Modding

Playing A Game From The 90’s With Mods From 2018

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A field of pumpkins, and a Quad Damage powerup in front of a scarecrow.

After venturing around for DOOM Halloween mods the other night I wanted to see what the Quake Community had to offer. I found the Quake Halloween Jam from 2018, which sports a total of nine spooky maps to play. So far I’m two levels through it, each level presenting a challenge even on Normal difficulty.

An image of a pumpkin patch on a wall that reads "Pumpkin Grind By Pinchy".
It’s like a world you can actually jump into.

When you load the Halloween Jam you start off underground in a coffin, but eventually make your way to a haunted house containing large portraits on the walls that you can leap into. I played Pumpkin Grind, which lives up to its name of having lots of pumpkins and being a grind (a FUN grind!).

Stone walls are lit by candles,
Mood lighting at its finest.

Then I ventured through The Four Incantations, where you have to fight off four wizards to open a seal to leave. That one also did a good job of throwing monsters at me. It gave me an excuse to download the latest vkQuake to check out. It was pretty easy to get up and running. I never really did much in the way of modding the old Quake. It was always DOOM and Quake III Arena that got my most modding attention as a kid. Better late than never I guess.

A Game of Trick and Tear!

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I thought about tearing back into DOOM last night, this time GZDoom! I wanted to download some Halloween themed DOOM wads. Tonight I tried Trick and Tear – a Halloween themed megawad for DOOM 2. So far I’m three levels in playing on “Hurt Me Plenty”, or as they call it in the wad “I Play With The Lights Off”. Trick and Tear features a total of nine levels by numerous authors, so far I’ve only survived through three of them.

I’m about half way through Map 3 (Rigor). Surprisingly the Revenants in the image don’t attack you! (not yet anyway). Made it to just outside where I keep getting pounded by rockets from fully functioning Revenants. I won’t lie… I’m kinda wishing I went at least one difficulty back. Some of the areas feel almost impossible to trudge through when you’re locked in an area with a sudden demon moshpit, and no wiggle room to effectively take them out.  But I didn’t give up! Just took breaks whenever I got irritated enough. Think I’ve had my fill for the evening. It gave me an excuse to check out wads… it has been a good number of years since I last looked. You know a game is really good when you have people who are playing AND making mods for it decades later.

More images can be found on my Mastodon.

The Revolution Is Over… At Aperture

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One of the main reasons I always preferred PC Gaming to console is the modabillity of games, when applicable. An XBox or Playstation version of Portal 2 doesn’t go nearly as far or as hard as the PC Version, where the modding never really stopped. We get to enjoy mods like Portal Reloaded, Thinking with Time Machine, and Portal Revolution! I managed to finish it tonight, it was a wild ride and it did an incredible job replicating the humor of the original base games. I’ll need to go back and grab the achievements I missed after giving myself a break from it, but overall I had a wonderful time playing!

Stay tuned next for a completely different game… probably.

Puzzled

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Played the evening away in Portal Revolution! Had to stop playing juuuuuuust as the story was getting interesting.

I made a new friend (not the mannequin), and am now making my way through old school aperture. Having to turn the power on and off in a couple of the test chambers was an interesting touch. Plus I just started using excursion funnels! I wish they used those more in Portal 2 proper… but at least we have mods brought to us by the creative ingenuity of others. If I had more time tonight I would probably finish it, but alas… work beckons in the morning.

Scratching The Surface Of Portal Revolution

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Played Portal Revolution tonight. Haven’t touched it since May, and I needed to find something to fry my brain. It doesn’t quite make my brain smell like bacon as Portal Reloaded did, but it can still make you think until you can’t.

The earlier test chambers leave you stuck with a portal gun that only fires blue portals, and the test chambers you use them in are slightly more intricate than the beginning levels of the original Portal games. It took me a little while to figure out how to solve a few of these puzzles while others were solvable in just a couple minutes. Either way it was a good fun few hours to kill.

A Writer’s Story Can Be Another’s Reality

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Decided to return to the Remedy Cinematic Universe tonight. Gave Jesse a small makeover, and installed a bunch of mods! The Nexus has five pages worth, and surprisingly some of them range from helpful to entertaining. I figure as Director I can pretty much do whatever the hell I want. Advanced the plot, and even got a small glimpse of Alan Wake:

One of the documents I found lying around mentioned him and Alex Casey, and it sounded like something that might have gone down in Alan Wake 2… of course it’ll be a long while before I find out. 😛 Maybe it’ll release on Steam after I finish Control and Alan Wake…. someday, someday.

Finally Beat Portal Reloaded!

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I thought someone was cooking bacon nearby tonight, but it was just me wracking my brain on the final puzzles. This was so incredible that I kept forgetting it was just a game mod.

Until I find someone to play Multiplayer with I’ll have to check out some other mods! I’m thinking Portal Revolution will be the next one to check out.

Just A Normal Game Of HZD

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Sooooo I made the mistake of looking at the updated list of mods for Horizon Zero Dawn, and ended up spending most of the day immersed in Aloy’s adventures. I took over another bandit camp, caused all kinds of machine related chaos and even made it to the desert. Finding all kinds of different machines, each bigger and more horrifying than the last, and equally fun to try and figure out how to take down. I kept telling myself that I’d get back to animating after finding a stuck area, but I kept powering through it enough that next thing I knew it had been a good couple of hours, and at that point I was thirsty for more adventure!

I think after today I can say I got a good amount of adventure out of my system, enough that I can shelve the game for now and focus on my animation, and of course a different distraction. This game was just too beautiful to put down, and I’m compelled to finish it now that I have Forbidden West to play afterwards! That’s a looooong ways away though. I have other games I need to take into consideration – I’m thinking of doing something hellish tomorrow night…