MOD: the original Unreal

I'll spend a lot of time with this one, since I consider the original Unreal to be my largest step into modding. I fell in love with the game when it came out. It provided large expansive areas to explore, atmospheric graphics, and colored lighting. Colored lighting! Be still my heart. Nowadays of course it looks a little crude. It's amazing how fast game and graphic technology advances. As I write this I'm fiddling with the Unreal3 engine and it's a different animal entirely. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Once I got into editing, I was pretty entrenched in the Unreal community. I ran a skinning site in PlanetUnreal called House of Style (I took it over from the original founder if I recall... I'm sure I would've named it something different). I made several maps, some even with, you guessed it... colored lighting. This also gave me a chance to experiment with a lot of different concepts. I'll run down some of the maps I've made and add blurbs for each one. I'll add a screenshot if I have any handy plus any reviews I might have saved. It's funny looking back at some of these now... so basic!

Faithless isn't a great one to list first since it was never intended as a public map; it was instead a portfolio piece for a company that I applied to (because of this it looked like I would've been hired at Looking Glass but then they closed their doors! Ugh...) This map was an experiment for triggered sequences. They wanted me to make a few locations and give a few scripted sequences just to show I could do the basics. The map itself is a stone chapel, with passages to a bedroom and some secret caverns beyond. Funny how much more complex everything is nowadays. This never got reviewed since I never released it publically.

DM-Chessboard (and DOM-Chessboard) is the simplest of the levels I've made, being a Morbias-style arena. It's multi-level, a single large room with a couple wings and a large chessboard in the center, complete with moving pieces and trap doors. The idea was to make a simple, elegant environment, and the addition of a classical soundtrack helped this immensely.

A review from Atticbat (Frags in the Attic:) Though far from mammoth in size, Chessboard makes up for it in quality. Based around the huge chessboard namesake, the map is basically an arena for the eight-ball of deathmatch domination. While attempting to avoid being crushed by the larger than normal chess pieces as they 'move' along their paths as if some larger unseen beings were in the middle of a weekend game, one must also beware the ample shaodws above and surrounding the board. A second level encircles the chessboard, along with multiple lifts giving access. Weapons are no problem to find, hiding places are. Again, I played with six bots, and they thrashed me!! All the time, I felt as if I had played this map before, possibly on-line, has it been out for that long? Regardless, I found myself returning, repeatedly, and that's what it is all about! Check this map out! Get it? 'Check'?? Nevermind, just play the map!!!Graphics- 8.5, Variety-8.0, Gameplay- 8.0, Freshness- 7.0

DM-Ether was another early level of mine, an experiment in open space and bizarre atmosphere. A real sniper-heavy map. This kind of level wouldn't go over well nowadays- well I suppose it could but it would have to be a lot fancier visually and vertex counts would have to be put in check. The map used a silly amount of what these days are called "emitters"... effects that are rendered on the fly (such as lightning, smoke, fire, etc.) It was a new technology then! This was also probably the first map I put easter eggs in. If you fell off any of the platforms anywhere, instead of dying you would get teleported to a different part of the map. But if you did it in a few certain places, you'd end up in secret areas (one of them is the picture I chose to the left). Various reviews...

Frags in the attic: Gooooo, NarkyBark!! The play area is limited to levels of ramps (careful around the edges, there, boyeee!!) giving multiple angles of fire. The lightning backgrounds are awesome, I kept waiting for a strike on one of the ramps, that would have been rad! The ramps lead to a few different areas. There are 'rooms', with some interesting areas to play around in, and secrets... shhhh! ;) My bots played reaaly well, keeping me hopping, but the true gameplay here is with other humans, and it rocks!! Definately a desirable addition to the 'maps' folder, fraggers!!Graphics- 8.0, Variety-7.0, Gameplay- 8.0, Freshness- 7.0

Nali City: NarkyBark is the curator of The House of Style here on Planet Unreal but who knew he could make maps? DmEther is definitely original - it's a system of platforms and catwalks floating over a swirling ether storm. Lightning flashes in the distance make this map all about atmospshere. But does it make a good Deathmatch? Hell yes! Even with the huge open area frame rates are still good. It's got some of the best sniping you'll see anywhere. Best of all, if you've got 2 health and someone's chasing you then just leap into the ether. You'll get teleported back to a different location on the platforms. Score 8 out of 10

DM-TheMatrix.... ok, so just like everyone else, when this movie came out I was crazy about it. (Still am, actually. But those sequels...) I wanted to try to replicate some of the physical effects in the movie- want to walk on walls? No problem. Want to stop those rockets that were fired at you? Make 'em stop in mid-air. Want to be totally confused? No problem! Seriously though, you can do all of the above. Prepare to be confused! You can walk on almost any wall or ceiling- there IS no right side up. And with the special powerup (it appears as boots) you can stop projectiles fired at you in their tracks.

Plus a few other little items that you'll remember. It'll take some getting used to- the view shifting due to the player orientation as he jumps around on the walls is a little disorientating at first, but you learn how to get around quickly.

The Darkside Collection- a series of maps with minimal lighting. Lighting comes from only natural sources such as lava, and the skies are twilight. Provides for lots of hiding and stealth and makes for a different style of deathmatch. I believe there were a dozen or so maps in the pack.

