Where in the world is Adrian Shephard? Chell recently escaped into the surface world (and a thousand fan-fictions), Gordon Freeman’s return is more anticipated than Christ’s because gravity guns are more useful than divine grace, and Alyx Vance has now appeared in more internet fanart than the color purple, but Opposing Force’s marine hasn’t been seen since the G-Man stored him away like a half-eaten lunch. Despite a dozen years on the bench, he has a lot to teach these modern shooting whippersnappers. Starring in one of the best expansion packs ever made gives you authority. Even over men whose sole definition is “Has a gun and uses it.”

For a man with no voice, or face, he has a lot to say

Outsource the Expansequels

Valve make fantastic games because they know when not to do so. They handed Half-Life over to Gearbox Software and told them “Make an expansion pack for that.” Why? Because they were busy upgrading official versions of Team Fortress, Day of Defeat and Counter-Strike. Oh, and making Half-Life 2. It turns out that when a company can make breakthrough games, they should make breakthrough games instead of sitting around milking past successes like a nostalgic farmer. So they let someone else make the guaranteed expansion while they got on with revolutionizing the genre.

Which took a very, very long time but was worth it

This may be the most important strategy in gaming development, so it’s a pity that other companies pretend it didn’t happen. Companies like Bungie are rewarded for brilliant games like Halo by being forced to make expansequels forever. Inventive geniuses restricted to “new” games which would barely count as DLC for the original. Protip: when your second sequel’s biggest selling point is five new abilities for the exact same game, that’s barely a new level. But it could be worse: with Modern Warfare Infinity Ward made most incredible war shooter in existence, twice, and got fired, sued, and sued again.

Tough Guys Can Shut Up

Alan Shephard continued the Valve trend of utterly silent protagonists, and it’s brilliant. Bespectacled physicist Gordon Freeman was a reaction against the blood-soaked marine stereotype, Chell keeps quiet because GlaDOS and Wheatley are busy being the best voice-work in any game ever, but Shephard is simply a guy with a gun out to kill things. A marine deployed in a fubared situation full of alien horrors? Back then he couldn’t have been more stereotypical of shooters if he was a bullet.

Nowadays he’d need steroids and a dose of gamma radiation to even count as average

Which made his silence golden. Because we would actually pay gold in order to shut some modern “heroes” up. Halo let its characters speak, and in Halo 3 it ended up literally interrupting the game with stupid annoying bursts of dialogue, reminding you that hey, maybe you as the tough man were meant to save the naked woman held hostage by the bad guys. In case that complicated motivation was beyond your understanding. Gears of War’s Dom redefined whining as more painful than being chainsawed in half, because that part of the game happens in multiplayer, is fun, and doesn’t make you wish for the death of spoken communication.

The head:neck ratio of unity really contributes to his emotional range

Shephard doesn’t feel the need to shout Plot Motivation For Dummies at us. He’s alive, he’s in a base which will change that, so he kills his way out. Done! In fact, anyone who doesn’t get that without the characters explaining it probably shouldn’t be allowed even pretend guns.

Love The Original

We really shouldn’t have to explain this one. Gearbox understood, embraced, and enjoyed everything that was good about the original. Even the changes were those of true fans instead of employed hirelings. They removed the Xen sections, because anyone who played the first game would do that, but included a cheeky corridor long section where you teleport to the horrible alien jumpy-world of infinite enemies, thinking “Damn,” then teleport right back to the complex!

Proof that even the best make mistakes, and First Person Jumping doesn’t work

The other change was one of respect to the Half-Life universe: the ill-fated Race X. Gearbox wanted to add new enemies without messing up the Valve continuity, and it turns out there’s a really easy way to do that in a plot about dimensional rifts. The extra enemies teleported in for a single sequel and were utterly defeated by Mr Shephard. So never mind gamers - Gordon Freeman could learn something from this guy. Thirteen years later and he’s still trying to clean up his own mess.

Then again, the Combine weren’t considerate enough to teleport in between twin emplaced machine gun nests

So let’s hear it for the smartest marine in shooter history. The only one smart enough to find himself in a hellish science-base and decide “I should try to get OUT of here.”

