Rexaura – a mod for Portal

Rexaura is a mod for Portal by Mevious, featuring a full sized campaign, unique dialogue, and plenty of puzzles including some new types featuring plasma balls, which you can deflect using cubes, send through light barriers and so on.

You can download Rexaura from moddb.  To play this mod, you need to extract the file into your sourcemods folder, and restart Steam.

The author of this mod has previously created another Portal mod: Portal Pro, which can also be downloaded from moddb.

From an Elevator to The Blind Monk’s Society

Two mods came to my attention this week: Elevator: Source, a mod built on Garry’s Mod, and The Blind Monk’s Society, a mod for Half Life 2.

Elevator: Source is an elevator simulation by Pixeltail Games.  You get on the elevator, and then wait until it stops on a one of the 28 randomised floors..

First I got to look out into a freezing world.. I wanted to step out and have a look, but there was an invisible wall 🙁

After this, there was a dingy corrridor from which an NPC appeared.. she joined me and waited.. the next stop had the doors open in space, with a strange spinning kaleidoscope pattern.  There is an end-level where you can leave and walk around a games room, play pool and watch TV, but I just didn’t feel like sitting through more floors to get there.

I had the second mod to get to.. Blind Monk’s Society, where you play the part of a blind monk!

The game has no visuals, so to find your way around you have to listen very carefully.  I had read about this game over on Rock, Paper Shotgun and seen a recommendation to shut my eyes.  This actually helped a lot as it removed the distraction of my room and forced me to just listen..

You are greeted by two other monks, who really are channeling Monty Python with some very strange voices, silly singing and random phrases.  I got told off rather a lot as they explained my first task, for not keeping up as they started walking!

The first task is to collect a wind-chime, making your way alongside the river and up to where you can just hear them chiming.  My path up to the chime was extremely hesitant, after I stepped into the river and quickly backpedalled to get out, then didn’t want to end up lost.  The return journey was guided by the ringing of a bell, although I was nearly distracted by a crazy monk chattering about sitting in the grass and getting a wet bum!

I consider my hearing to be poor, so I was surprised to find that on the second mission, I was able to follow the audio cues rather easily, retrieving the second wind-chime and returning rather quickly.

I would have loved to see an overview of the path I’d made afterwards, but as the game was made as a project in navigation, there weren’t any visuals.  I would also rather like to see a horror game using some mechanics like this.. scary as it would be!

Saints Row 2: Gentlemen of the Row

I came across IdolNinja’s Gentlemen of the Row mod for Saints Row 2 by chance, while reading the comments on the end of an article for the latest installment in the Saints Row series, Saints Row: The Third..

I grabbed Saints Row 2 for the PC almost two years ago, and quickly found a gamepad essential.  While running around with my purple-haired freak was passable, driving without the gamepad consisted of crashing left and right across the road with virtually no forward progress.  I know I’m not the best driver in games, but I can usually keep the car in my own lane!  With the gamepad, I made some progress.. till I got to a mission that required a lot of driving, and got stuck slightly.  Around the same time, I met a certain friend who started inviting me to lots of Left 4 Dead.. and Saints Row 2 ended up accidentally abandoned.

Not only does the Gentlemen of the Row mod fix some of the bugs and performance issues in the PC version, it also adds new content, from clothes and tattoos to extra weapons and missions!  A friend also tried out the mod.. and came back with rather a lot of praise for it!

I had a slight technical hitch getting started.. the game doesn’t like me having two monitors, so I had to disable one, start up the game and put it into windowed mode, before getting my second monitor back on again.  After that though.. I went with a new game.

Having proper controller keymapping made the tutorial much less hit and miss, and when I got out of jail, driving was passable, though still not great.  I can’t honestly say whether the game is running more smoothly now due to the mod, or the upgrade on my PC.

I attempted some streaking, though as I’d not yet been to rescue Johnny Gat from the court, I think that prevented me clocking anything up in terms of respect, or stats on people having seen me streak.  I went to put some clothes on before carrying on with the story.. as crazy as this game is, having a blur-censored character running around in the cut-scene would feel really silly.  Where would she keep all those guns?!

I also had a go at the Crowd Control activity.. I don’t think I came across it last time round.. not that I got all that far with the story either!  I aim to get this game completed before picking up Saints Row: The Third 😉

Nestlings

Quite a few weeks back, somebody recommended I try Nestlings, a mod for Half Life 2 by Lewis Denby.  This is available on ModDB, and requires Half Life 2: Episode 2.

Rather than a game, this was described as “an experiment in story and mood”.
You start off facing an old, abandoned-looking house, completely surrounded by darkness.  Oh, what to do?

