Posts from ‘Mods / Hacks’ Category

Recent Good Knytt Stories

By: Derek Yu

On: November 9th, 2010

[This is a guest post by ortoslon.]

Remember that pretty platformer that came with an intuitive level editor? Some of you liked the game enough to reach for user-made levels, coming regularly to Nifflas’ Forums and the Knytt Stories Level Archive, but ultimately turned away as gems became rarer and harder to find. Good news for you: nice Knytt Stories are still being made, and I’m here to show them.

(Make sure that you have the latest version of Knytt Stories, or these levels might not run correctly.)


1. Shipwrecked, by egomassive, is an episodic adventure with custom graphics, ambience, and carefully-chosen music. You end up on an island, befriend a crab, and find out that you’re not alone. This level isn’t very hard unless you go for one of the bonus endings. Playthrough.

Read the rest of this entry »

Make Something Unreal Competition Results

By: Derek Yu

On: February 19th, 2010

Make Something Unreal Competition Winners

The “Make Something Unreal” mod competition is over after 2 years! The winner of the competition was The Haunted, a multiplayer survival horror game. The creators of this mod will receive $50,000 and a commercial license from Epic Games for Unreal Engine 3.

According to Alexander Bruce, the creator of Hazard – Journey of Life, all 5 grand prize winners are going commercial. I’ve provided videos of each game and links after the jump.

1. The Haunted (Michael Hegemann)

2. The Ball (Toltec Studios)

3. Angels Fall First (AFF Team)

4. Prometheus (Rachel Cordone)

5. Hazard – The Journey of Life (Alexander Bruce)

Mod DB’s Indie Games of 2009

By: Derek Yu

On: February 5th, 2010

Natural Selection 2 was voted Indie Game of the Year by the members of Mod DB. According to developer Unknown Worlds, the above video reveals “the first game footage of the skulk, marine, gorge, command station, the sentry and a marine base chock full of marine toys”.

The other games honored are Wolfire’s Overgrowth, 0 A.D. (an open-source ancient history RTS), FOnline: 2238 (a pretty amazing-looking free-to-play Fallout MMORPG), and Platinum Arts Sandbox, a free, open-source 3D game creation program. Really cool stuff. I need to pay closer attention to Mod DB, apparently!

By the way, for those of you who were curious about the results of the NS2/Overgrowth Preorder Promo that happened last month, Wolfire’s provided a postmortem. And for those of you who were curious about Wolfire’s John Graham, Wolfire’s John Graham’s beard, and more importantly, Wolfire’s John Graham’s beard’s color, check out this video. Warning: it’s hot!

Harmony

By: Derek Yu

On: November 12th, 2009

Harmony

Thomas “T.V.” van der Velden’s Harmony is a new FPS made with the ZDoom game engine. It is 8 years in the making. 8 years… wow, that is some dedication!

The game features original graphics and music. The monsters in the game were modeled from clay figures that the author rigged with wires so that they could be animated. Overall, Harmony looks fairly drab, but the character designs certainly lend it a unique and creepy look. The music is pretty good, too – I especially like the track that’s all drums.

It’s a challenging FPS that hearkens to the early days of shareware – there’s no jumping or swimming here (there is mouse-aiming, though)! Unfortunately, the weapon selection is not as interesting as the monsters, and you’ll mostly be playing with variants of the standard Doom line-up. But the level design is good – 11 large (and I do mean large) maps make you backtrack a lot, but are intuitive and have lots of shortcuts and secrets. The item placement feels right to me, too – ammo is valuable but not too scarce.

An original and complete game based on the Doom engine doesn’t come around that often, and Harmony is an impressive effort, if somewhat rough around the edges. It’s definitely worth a look for fans of old FPS’s. Thanks, jute, for the tip.

TIGdb: Entry for Harmony

Stonesense – Dwarf Fortress Visualizer

By: Derek Yu

On: November 3rd, 2009

Stonesense

Now this is a dream coming true right here! Stonesense (alpha) is an open source isometric visualizer for Dwarf Fortress, created by jonask and Solifuge. It can run side-by-side with the venerable roguelike/sim to provide a graphical view of the game. The sprites are being contributed by various members of the DF community.

Here’a video of the mod in action:

Thanks, Michael Komalarajun, for the heads-up!

This Fall: Natural Selection 2

By: Derek Yu

On: May 27th, 2009

BREAKING KOTAKU EXCLUSIVE! Natural Selection 2, the sequel to the popular multiplayer Half-Life mod, is slated for a Fall release on Steam, according to its developers. The original game blended FPS and RTS mechanics and featured two very different playable teams – the alien Kharaa and the human Frontiersmen. NS2 will maintain the same basic mechanics, but with some new features (and obviously much prettier). It’s now running on an unnamed proprietary engine, with Valve’s Source engine having been dropped due to the cost of licensing.

This is great news, as the development has been through some rough times, with its creators selling a Sudoku puzzle game to make ends meet at one point.

(Source: Alec Meer, via Rock, Paper, Shotgun)

Smokin’ Guns

By: Guest Reviewer

On: January 10th, 2009

Smokin' Guns

[Guest review by MisterX, originally posted on TIGForums]

As few probably know about it, I’ll just introduce it a bit: Smokin’ Guns is what became of Western Quake³. The latter was a very solid and well-liked western mod for Quake 3, and it was developed by Iron Claw Interactive. As time passed, the usual thing happened – there was less and less activity on the servers and eventually the developers moved on to other things. So when the source code of Quake 3 was released, a group of die-hard fans put it upon themselves to polish the mod, iron out bugs, create new content, and, best of all, make it a stand-alone game! They achieved no less and so now, few days ago, Smokin’ Guns was finally released into the wild!