Valve are kings of the crossover, arming their characters with a crazier range of weapons than the Joker and Batman combined. TF2 gamers play with more fictional items than Harry Potter, and while other companies like Activision don’t just sue other companies far making similar games, but sue their own (ex)employees for making similar games, Valve promoted Monday Night Combat like it was their own work.

More murderous cyclopses than Greek mythology

What other games would we like to see on Steam events?

1. Serious Sam And Counter-Strike

Duke Nukem’s reclaimed the spotlight but Serious Sam is the thinking man’s not-thinking man. Mainly because he actually writes his own lines instead of stealing Evil Dead (one line is a reference, an entire script is copyright infringement.) If you ever want to terrify a Sam-player, just run at them screaming LOLOLOLOLOLOLLOLOOO! In fact, try doing that anyway. It’s a lot of fun.

No head and bombs for hands. Finally, an enemy who really would still attack after you’ve killed ten million of his mates!

The skull-free suicide-bombers are the perfect antidote to the professional CS server, where you’ll be informed that gaming is serious business and whatever you’re doing is noobier and gayer than a sonogrammed fetus looking disgusted to be inside a woman. They’ll also survive a lot longer than the average player – they’re the only thing in the first person world immune to AWP headshots, and the sheer frantic dashing of a horde of these things will shatter even the most professional team the first time it happens.

It’d be a hilarious custom mod, and even better as an admin tool. Someone’s screwing around but you don’t just want to kick him? LOLOLOLOLOLOL!

2. Doom with TF2

TF2 characters now employ more custom-created tools than MacGuyver, and unless you work in a sex shop they’re more fun to use on people as well. But the game is still missing the ultimate examplar of melee weaponry – something which would reclassify every TF2 server as a museum of modern mauling history.

The exact moment players first realised FPSes could trigger orgasm

As employed by Professor Williams, Head (Remover) of the Department of Chainsawlogy

Left 4 Dead 2 already understands this, but that’s because it is by definition “One of the best games ever, with improvements.”

3. Dead Rising 2 and Half Life 2

Dead Rising 2 is one of the greatest games ever made, and that’s with the flaws. Without them it would be the next stage of human evolution.

I have never seen anyone better prepared for anything.

Half-Life’s Gravity Gun is pretty much the only cool weapon not already in that game, and while it had a crowbar it was criminally, catastrophically un-combo-able. You also don’t even have to worry about game balance. While a gravity gun would break most shooter worlds harder than an armistice, Dead Rising has always been more fun and ludicrously unbalanced than a unicycling Sumo wrestler. This was a game which trusted you enough to give you a choice between a handbag or a spiked baseball bat, and fun enough that you’d try both.

Now imagine strapping a chainsaw to a crowbar and spinning the whole thing with a Gravity Gun. Just writing that has improved the health of everyone around me, because it repels the dead so hard we just became more alive.

4. Portal And Lemmings

We would have saved a full year of our childhoods.

In fact, put a portal gun in every title. If the players use it to skip parts, then those parts shouldn’t have been in your game!

User-created content is a complicated subject, with all manner of issues like profitability, piracy, distribution rights, liability, and various other words which are the exact opposite of fun.

Which is why we’ve broken it all down into one simple question:

It’s purely a question of corporate attitude, and any “issues” raised by that company are excuses because their corporate attitude is one that says “suckers” instead of “players”. Modifications are indisputably a good thing for gaming. The question of whether mods actually add anything to the player experience hasn’t just been answered, it’s been so answered it now reveals anyone who even asks it as either a non-gamer or a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome. And at least the latter has an excuse for not knowing what they’re talking about.

Team Fortress and Counter-Strike both started off as modifications (for Quake and Half-Life respectively). Sorry, typo, I meant to say the two greatest FPS games in existence started as user-modifications. You could no more argue that mods are a “maybe” than you could claim the Sun is optional for life on Earth.