There’s a note pinned to the wall by the door which sets the scene – someone conducting some kind of research out here, all alone.. and imploring ‘Annabelle’ to turn around and run away.  Creepy.

There are more notes scattered in the rooms of the house, pages from a diary with details of research into the Nestlings, some kind of supernatural creatures from out in the forest.  I was expecting these Nestlings to jump out at me as I started to explore the rooms, but I made it upstairs without incident..

Through the ground floor, I managed to find the diary pages in the right order, but upstairs I turned left to start at one end, rather than opening the door directly in front of me.  This meant I came across the last note first; this page had a key attached which would unlock the attic.

I checked out the other rooms before heading up the ladder, as I really didn’t want to miss anything.. but after that there was only the attic left..

I think one of these bodies has to be the researcher, as the diary pages all foreshadow him being at the “peak of the house”, but I think that the second is Annabelle.  I think she would have come looking for the researcher and either died of the illness mentioned in her note, or met the same fate as he did.

After reading Annabelle’s note, the attic door slid shut and the lighting changed; after the lack of anything jumping out on me previously, this actually made me scream! 🙂

The abandoned house and rather abstract story reminded me of Dear Esther, another experimental story-mod I played a while back.
Looking at the developer’s blog, it seems Dear Esther has had a few updates over the past few months with some amazing looking graphical tweaks too!  He also mentions another, final, level is in the works, which I’m sure will be well worth checking out when the time comes.

Mods

For a long time, I wanted to create my own games.  Lacking the skills of a game developer, and to some extent the time and patience to figure it all out, I turned my attention to map making and level design, as the really hard work has already been done.  There are also plenty of tutorials around the web, taking even more of the pain out of it.  So far, I’ve not devoted the time required to create anything I’d want to show beyond my closest friends though..

Others though, have the time and patience (and the skill!), and there are some great works out there.  I’ve been recommended a few HL2 mods over the last week or so: Awakening, MINERVA: Metastasis, and Dear Esther – and the latest in the list, Korsakovia, is downloading now.

Awakening was described to me as a good game with awful voice acting.  You play as Adrian Shepard, from Opposing Forces, somewhere between Half Life and Half Life 2 in the timeline.
It starts off with a rather long trailer – Combine troops attacking some kind of facility – which pans around the fighting then inside the base, and eventually comes to rest where you wake up from stasis..  Simple enough game – shoot them all!  It’s quite a short game too – I completed it in about an hour.  The level design was great, and battles seemed to be well balanced, although I found myself seriously low on ammo for quite some time..  but yeah.. the voice acting was somewhat amusing.. 🙂

MINERVA: Metastasis really stuck in my mind as the best of the three mods, although all three were quite different from each other.
You begin the game strapped to the underside of a stolen Combine helicopter, being shipped into an island to spy for Minerva.  She communicates with you only via radio messages which appear as text – no dodgy voice acting here, although the language is strangely poetic and could put some off.   Exploring the island, and finding out exactly what the Combine are up to, requires plenty of shooting and some puzzle solving.

The map design here is very open, and although there’s really only one way to go to further the story, you’ll return to the same places a few times during exploration.   I was also quite impressed with the quality of the graphics – at least on a par with the official game itself.

Dear Esther is a strange sort of interactive ghost story, rather than a game.  Had I come across this myself, without recommendation, I might not have paid it much attention – especially as it started off so slowly, and you’re confined to a very slow walk – but that wouldn’t have done it justice.

The game begins with a portion of a letter being read out, to “Esther”, as you look on a deserted building.  Exploring the island triggers other portions of letters, or rambling thoughts, which only seem to become more rambling, more confused as you get deeper into the island, and markings on the walls only add to the atmosphere.

I discussed this with a friend afterwards, comparing notes on our understanding of what happened – an accident on a motorway, drink driving, the loss of a loved one, self-imposed isolation.. mixed with long lost shepherds, stolen bibles, monks and syphillis – all ramblings of a man delirious with a broken leg who somehow feels he deserves his fate..

Having looked around the internet for this one, I find that parts of the script are actually randomised, so if someone else were to play through this, they might have a slightly different interpretation.  Dear Esther made me feel rather sad, stirring up memories of my own, but that doesn’t stop me from admiring it.

I also mentioned I was downloading Korsakovia..
This is another mod from The Chinese Room, the team who created Dear Esther.  This game – experience? – is not meant to be enjoyable.. the whole intent was to explore what happens when you push boundaries and subvert what people expect from a game – with flashing lights, disturbing sounds, and the oh-so-creepy tagline:

“The paramedics report that they were unable to find his eyes. We think he may have eaten them.“