You Must Play The Stanley Parable

You will download and install the Half Life mod 'The Stanley Parable'.

You will play the game.

Stanely did.

You will enjoy the game.

Stanley did.

You will not question this choice.

Stanely never questioned.

You will simply enjoy the tale told.

Stanley enjoyed. Oh did he enjoy.

And look where he is now.

Others have done this.

Listen to their tales now.

Kill Screen

PopMatters

Independent Games Festival Mod Nominees

So busy these days.

The mod category nominees for the Independent Games Festival have been announced. The most surprising thing, to myself at least, are the large number of FPS mods. The entire category is dominated by FPS mods, especially for games like UT 2004 and Half Life 2 with only a few non-FPS mods listed for games like Neverwinter Nights or Homeworld.

Does this mean that few non-FPS mods are ever made or that those mods were not submitted to the festival, or that they were and were not considered of sufficient quality? Considering the popularity of RTS and RPG games in particular, I suspect that it is either category 2 or 3 (not submitted or not of a high enough quality). There are no mods for popular games like GTA or Oblivion (there is one for Morrowind), and the only RTS mods are for Homeworld, Warcraft III (no recent RTS games), and one nomination for a Civ IV mod (turn-based strategy). I was also surprised to see how many mods there were for Max Payne 2, a game I thought did not do so well in terms of sales, so the fact that there are three mod nominations for the game appears to be an aberration.

It's unfortunate that Dystopia was not nominated as I think it's one of the best mods I've played for Half Life 2.

John Romero says modder are screwing the industry

You have got to be kidding with this one. John Romero, formerly of Id software, has blamed modders for releasing game mods that expose games to a re-rating as recently happened to Bethesda's Oblivion, and previously happened to Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto due to the Hot Coffee mod.

There's a number of problems with this entire thing:

1. the modders aren't to blame
   
2. give me a break, it's a polygonal breast (as opposed to all the silicon ones you can find on the web)
   
3. the US views on sexuality are from the dark ages (damn Puritans)
   
4. who cares what John Romero says these days (when was the last time he produced anything noteworthy)

The real outfall from this will have a chilling impact on game development. The modding industry is a great source for new ideas as well as new employees for developers. If developers become paranoid about modders altering their game content so that sexual content become available, then developers will simply not produce any modding tools, and will aggressively go after the modding community and shut them down. The real problem, however, is not with modders, or the ratings produced by the ESRB, but is instead due to the puritanical right wing idiots who are both offended by this content and the power they have in affecting entire industries (recall Janet Jackson and the superbowl scandal). It's rather repugnant to me that in the US human sexuality is a forbidden zone for all media content, while violence is shown at every step (seems rather pathological to me) in video games and on mainstream TV. I say, more sex, less violence.

On a tangential note, it would not surprise me in the slightest if some underhanded game company produced a 'mod' for a competitors product that contained sexual content or artwork or looked into the game files to find such a thing. "Hey Walmart, Game Company X has a game with sexual content, while our game doesn't".