Smart companies take things like those and extend them into incredible new products. Team Fortress 2 and CS: Source servers are the most popular shooters online, and Valve regularly embarrasses every other company in the business with their sheer levels of sales and support based entirely on “providing great content for users, and letting them do that too.” It’s enough to make other developers ask themselves “Why the hell are we doing it our way?”

Like Modern Warfare. The first was an excellent online shooter with integrated Mod support. Modern Warfare 2 treated the user like a special needs student. They removed so many options you counted yourself lucky they still let you control the character. Tying to set up a server in ModWar2 gave you the strong impression the developers thought you were wearing a helmet.

The idea that modifications damage profits is ludicrous. Civ V took approximately infinity man-hours to make, and they’ve installed mod-support right from the first menu. No unpacking, no hacking your way through file trees, just telling the game “Hello lovely game that I bought, I would like to use you for fun things!” And the game goes “Great idea!”

You can tell somebody’s lying when people hide behind issues of “stability” and “customer satisfaction.” No company has ever failed to work out technical problems when there’s real money to be made, and unfortunately the opposite is also true: if they can make more by refusing to do something simple, that’s exactly what’ll happen. Player-made mods for popular games aren’t an abstract option, or some weird internet extra: they’re a simple binary indication of whether the company really cares about players or not.

Now we’ll look at which games don’t allow server mods. Or to put it another way: which Halo are you playing? It’s certainly not the original (unless you have a PC Halo server) despite how it that introduced the revolutionary - in fact now mandatory - shield mechanics for console shooters, or the grenade button (not so much an incredible innovation in that title but an incredible oversight in every game before that) Because the original Halo servers have been shut down (though you can still play on PC!) So has the Halo 2 support. So you’d better have bought 3. No, ODST. Sorry, Reach. Whichever they told you to buy most recently.

And people accept that! A strategically-mandated announcement “You don’t get to play anymore. It’s no longer worth OUR while to support this, so YOU don’t get to play this game you paid for - and clearly love because you’re still playing - anymore. Why not buy our sequel RIGHT NOW?”

Meanwhile, six years after release Half-Life 2 players can now now enjoy the cyberpunk class-combat of NeoTokyo, or the horror-movie hunting of The Hidden, the teamwork of Synergy and Follow Freeman, the insane Mad Max mayhem of D.I.P.R.I.P. and many more all from the same game.

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.

The best thing about having your own server is that you can take some of the greatest games ever made, and play them exactly how you want. Some scum won’t stop using rifle grenades on CoD4? Kick him! Want to play Well despite nobody in the world liking that map? Go ahead! And thanks to the hard work of modding community FPSBanana, you can redecorate in ways you never thought possible:

1. The Glorious Francis Heavy Skin

In the best cross-over ever (until the Portal gun turns up in Half Life Episode 3), Left4Dead’s Francis can escape the infected - to a TF2 server. This skin retextures everyone’s favorite weapon-wielding Russian into Mr “I Hate Everything” himself. Install it client-side and only you’ll be able to see it, but if you host a TF2 server you can upload the upgrade for everyone to enjoy!

I hate RED!

Just imagine if Francis could take Natascha to fight the Horde - why, he’d be invincible! For about ten seconds. Then he’d run out of ammo and die, but man, it would be so sweet up till then!

2. That’s Not A Knife, THIS Is A Knife!

It’s a fact that Counter-Strike servers are still the most popular around. It’s also a fact that the most popular skins are all insanely detailed knives and weapons, which would be more worrying except the whole point of the game is “Use knives and weapons.” If you’re the kind of CS server master who can run around eliminating enemies with nothing but a knife, you should definitely make it a nice one. The terrifyingly specific “M9 Probis III” knife is the most popular.

I’m the one holding it and this thing terrifies ME.

3. Tuxedo Sleeves

Slick stunt-style shooter The Specialists may not have a Source upgrade, running off the original Half-Life engine, but it still has class. Modder “Jeffysan” certainly thinks so, tweaking the code for nothing more than giving you trendy tuxedo sleeves as you obliterate the opposition.