Smokin’ Guns is not the most modern shooter, but it’s one of the few Western-themed action games there are, and it’s simply the best, in my opinion. There are the normal deathmatch and team deathmatch modes, but they have a catch, as you need money to buy weapons, ammo and items whenever, wherever you like. The money is not only gained by killing, but it’s also found lying around the maps. More interestingly, there is the Bank Robbery mode, which pits one team as defenders of a bank against another trying to break it, steal money by blowing up the safe, and then escape to the train yard. The most competitive one, though, is the Duel mode, which is self-explanatory. Two men go in, one comes out – very classy.

SG is really not an innovative game, but I like it for how well it manages to capture the Wild West feeling inspired by all the famous classic movies. In most shooters rifles are the most important weapons, and the one-handed guns are merely backups. But here it’s really well-balanced, so if you want it to be all about the revolvers, have it be that way. There are a bunch of revolvers, rifles, and shotguns, and even a fancy classic Gatling gun – in my opinion they all just feel right, especially the revolvers. You can use single ones or carry two simultaneously, and you can mix them how you like it. When using two, you can also reload them individually, and one of the revolvers is reloaded one bullet at a time, which feels very nice.

Lastly, the graphics aren’t much to look at, but they have been polished from Western Quake³, and the maps tend to look quite atmospheric. The sound is a different story, though, as the weapons sound appropriately powerful, and there’s a very, very nice soundtrack which really gets you in the mood for duking it out at high noon.

It’s been a long time coming, and I’m glad I can finally play the game again online. I hope some of you will also find it interesting. So, see you online, maybe!

Recommended ZZT Games

By: Paul Eres

On: October 26th, 2008

<img width=500 src=“http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/0002habh”>

The ZZT is an ANSI-based game with a game editor, and that editor was probably the first important piece of game creation software. The editor wasn’t even intended as its most important feature, but its popularity eclipsed the game itself. It’s still used to create games even today.

Clysm, the author of the classic Game Maker game Seiklus, has put up a nice list of the ZZT games he recommends. You’ll need to download the ZZT runner itself to play them. I recommend trying them all out, they each have something interesting about them, and playing them is a good insight into the history of independent games (if you care about that).

Trivia: one of the games there, Rhygar, pictured above, was created by the writer of the story of Immortal Defense (long before I met him). I’ve never actually finished it, but I like how it arranges the colored text characters into almost photograph-like scenes.

EDIT: Dessgeega has created a similar list of recommended ZZT games that is worth looking into, over at The Gamer’s Quarter.

Atmospheric Mario

By: Derek Yu

On: April 22nd, 2008

Auntie Pixelante (aka “dessgeega”) has been peppering her blog with thoughtful commentary about Super Mario Bros. ROM hacks. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I think of NES ROM hacks, I usually imagine something like this (which, I have to admit, is amusing in its own terrible way). But what Auntie P. shows us is that, at least with a game as ubiquitous as Super Mario Bros., there are some more interesting and… er, subtle remixes out there.

Mario Hacks

Enigmario replaces Koji Kondo’s music with chiptune versions of Enigma’s MCMXC a.D., a concept album from the early 90’s. It gives the game a very different feel. (Auntie’s Analysis)

Super Greyscale Brothers presents a monochrome version of SMB. There’s not too much more to say about it than that, but it’s an interesting effect.

Old Pond, Diving Frog, and Water Sound is a hack named after a Matsuo Bashō poem, and takes place entirely underwater. This is a really beautiful hack, visually, featuring quite a few custom graphics. As to be expected from the creator of Mario Air, it’s also pretty difficult. (Auntie’s Analysis)

Silhouette Mario makes Mario a two-color game. Lovely to look at, and quite difficult, also. (Auntie’s Analysis)

Last but not least, The Pixel Kingdom changes every sprite in the game into a single-colored rectangle. This, and Silhouette Mario, I think, really show off how iconic and well-understood the graphics in Mario are.

In conclusion: hacks can be delightful, and Super Mario Bros. 1 remains one of the most interesting conceptual playgrounds in video games (and probably elsewhere).

To play these, you need an emulator, an ips patcher, and, for The Pixel Kingdom, Super Greyscale Brothers, and Enigmario, a clean copy of the Super Mario 1 ROM, which you may or may not find if you hunt around in this thread.

Asshole Mario and Quantum Physics

By: Derek Yu

On: February 6th, 2008

This is so unbelievably geeky and amazing. A Japanese guy creates an insanely difficult Super Mario World hack called “Kaizu Mario” and records his friend playing it. Eventually the video ends up on YouTube, under the mistranslated title “Asshole Mario,” and becomes a cult hit. Inspired by the hack, an intrepid fan in turn hacks the Super Nintendo emulator SNES9x so that he can superimpose all of his 134 attempts to beat the first stage onto a single recording (seen above), and then uses the recording to explain theories behind quantum physics.

I love it.

The hacked emulator and quantum physics are here, and the Kaizu Mario patch is here (IPS patcher required).

(Source: haze, via selectbutton)