You may or may not know that Steam has released 5 SourceMods through their servers–Synergy, Insurgency, Age of Chivalry, DIPRIP, and Zombie Panic. I’ve tried the first few (I don’t think any zombie game can live up to L4D, so there’s no worth trying it) and they’re pretty good, at least as far as mods go. First, I think it’s an amazing thing to do; release mods for free on your otherwise commercial servers. Kudos to Valve for being such an awesome company. I can’t wait for L4D.
Anyway, first up: Synergy. Basically, it’s a HL2 co-op mod that works with HL2, EP1, EP2, Sin: Emergence, and some other game that I’ve never heard of. I’ve only been playing HL2 so far, as not everyone I was playing with had EP1 or EP2 installed, but I must say it’s pretty well done. It’s a lot more stable than other co-op mods that I’ve tried, and the simple game mechanics it uses to keep toe co-op in line are quite nicely done. For instance, when a player dies they spawn near the last player alive. Then when there are vehicles, there’s always a “ghost” of the vehicle where it spawns that anyone can press E on to make it into an actual vehicle to drive away. Overall, Synergy is quite good. There’s nothing too ‘fresh’ about it as it’s just HL2 maps, but it’s nice to play HL2 again with some friends. It does crash on certain maps for me, at least on a listen server.
Next up is Insurgency. I’ve played it before, I think when it first came out. It was nice, but was horribly unbalanced, laggy, and spawning was massively fucked. The spawn points had no shelter, and there were only two spawn entities so everyone got jammed inside each other. I’m happy to say that everything’s been fixed, and I can finally see how awesome a game it is. I guess you can call it a mix between BF2 and CoD4, but a lot more tactical. You can’t just run and gun, you have to do a lot of careful planning to get from point A to B and keep a constant watch on all your surroundings. It’s very realistic, so you have to keep an eye out for friendly fire, especially so since just a couple bullets will kill you. I really liked Insurgency, I’ll definitely be playing more of this. My only problem is how long the spawn time is, it’s amazing.
Age of Chivalry is decent, but gets old fast. The concept is great–somewhat similar to Dark Messiah in terms of game mechanics. It’s a medevail-based sword fighting and archery game. You can build objects and buildings, use catapaults, and combat of course. It’s fun, but the sword fighting is so incredibly slow paced that it gets really boring after a while; archery is a lot more fun, but that gets old too. Honestly though, you swing your sword so incredibly slowly that the animation doesn’t even look the least bit natural. Overall it’s quite decent but the gameplay is so slowly paced that you’ll be bored of it in just a couple plays. It’s pretty interesting, though.
DIPRIP [Warm Up] is… strange. It’s a total conversion mod to where everyone is in a bunch of tank-like vehicles driving around and shooting other players in tanks. It’s really strange though, you have these massive tanks rolling around and the guns are just these puny little pea shooters that sound like a cat meowing. Yeah, they really make you feel threatened when you’re up against them. The aiming for all but one of the weapons is god awful, so everyone’s just whoring the little pea shooters, making it take forever to kill just one guy. It sounds like a good concept, but I don’t really like how it’s executed. It’s impossible to tell where you’re supposed to go, so you’re just rolling around trying to find enemies to poke with your spit wads.
Anyway, that’s about it. I recommend you try all the SourceMods, and hell; I may even try Zombie Panic even though I know L4D will put it in between a rock and a very hard place–just like how TF2 pumbled that TFC SourceMod remake. See, I don’t even remember what it was called! In other news, LittleBigPlanet makes me want to buy a PS3. I wish I had the money to blow $600 to play just one game, I really do. Maybe if Sony had a better lineup with some original, fun-looking games that aren’t multiplatformed with the 360, that might help. As for the 360, I want TFU but I’m saving up for other things (namely, L4D). Nintendo’s been pissing me off with all it’s shovelware and pedometers. The Conduit looks good though, and apparently it makes use of Motion Plus–hopefully that little addon doohickey will save the Wii from the doomed fate of monthly My Little Pony episodic games. Oh wait, we already have that. That PS3 is looking very nice right now…
Aaaaaand for your blogly EXRP banter: I’m trying to fix displacements, I really am. I was told the problem was some missing files that define how friction on different surfaces work, but I’ve been unable to find them. I was told they were in the scripts folder of “some shared GCF for some game”, but after extracting every file from the scripts folders of every game, nothing works! I’m having an even bigger problem finding all the mattypes for all the broken surfaces so I can get my platform fix working on different maps, but then each map conflicts with eachother! I’m thinking of emulating Steam then logging into my account and running a listen server, as it seems this problem only occurs on dedicated servers. We’ll see, we’ll see…