On one hand this is wasted effort - it doesn’t affect the game, and you barely see it. On the other hand, it makes you feel that tiny bit more like Bond and is therefore absolutely essential.

4. Band of Brothers on the Day of Defeat

Day of Defeat servers get some pop culture love with a TV-upgrade, swapping out one of the skins for Ronald Speirs. If you just asked “Ronald Who?”, you don’t watch Band of Brothers and can move on to the next item. Fans may wish to have a look at this fun skin:

5. Dead4Left

Technically the easiest mod on the list as it only copies the survivor skins over the infected, but come on, that’s pretty fun looking. It’s also a bit of a cheat on our part - the mod is single-player only, so you can’t run it on your L4D server, but we figured it was more than cool enough to let people know. And you just know that the community are working on a full multiplayer infected/survivor switch.

6. The Most Terrifying Mod Ever

Say goodbye to Silent Hill, because this is the most mentally scarring videogame you’ll ever see. That chick from the Ring could get on BitTorrent and come out of every computer in the country, and it’d only be a welcome break from the screaming. Of course it’s for L4D servers, and we warn you: don’t scroll down if you’re eating:

NOOOOOOOOOOOO!

How can the Boomer be made so much more terrifying by putting more clothes ON? What horrible inversion of fashion, flesh and mortal sanity makes a spraypainted thong worse than infected nakedness? We don’t know, but we salute Darksider1972 for advancing the frontiers of Lovecraftian insanity to find out.

You’ve seen some sweet sights on your Source server - a fully-charged medic dropping to your headshot, the blind side of a terrorist on Bomb Site B, the UDamage when you’ve got a full rocket clip - but some people take it to the next level.  The “Somebody who isn’t actually playing would watch it, repeatedly” level, even though watching someone else play is usually the most frustrating thing outside a Chinese finger trap at the urinal.

1.  Combine Nation

Pretty much the only good thing about reality TV is the parodies - and what’s a better parody of real life than video gaming?  We’ll tell you what: video gaming with the Metrocops of City 17 as they deal with barnacles, insurance fraud, and their own idiotic members.

Combine Nation gets bonus points for resisting all the obvious gags - there’s no silent Gordon Freeman, no “From the nameless grunt’s point of view” killings by the player, there isn’t even a gravity gun.  They do include the “What happens if a Metrocop sneezes” bit, but it’s thrown in as an aside - not a single joke forming the focus of an excruciating five minute scene, as with so many fan-made creations.  Take time off from your HL2: DM server to go see.

2.  Ignis Solus

It also features somebody actually winning on 2Fort, and we think that’s an amazing enough to deserve mention all by itself.

3.  Maintenance Man

The story of an unlikely hero thrown into circumstances far beyond him, struggling against impossible odds (and heavily armed enemies) to save his world.  Who cares if he’s a bad guy?  Maintenance Man is about a gravity-gun-equipped janitor out to clean up Gordon Freeman’s mess, and since Gordon blew off the entire Dark Energy Reactor assembly and fatally destabilised the Citadel core, that’s a “mess” on par with the Death Star explosion.  Yes, he’s the guy who has to fix the results of Half Life 2.

Maintenance Man features incredibly skilled camerawork - they manage realistically gritty camera shakes, despite using virtual cameras on virtual actors.  These guys make something so pretend look so real they could probably sell you unicorn insurance.  They’ve also got perfect timing (the weak point of all wannabe Source server directors) adding wonderful little moments of humor and character in the midst of a serious story.

4.  Freeman’s Mind

You may have noticed that all three of the above were made by Lit Fuse Films.  We’re not going to lie to you: that’s because Lit Fuse are simply the best outside of Valve, and any list of the best Source machinima will always just be “Lit Fuse + a couple others”.  If they don’t get hired to do some serious (and well paid) production then there is no justice in this world.  Now, on to the “couple of others”.

