Time for something a bit different today. I don't have any new games lately to comment on since this past week was kind of an off week (thanks to consciously choosing to pass on Borderlands for the time being).I spent most of the past week catching up on some PC game mods. One thing I love about PC gaming is the wealth of diversity and options that are brought about with the PC community and it's modifications to games. It can range from simple stuff that tweaks stuff in the games like skins and weapons, to player-made maps and gametypes, and even total conversion mods that are basically complete games that could honestly be sold stand alone at retail. It's amazing and refreshing seeing the kinds of ideas that mappers and modders can come up with. Today, I'mhere to highlight two particular total conversion mods for Unreal Tournament 3 that have caught my eye for awhile now and I believe are worth checking out despite the fact that most of you who read this aren't really PC gamers at all.

Prometheus

Now I know a handful of you, like myself, will be picking up and playing Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time later this week. I already know that a number of people are going to get to Clank's puzzles in the game that feature recording himself doing stuff and playing back that recording in realtime, and proclaim it's so original and it's never been done before. Well, hate to break it tothem but Prometheus has been doing this for over a year now, and has been evolving the idea further and further. I first mentioned this total conversion mod briefly in a blog back in January, and I will say it has been evolving nicely withinthe past years time.

The general idea is simple: record yourself doing certain things within a time frame, and then replay that recording while you're playing along side it and achieve things you couldn't normally do solo. Prometheus takes that idea and just goes nuts with it. For the first half of the game as it currently stands, you have up to 5 'quantum states' available to you (you and 4 pre-recorded versions of you) to solve and rectify scenarios presented to you. The only limitation is that each state can only be recorded once. The puzzle design behind the missions are quite devious too as most do require proper useage of all 5 of your states to solve it. As you have seen in the one clip above, some even involve 'killing' past states of yourself. There's something inherently cool, but creepy, about watching yourself kill... yourself with a sniper rifle. There's even an in-game achievement for using one of your states to kill a future state.

Moving beyond this, the second part of the game involves the same general concept but expanded on. While you'll only have 3 states available to you, you can now re-record any of them after the fact. This leads to a whole new world of possibilities in that you can get past states to open doors to lets others through, but later on redo that one so it does more than just hit a single switch the whole time. While Prometheus currently only features 3-4 levels using this evolved concept (8-9 level in the total game so far), those levels already had me crunching my brain to figure out the best/efficient use of all of my states. I'm anxious to see what the mod team will come up with in the future.

Visually, Prometheus is currentlyvery clean and simple. It can be said that it takes a very similar visual aestetic as Portal (which is also a puzzle game coincidentally). While the game started out looking very dark and gritty like a large number of Unreal Engine 3 games, it's moved along into it's own appeal and differentiates itself. While it's simple in it's general looks, it still has some subtle touches in it's environment that help highlight important items.

Just to touch on audio a bit, Prometheus has this little effect with music that is clever. When you first start a mission, all you'll hear from the music is a sample like a drum beat or such. However as you move onto using each state onto the next, it'll add another part of the music. Eventually once you're using your last state, the full song is playing full beat. It works very well in matching the pace and excitement of the game as you're piecing together a complex puzzle almost like you're piecing together the music.

I'm certainly excited to see how the mod team behind Prometheus will evolve this mod beyond where it's at. It's got a wonderful gameplay concept, excellent puzzle/level designs, and a whole lot of room to work with. As it stands, I believe that it's just about up there with Portal in quality. This is certainly a team to keep an eye on in the future.

The Haunted

To lay this flat out, The Haunted is a horror themed survival game. It's very much like Uncharted 2's Survival, Gears of War 2's horde mode, Halo 3 ODST's Firefight, and all of the survival gametypes out there. So what makes The Haunted so special? First off, check out this gameplay video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrMOErxyWzA

Well for one, the mod features your typical co-op play with up to 3 others trying to survive the demon onslaught; however on top of that there's also a 4 vs 4 humans vs demons with a slight catch. The players on the demon's side can control not only a particular demon within the game, but also have the ability to control the spawns for more demons. Those players can control which types of demons will spawn and where using an overhead map view that very similar to an RTS. Of course to keep it balanced there's a limit to how many demons can be summon at a time based on an imaginary resource (stronger demons cost more to spawn so you can't just summon an huge army of the baddest of the bad).

The humans side isn't SOL though as they've got a modest variety of weapons available to them despite overwhelming odds. A nice addicting touch is that each player can 'level up' to stronger weapons as they kill more and more enemies, which is a nice incentive to stick with the group and kill rather than hang back and let others do all the killing. Even if the humans run low/out of ammo, they've still got options as they always have a melee weapon available (starting with a knife, but can level up to a chainsaw and beyond), have the ability to dodge roll, and have a variety of melee strikes at their disposal (roundhouse kicks, uppercuts, jumpkicks, and charged versions of each) for keeping the horde at bay to an extent.

As for the maps themselves that are played on, there's only a couple at the moment, but each one is well designed. They each follow a typical deathmatch circular flow to them where the paces is constantly moving. There's rarely a spot in any map that's particularly safe for any reasonable amount of time, especially once you start getting late into each round when the tougher demons start spawning with ranged attacks. A great feature of the included maps is how the weather changes at random times. One moment it could be perfectly clear out (well, as clear as a horror can be at least), but the next minute is could become cloudy and darken the area, or even a thick fog settles in limiting your view in all directions. Moments like that can really get you adrenaline pumping as it really emphasizes and reinforces the horror aestetic of The Haunted.

The Haunted is a real blast to play either solo or with others. It's fast paced gameplay mixed with it's horror aestetic creates an experience that exhilarating to play again and again like most survival gametypes out there. Throw in a modest amount of options in gameplay and you've got yourself a winner.

Well, that's about it for today. Hopefully this will inspire some of you to check these out. The PC mod community always needs support as these mappers, modders, and designers very well could be the future of the industry. Let me know what you think at the usual spot; I'll try to actually comment back this time as opposed to the last blog. Until next time...

--JT