Avery Score Games Editor, Mobile

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Mario Mod?

Doom 3 hasn't even been out half a month, and the crafty mod community has already sunk their collective jaws into the title, releasing several mods (amateur-created modification packs) for the game, some of which mitigate gameplay issues Greg wrote about in his recent review. One of the more popular of these early mods makes zombie bodies remain in their corporeal state after they're killed, instead of phasing out of existence à la Blade.

The PC community at large has come to rely on these home-grown additions to boost the longevity and playability of their games. As an overture to would-be modsters, many PC game makers ship their titles with a collection of editing programs, designed to give armchair developers similar tools to the ones the game's actual development team may have used. In exchange, those companies get free publicity, a dedicated online community, and increased replay value for their games.

The upcoming Counter-Strike: Source, based on Half-Life 2's Source engine, is looking pretty amazing.

Perhaps the most famous example of this is the Half-Life mod Counter-Strike, which was created by 20-something modders Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess Cliffe. Since its 1999 beta, Counter-Strike has grown to become the most popular online action game in the world and has been ported to the Xbox (albeit poorly).

Given the success of modding as a means of improving and extending the half-life (har har) of PC titles, wouldn't the console world find equal benefit in opening the door to would-be modders? Consoles like the Xbox, which is essentially a set-top PC--complete with a hard drive and an Ethernet connection--would be perfectly capable of supporting a console mod community. When Half-Life 2 finally ships, you can expect the mod floodgates to open anew. Some version of Counter-Strike: Source will likely make it to home systems, but what of the numerous other mods that HL2 will undoubtedly spawn? Here's to hoping. Xbox Live-enabled games already see updates and additional content from their developers, with the Ninja Gaiden Hurricane Pack being one of the more prominent examples, and there's no reason this system couldn't be extended to include user-submitted additions to retail titles.

It's important to remember, however, that the ability to patch and update console games, after their releases, may be a mixed blessing. For the most part, when a console game hits shelves, it is in its complete and final form. Though, as many had predicted, we're starting to see functionality-based patches for console games--the Xbox version of EA's recent NCAA Football 2005, for example, had to be patched before its Live features worked properly. It could well benefit from an additional patch fixing its slowdown issues. This may set a dangerous precedent, but the upside is that broken console games are getting fixed. Now, if only people would release balance tweaks for fighting games and weapon refreshes for shooters...

In general, the PC gaming experience has always been more customizable, with games running on heterogeneous hardware, differing drivers, and omnifarious operating systems. The criminally underappreciated Dreamcast was the closest consoles have come to this model. Not too many commercial developers took advantage of the system's Windows CE functionality, but numerous enterprising amateurs certainly did. Homebrew games, apps, and a variety of emulators abound. Many Dreamcast owners even installed internal VGA adaptors into the machine and used it as a PC or server. This is the kind of thing that happens when the PC tinkering mentality is applied to what would otherwise be viewed as just some piece of consumer electronics.

Dreamcast hardware mods can get pretty intense.

While the Xbox lacks the Dreamcast's keyboard and inherent hardware modifiability, it is connected to a kind of Internet--not the same one that hammers your inbox with inappropriate spam, but close enough. It would certainly be technically possible to use a PC to post mods or software to official Xbox Live servers, to be downloaded by content-hungry gamers. This is, of course, should Microsoft ever allow such a practice. Perhaps a few, open-minded game designers might agree to release their development tools. A Microsoft-sponsored contest could then sort out the best of the resulting mods and post them on the Live servers.

Although it's doubtful that this dream will be realized in the foreseeable future, certain console games have already relied on user-generated content in some modest way or another. Amplitude basically follows my model in the anteceding paragraph, allowing players to remix the game's included music, track by track, eventually yielding songs that sound little like their originals. These can be posted online, for other users to download and enjoy on their PS2s. The Tony Hawk games have let players upload custom skate parks in a similar way since Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3. While these aren't exactly mods, this model brings us one step closer.

As the PC market is ironically becoming divided into two console-like platforms--based on the great driver divide between ATI-friendly games and games built for Nvidia chipsets--the console world continues to move closer to its PC brethren. These formerly separate worlds are merging and converging, and open game mods may just be one of many ways this happens in the future.