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.

… [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.>

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.

… [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.>

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]

Do you remember a time when Wolfenstein hero B.J. Blazkowicz was a grinning, bum-chinned sprite with shiny blue twinklers rather than a morose sad-eyed man in a broken world? I’ve enjoyed several versions of Wolfenstein over the years, and perhaps none more so than The New Order, but I’m still fond of the first 3d title in the series. And I fucking love Doom. What a pleasure it is, then, to find Blade of Agony [official site], a GZDoom-based mod/sequel following the continuing adventures of Blazkowicz. It looks spectacular>.

… [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.>

Have you played the Quake II mod CrateDM? If so, please tell me all about it. It’s a simple but oh so wonderful idea, which is best explained in its readme file: “CrateDM pits opponents against each other in a room full of crates, and the players are crates.” That’s it. All-crates Quake 2 deathmatch. Before Old Man Murray even created their Crate Review System, CrateDM was at the cutting edge of crate culture.

… [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.>

Quake has seen plenty of mods adding oodles of wacky weapons but the one that most caught my eye was Chaos Deathmatch [official site] for Quake II. If you weren’t poisoned and being chased by smiley-faced homing proximity mines while juggling another player with an air blaster, you were missing out.

… [visit site to read more]

‘Played’ isn’t quite the right word for Hardly Workin’ [archived official site]. You may need Quake II for it but Hardly Workin’ is machinima – a movie made in a video game, before that term was yoinked by a site which became a #contentnetwork. What made Hardly Workin’ stand out to me was that you could hardly see it was Quake II. While most early machinima drafted existing in-game characters and assets for action figure pantomimes (and heck, Red vs. Blue still does this – no disrespect), Hardly Workin’ is built from scratch for a silly cartoon tale about two lumberjacks getting jobs in a diner.

… [visit site to read more]

Not that I’m saying Quake is not suitable for 21st century play – quite the opposite. It’s just that enormous and beautiful mod campaign Arcane Dimensions applies some of the design values we are accustomed to from later, flashier games to the ancient Quake structure. From flow to geometry to sheer size, it’s taking Quake to places id possibly could not have imagined when they first made it, and wrestling the engine into brand new shapes without actually losing its essential Quakeiness.

Because that’s the thing: playing Arcane Dimensions makes Quake once again feel like it felt when I first played it.

… [visit site to read more]

Depending on to what extent you accept ‘Bethesda’ as official, of course. This isn’t id’s work, and it’s definitely not Quake-era id’s work, but it is the work of neo-id’s stablemates Machine Games – they of the improbably good Wolfenstein: The New Order. (And who, according to its credits, pitched in to some extent with this year’s even more improbably good DOOM). They’ve just unexpectedly release a new Quake episode in honour of the dear old man’n’monster-shooter’s 20th birthday. It’s pretty good, too. … [visit site to read more]