There are a couple more maps to be had, but that brings us to Unreal Tournament...

MOD: Games of the Past

This isn't going to be a long post, but I'm putting this here as an amusement to myself and perhaps anyone else who's been modding a long time.

Remember programming in basic? LOGO? TURTLE? (god help us, turtle.) I never claimed to be a programmer, but I tend to tinker. I can't recall making anything terribly playable back then besides some really basic text adventure. Saving your work to cassette tape, knowing full well you'll never be able to retrieve it again... good times. Five inch disks were better, at least until you get the Disk Drive Chatter of Denial.

When did "modding" officially start, anyway? I suppose you could always hack your favorite game to your liking. There were programs like Game Genie that would let you change values in games. But when could you create content to share with other people? I'm not sure of the answer. I remember around the C64 era a lot of games came out with editors, so you could build your maps for Risk or whatever. I was fascinated with Adventure Construction Set, which essentially let you build a tile-style kind of RPG, much in the style of the first Ultimas. (I'd like to add that I'm now fond of the phrase "tile-style". I can see it appearing in Necro's next album.) The internet was still on the horizon at this point, so mass sharing of files was difficult.

Then around 1990 the internet started to bust out of it's crib. MUDs... oh God, MUDs. I spent way too much college time playing and creating MUDs, not to mention Nethack. Once our campus put nethack on the local vax network (was it vax? I'm having a block) many more hours were flushed away. I never did beat that damn game but I did have the highest score. Knowing nethack I probably died cutting my thumb on a tin can and getting tetanus.



Then Doom hit. I realize Wolfenstein came first but I never did play that one. Marathon might have as well, again my timeline is fuzzy. But I did have Doom, and it was a thing of beauty. I remember getting a WAD editor from somewhere and thus the level editing started. What a pain it was to be able to get hallways to overlap each other in the Z-axis. I did publically release a level pack for Doom, but I couldn't even tell you much about it at this point.

Since then, games and their editors have become more complex, at least depending on the game. 2D games are still fairly easy to use. Let's see... exactly a decade ago I was making Starcraft levels. The Selear campaign, if I recall. Strange how you don't realize how old some games are until you think about it... and then you don't want to, because that makes you realize how old.... gulp.

Makes you feel old...

I'm not a fossil quite yet, but my consciousness in this life almost coincides with the birth of electronic gaming. I remember Pong. I remember those games at parks with the light rifles. The introduction of Boot Hill, Space Invaders, Star Castle, Battlezone. The shift from vector, to bitmap, to even laserdisc graphics in arcade games. The rise of electronic toys such as Merlin, Simon, and those awful black and white quartz games. The growing of computers, the Sinclair, the TRS80, The C64. The introduction of multigame consoles, the Atari2600, Intellivision and Colecovision. 256 colors to millions of colors. Raytracing. Rendering. Colored lighting. I've followed it all from the start.

What's to come? Some predicted holograms, others virtual reality. Some predicted large online worlds where people could congregate and explore, and they'd have been right. It's to be expected there will always be better graphics and better physics around the corner. Currently video games are more accessible than ever before.

This is both good and bad. It's great because you can get all the gaming goodness you want at home. It's bad because it signalled the death knell of the arcade, which could be social hangouts just as much as places to play games. I don't know if they can be revived in America- and that's a little sad.

Once Windows 95 set in, I was essentially a PC gamer. I seemed to get one console per generation; a Sega Genesis, a Nintendo64, a Playstation2. I never got many games for them though. I always preferred PC gaming.

Why? Likely because of the style of games I like- RPGs, FPSs, MMORPGs. These were all much better suited for a PC, with mouse, keyboard, and online connection. I also liked to create mods for games, and you can't do that anywhere else. If you take that out of the equation however, consoles may finally rule the roost. I know someone with a PS3, and it eliminates a lot of the advantages that a PC has. Online connectivity? Yup. Can use a keyboard? Yup. Latest graphics and sound, without need to mix and match components? Yup.

Consoles are output only however, you can't create on them, and that is why I will continue to use a PC. With the rate things are going, who knows how long that will last though...

You must gather your party before venturing forth.

Hello, world!

When deciding to make a blog page, many ideas swirl in your head. Topics to discuss, how to make a logical presentation, and in my case how to present my gaming files- or even which ones to present at all. Then you sit down with a blank canvas in front of you. What to do first? Although not highly functional, I always feel better with an introduction. Foundation, and then the bricks.

This blog comes out of some necessity. I keep, or kept, an online account of gaming mods that I create, and the space I was using has closed down. (Not like you'd ever read this Erik, but thanks for the many years of use!) It occurred to me that I didn't really need to keep so many mods online anymore, since games become obsolete in the manner of a few years. The current ones are usually posted on mod sites anyway, so by creating a blog I can present them formally and also speak about other gaming-related topics that interest me, such as card games, poker, etc. I have other creative interests such as music, and I know I'll probably link to it at some point, but my intention here is to focus on gaming.

When discussing mods that I have created, I'll add MOD to the title, just to make them easy to find. If the game is still relevant I'll include links when I can.