players into the pre-GlaDOS era of Aperture Science where real scientists did the dirty work, not that cake-promising machine. This story has great potential, so great in fact the Valve announced back in June 2008 that they were working on a prelude to Portal themselves, but the man behind the mod, Nicolas “NykO18″ Grevet, continued to create and now release his vision of the game.
Update: Download links are now available at Filefront, Fileshack, Mininova (torrent), and more.
FilePlanet managed to get 24-hour exclusivity rights from Grevet (a bad decision in my opinion, mods should be free to everyone at all times), and the mod is set for release to the general public tomorrow. You can watch the trailer below for the mod while the 775 MB gets onto your computer. If you are unsure of how to get a mod properly working on Steam, Planet Half-Life has a tutorial on installing mods.
Aug 17th
This week, nVidia released their first ever “Power Pack,” one of many planned to be released. This power pack comes with new drivers for the nVidia Geforce 8-series or newer, bringing nVidia PhysX to gamers around the world. Astute gamers will notice that Ageia is not developing PhysX anymore; this is because nVidia bought the company in February and began integrating the technology into their video cards. PhysX brings some really awesome features to gamers, such as:
- Explosions that cause dust and collateral debris
- Characters with complex, jointed geometries for more life-like motion and interaction
- Realistic weather effects, with forces such as tornadoes directly modifying the world
- Cloth that drapes and tears naturally
- Dense smoke & fog that billow around objects in motion
The Force Within Power Pack itself comes with a slew of games and programs to make use of the PhysX technology. From the Unreal Tournament 3 PhysX mod to Folding@Home, the pack will hopefully continue to be a showcase of ground-breaking games, mods, and programs. You can stay up-to-date on future nVidia news at The Pxl Lab.
Jul 19th
Half Life 2 has long been the modder’s choice game to work with. Adam Foster, creator of the very popular singleplayer mod Minerva: Metastatis, finally gets to live out his dream of working alongside the creators of Half Life 2 themselves. Valve hired Adam, to begin working in October, because of his work on Minerva. Here’s a bit of what Adam had to say about the whole thing:
What does this mean for MINERVA? Right now, I don’t know – I’ll initially be working on Valve’s own Episode Three, but after that, who knows? I seriously suspect this isn’t the end for this particular chain of experiments in designing single-player Half-Life 2 maps, all conducted for fun in my spare time.
If you are looking to get into Half Life 2 modding yourself, there are some great tutorials over at Moddb that teach beginners how to mod HL2.
May 31st
Tactical Assassin 2, as made by Simon Hason, had a huge following even before its release. Tactical Assassin 1 was an immensely popular flash game released in 2007, and has over 10.4 million plays on Crazy Monkey Games at the time of this writing. For those of you who don’t know, Tactical Assassin 1 and 2 are flash games, with the player being the sniper receiving assignments about which stick man to take out in each level. Tactical Assassin 2 builds on that by adding purchasable weapons and accessories, along with storyline for those who want something to do besides shoot stick figures.
For those of you who might have already played through Tactical Assassin 2, there are level-changing cheats that you can use to change to a specific level of the game. For those of you looking to keep the game on your computer, I took the liberty of getting a downloadable version of the game, which you can get below.
(If your computer can’t view .swf files, I would recommend getting Irfanview, an image/flash/music viewer.)
Apr 21st
Hey everyone, I just thought I would write up a quick post about a little Oblivion mod that I made called Vampirism Obliviated. Here is the description that is in the readme:
Vampirism Obliviated in Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion erases all of the vampire spells and effects within Oblivion that act upon your character, and works whether or not you are currently a Vampire. Specifically, this mod erases the spells that make you into a vampire, such as vampirism25-100, the attack and defense bonuses, and sunlight damage, so that you can still become a vampire again if you disable this mod.
Not that I should get much of a say about its awesomeness, but I do since I made it. Here’s the story about why I decided to make this in the first place. Grab a coke and some Cheeto’s, this is a classic…
…One day I was minding my own business pulling off the biggest theft in history by stealing an Elder Scroll from the Imperial Palace and thus become the Master (Gray Fox for Oblivion players) of the Thieves Guild. This had been going smoothly thus far: I had the already taken the Scroll from the blind monks in the library after sneaking in through the sewers at like 4 in the morning, and now was whooping and hollering on my way back through the sewers, ready to claim the title of Gray Fox. Low and behold, there are a few vampires hiding out in the sewers that had definitely not been there the first time. I kill them with ease, still on my adrenaline rush, and don’t notice the text in the upper-left hand part of my screen saying I had contracted the vampire virus known as “porphyric hemophilia.” A couple days later, a little note pops up on screen after I had finished with a little catnap saying I was now a vampire. Well, I don’t care so much about feeding on people after hours just to be normal, so I tried to take a Vampirism Cure Potion, but lo and behold, I’m still a freaking vampire! I then scower the known (and unknown probably) internets in order to find another solution. There is but one more I can find, which is by removing the vampire spells via the console. I try this, and guess what, it doesn’t work either. It was here that I began the quest to rid Tamriel (the ingame world) of this foul and unsightly life alteration. All the spells that effect you, such as sun damage and night vision, have been removed on only the players’ character, and the other NPC freaks can still use it. I have been playing in the world without vampirism now for weeks, and I’m happier, and I hope that you are touched by my inspiring classic. I’ll likely be selling it in stores soon.
Oh yeah, here’s a download button to the royal Download.com website:
