3D destroyed dozens of beloved characters back in dark days of the late nineties, now known as the “Plague Of Broken Polygons”, forcing them into a third dimension they weren’t ready for. The N64 Castlevania was a catastrophe of careening cameras and clumsy controls, and we’re going to have to pray our secret NES shrines forgive us for even mentioning the Playstation’s Mega Man Legends. But now we have professional 3D rendering tools, an army of innovative internet fans, and people who still love what made the titles good in the first place. Here we see how they’ve brought the old days onto modern game servers.

1. Super Gordon Bros

An awesome modification that’s half parody, half retrostalgic, showing exactly how things look for the Mario Bros in their flattened world. M0rtanius’s Super Gordon Bros teleports Gordon Freeman into World 1-1 of the greatest platform game ever made and it’s a view like no other.

It’s an incredibly fun little level despite being dangerously close to fan-fiction - but with the HEV suit coming out of the mushroom question block, and even the ability to “use” a pipe to enter the underground coin room, it’s about a minute of incredible joy. You can even load the level into a HL2:DM server for some side-scrolling shooting insanity. Not exactly the most balanced (or even possible) level but an awesome idea for a fun clan-server event.

Watch it here, or download it here.

2. TF2 Mario Kart

I don’t think we’re in Dustbowl any more

Teleporting Team Fortress 2 into a game where Mario was adapted into racing - this map involves more worlds than a Starfleet war. The team deathmatch level thrusts players into a psychedelic world of memes, mario karts and moving vehicles. TF2 servers running the map are usually heavily 4channed (meaning they’re not homes of fine teamplay or even coherent thought) but as long as you’re ready to mute the worst of the micspammers you can derive insane enjoyment from this lunatic level.

In fact, I don’t even want to know where we are

Get the files here, and thank the awesome Xenon for making it.

3. Half-Life Vania

We’re back with the best, with M0rtanius taking us to Transylvania - and giving us a crowbar. The instant you spawn you’re transported back in time, not to the days of Dracula, but the 8-bit eighties. The music immediately engages your grin response and the attention to detail is fantastic: you get power-ups by breaking candles, scanners patrol hallways in the classic sine-wave pattern, and the hidden healthpack is still in the right place for those who know where to smash up the wall.

It’s a Source server fantasy for anyone who’s taken the long road through gaming: if you’ve ever blown on a cartridge to make it work, if you’ve ever sighed and started again from the beginning after dying on the last level, if you remember the first time you saw something in 3D, then these treats are for you. And your friends. And the Garry’s Mod server applications are only limited by your imagination.

Watch it here, get it here.

Garry’s mod is a game with no objectives, no aims, no set structure, and now it’s got achievements in it. This is either magnificent metagaming madness or the worst electronic achievement idiocy since Turok’s teamkilling triggering one, and we’ll give you a hint: it’s not the second one. (more…)

Ghor of the Garry’s Mod community is now a Saint of Gaming, or will be just as soon as we can get Pope Freeman to make the pronouncement, because he’s made the DOOM weapons available for your Garry’s Mod server.  If you aren’t excited by that then we’re terribly sorry, Mrs MacOldwoman, we’re only talking about the coolest thing to happen to First Person Shooters since the gravity gun.

Just download the add-on, install, and you can relive your glory days in undreamed-of detail.

Ohhhhh this is fun.

You already know that running a Garry’s Mod Server is like having the ultimate living room - you can teleport in friends from all round the world, then have a chat while exterminating enemy armies, building incredible vehicles, and now you can relive your earliest gaming memories at the same time.  Most real-world landlords react poorly to blasting your buddies with shotguns, and most regular living rooms can’t survive even one grenade detonation.

Firing the rocket launcher in the Source engine is an incredible retro joy: the laughably low-res weapon art, the single-frame launch (reloading a CoD4 SAW involves more animation than the entire original DOOM game did), and then the awesome abuse of technology which forces a full 3D rendering engine to make single blocky pixels hang in the air!  Then the interaction where an old-school sprite-picture of an explosion actually projects ragdolls around in full physics glory? There won’t be a cooler fusion of high-tech and retro until the Cyber-Tyrannosaurs strike.

Ghor doesn’t just use the Source engine - he makes it dance for your amusement.  It would be moderately cool to render the old DOOM boxes in full 3D, but it takes true retro love to create extra code to make them to appear in 2D at all times - just like the original.

But let’s be honest:  you don’t care about pixel projectile trails or the aspects of 2D art.  When you saw “DOOM” up there, you only thought of two things.  And they are both so fine.

I call my Chainsaw Chamber “The Portal - to Pain“

Bomb Site B isn’t normally this well defended.

Then again, the terrorist don’t normally have a gun that could blow up the moon.

This is what Garry’s Mod servers are all about - a project powered by pure love, a gamer building something for others to pick up and enjoy for hours simply because he thinks it’s cool, and the ability to more with your desktop than movie designers used to dream of.  There’s no chance of the Ghor making money like Garry did, because the only thing scarier than the wrong end of a BFG9000 is a lawyer, but every time you chainsaw a Combine you’ll be thanking him.

If you have any Source-engined game, you really should have Garry’s Mod. Mod players laugh whenever they hear GTA IV referred to as “the ultimate sandbox” - that’s just jumping through a series of car-themed hoops. Garry’s mod gives you command of fully realised physics, a boatload of tools (many of which either explode or cause other things to explode), and shouts “DO STUFF!”

And what stuff people have done! From Rube Goldberg machines to machina, to simply answering the question “Who would win between a thousand ant-lions and a thousand combine sentry guns?” (Answer: they will team up to defeat your CPU). One use you’ve seen more than most is making an introductory image to a game server - it beats the hell out of a block of text, because as the tabloids keep reminding us, all video-gamers are too busy practicing murder to read. Which technically means that you don’t exist, but we’ll ignore that and give you five handy hints for making your own server image.

1. Choose the camera angle first

Before you start flinging things around with the physics gun (as awesome as that is), use a more powerful weapon - your imagination! Don’t worry, we haven’t gone Sesame Street on you. Just pick the angle you want to take the image from and spawn a camera there right at the start. It will save an enormous amount of frustration if you know now what you’re trying to create rather than constantly re-evaluating. Especially when you’re hosting a Garry’s Mod server and have five other users to co-ordinate.

Use the quick-key to check this camera as you build - you might initially imagine you’re going to build a perfect 3D world, but you’ll save amazing amounts of time just making things look right from that one spot.

2. Save Save Save

If you’ve performed more than two actions, even if one of those actions was “breath”, SAVE! For Heaven’s sake, SAVE you mad fool, and if you detect a tiny shred of personal emotion in this tip then well done Mr Holmes. Every second spent rebuilding a ruined set-up is a second not enjoying the fruits of your labours on your newly-decorated Garry’s Mod server.

Garry’s Mod lets you play with all the physics in the game - even the ones you don’t know about. One tiny “I’ll just nudge the dispenser a little to the left” and your hundreds of handcrafted props can go up like you dropped a stick of dynamite. Onto a nuclear weapon. Some items have field components that you can’t see until you let go and they suddenly shoot out of place and halfway across the map like a wrecking ball at an antique china exhibit.

3. People First

Just like the real world, people are more important than objects. Unlike the real world, you can strap these people to gas canisters and set off grenades without being locked up. No matter how awesomely sophisticated a set up you’ve got planned, place the characters first and build everything else around them.

The reason is that the rag dolls are the most sophisticated objects in any Source game - it’s what makes the shotgun so satisfying, but it also makes posing them with anything else in the way an exercise in pure monitor-smashing frustration. Set the models just so, SAVE, and make only the barest of adjustments after the fact.

4. Noclip is your friend

Not just for you flitting through the walls like an omnipotent and strangely firearm-obsessed god, but for your rag dolls. Once you set character in place right-click with the noclip tool to render them immaterial to any other objects. Even for pictures which require things to touch, you’ll find the it much easier to engineer if they can pass through each other (for example, this is how you make any character appear to be holding something: noclipping right into their posed hand).

In summary: to make things look real, you have to artificially make them exactly the opposite of that. At this point you should be gaining a better understanding of advertising, Hollywood and politics.

5. Post processing

Get yourself a nice graphics program. You might find it hideously boring to work with a program that can’t explode things on command, but this is how people used to create images back in the old days. Before that was the dark ages, where it is rumored artists used things like hairs of animals and dead trees and goo and who knows what else to make pictures, but I’ll tell you something - those losers never made any image as beautiful as a wrench hitting a spy.