I adore mods which give new life to mundane objects. Every crate in the crate-filled warehouse of CrateDM is potentially a player waiting to frag you. Prop Hunt modes put us in the mindset of level designers placing rocks and buckets. In Run For It!, a new mod for old Doom, objects which didn’t have legs do now have legs. Ammo packs, lamps, trees, barrels, weapons, corpses and goodness knows what else have sprouted arms and legs to run around. Yup, it’s as daft as it sounds. Watch this trailer, which comes complete with Doomy Yakety Sax: … [visit site to read more]

Developers imitate each other, as do writers, musicians and artists, and Blizzard are the best in the business at it. No other company is so good at distilling the sweat of another s brow and refining it into pure, unadulterated joy. Yet, while it s easy to see in Overwatch the objective-based gameplay of Team Fortress 2, the team dynamics of League of Legends or the creative movement mechanics of 90s shooters, its various ideas can often be traced back much further, towards older games that the designers at Blizzard may never have played.

I’ve chosen ten abilities Overwatch’s heroes can perform and used them as the starting point for a jaunt through game history. What was the first game to feature grappling hooks, or teleportation, or time-rewinding? Find out below.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

I’ve been trying to remember whether I had some sense when I first played Wolfenstein 3D that I really, truly was playing the future of videogames. It did seem landmark, but back then, age 12 or 13, every new game seemed landmark to me – each was a brand new experience, both because I was so young and because so were videogames.

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Ben Mansell has never released a Doom level before, but his first effort took 300 hours to build, spread across an entire year. Originating as a doodle back in 2003, Foursite is an enormous structure, divided into four parts, each with its own theme and boss battle. Mansell reckons it took a friend three hours to complete on their first attempt and required some tinkering with “advanced processes” to fit the standard file format given its size. You’ll need Doom II to try it out and there’s a full dev playthrough below. … [visit site to read more]

Back in 2010, a chap named Paul Schneider brought Doom II fans an exciting mod in the form of Unloved [official site]. A traipse through the classic shooter several shades darker (way more than fifty shades) than fans were used to, it was an exercise in serving up entrails as floors and chunks of flesh scattered throughout each level.

Most importantly, it was good>. It could have become its own game, honestly. Oh, wait. It looks like it has! Unloved has broken out on its own as a fully-fledged horror shooter after escaping the confines of Steam’s Early Access. It’s available in full now, in fact, and looks like it’s well worth trying.

… [visit site to read more]

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

You must have played my first Quake map. You’d know it if you saw it. Two cubic rooms, yeah? Only used three textures, right? One irritating obstacle, remember? I never released my first Quake map or showed it to anyone but I’m sure you will have played it, it or a Quake map much like it – maybe your own first map?

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After two decades, Doom still has a vibrant modding community. Now game designer JP LeBreton has opted to draft his autobiography, Autobiographical Architecture [official site], as a Doom II mod, deeming the game a perfect medium for the multi-volume telling of his life. Doom has been a huge influence on LeBreton. He started out making his own Doom levels in his bedroom, later finding a career including working on BioShock, becoming lead level designer for its sequel, and being a designer at Double Fine Productions, before going solo. Here’s a trailer showing a little of the mod:

… [visit site to read more]

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

I’m going to keep doing mods for a while because: 1) I struggle to remember what happened yesterday; 2) Unable to afford many new games, for about a decade I mostly played mods – many, many mods. Of the many mods I played from cover discs off cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer, the Quake singleplayer campaign Zerst rer – Testament of the Destroyer was the first that felt like something I should’ve paid for. “Professional quality,” we said back then, with very specific ideas of what that meant.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Every FPS with skills and characters is being caught up in the ineffectual backlash against MOBAs but heck, the idea’s hardly new. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory from is a cracking class-o-XP-a-shooter and that came out 13 years ago. The first I remember enjoying, though, was Future vs. Fantasy [archived official site] for Quake in ’96, ’97.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Slide [archived official site] is what made me realise mods could be almost brand new games, could be whatever they wanted – and could be games I’d never see ‘proper’ developers make. Slide turns Quake into a downhill hoverboard racing game, sending players zipping through dark tunnels, round obstacles, and over deadly traps in a competition to become the greatest hoverboarder this side of the Wizard’s Manse.

… [visit site to read more]