If Lit Fuse are the cinema, Freeman’s Mind is the stand-up.  It’s at the opposite end of the technical spectrum - it’s just the someone talking while playing Half Life with the HUD off, and if watching that sounds like the seventh circle of Hell it’s because you haven’t heard him.  Gordon Freeman’s muteness is the most overplayed joke in gaming history, slightly less original than Seinfeld asking “So what’s up with airline food?”, but Ross Scott gives a genius reason: he’s an idiot.  A brilliant, ridiculous, idiot who’s massively entertaining for everyone but downright hilarious for those who’ve played through Black Mesa’s “unique” architecture.  If you’ve ever even heard of crowbars, go check it out.

5.  Escape From City 17

Ultimately, and we do truly mean “ultimately” because it ends everything you ever thought you knew about the genre, there’s Escape From City 17.  Which is quite frankly unbelievable, as in the-first-cowboys-to-see-a-motor-car-, witnessing the start of a new technological era ,-unbelievable.  Merging the Source SDK, Half Life 2 sound effects and real actors in a way that would make major production companies jealous, its insane quality propelled it to the top of the internet so fast it made Zero Punctuation look like a livejournal.  Released one day, an official Steam update announcement the next - and that’s about as high as you can go, Valve-wise, short of owning a crowbar and joining the BLU team.

The makers, the awesomely talented Purchase Brothers, claim that the whole thing cost about $500 - and if that’s within even a factor of a thousand of being true, you’re watching the next generation of film right here.  The first episode alone kicks the hell out of most of the starting series, online or off, and they’re just getting started.  It remains to be seen whether the headcrabs will be the undoing of their limited budget (zombies are harder to recreate than metrocops), but they deserve every click and comment the community can give them.

Deathmatch Classic certainly lives up to its name: seven years old and there are still people logging onto Steam - you know, the place with the finest and most polished multiplayer shooters ever made - and playing this antiquated tribute to Quake.  It’s so Ye Olden Times you could run it on a calculator, but it turns out that no matter the polygon count shooting at people
is still fun.

A lot of fun.  But there are a few things you’ll need to know when you log onto a Deathmatch Classic server.  You’re engaged in truculent time travel here, and some things aren’t what you’re used to:

1.  One man’s modification
People still sticking with this when things like Team Fortress 2 are available are impressively dedicated to what they like: expect to download a horde of customized map and sound files, as hardcore users tweak their servers to their exact standards.  Most of these are designed to obliterate whatever pet peeve the host hates, so expect spawn-immunity and anti-camp-countdowns.  The bulk of the rest will be dedicated to making this as close to Quake as humanly possible.  ID Software’s magnum opus still lives strong in gamers’ hearts, and many will do whatever they can to keep playing it (except for actually running the original, which has an engine so dated you could probably find dinosaur bones in it).

The upside?  If you host your own HL:DC Server you can set it up how you like it.

2.  True Deathmatch
NO-ONE is on your side.  Deathmatch does exactly what it says on the tin and everyone you see is trying to kill you (and more importantly, so are the ones you can’t).  You might think you’re used to that, but these are people who’ve been here since 1996 in some cases, so while you’re still getting used to the distinctive “Brown and more brown” Quake graphics the score leader will have lightning-sniped you from midair while invisible.  This isn’t Call of Duty with alternate routes and camo - this is you and twenty murderers in an open room filled with an improbable amount of firepower.

3.  Unbalanced Weapons
Everyone trying to kill you wouldn’t be so bad - it turns out a lot of games have that idea - except you’re appearing with a wimpy shotgun and anyone who’s been alive longer than five seconds has a better weapon than that.  The old-school gameplay mechanics include balance-breaking items like Quad Damage and the Lightning Gun, so if you see somebody glowing purple and spewing thunderbolt death think of them as an angry Thor and run like hell.

Why put up with that?  Because it’s incredibly fun when it’s your turn.  Exploding enemies just by looking at them generally is.

4.  Bunny-hopping
A heavily-armed three-hundred pound space marine leaping and prancing like his feet are on fire is an odd sight, but in Quake-like games they’re exploiting the game’s physics to move faster than running and make themselves far harder to hit.  Oh, and sometimes their feet actually will be on fire:  Old school levels include huge lava floors, “haha you fell off” ledges, and various other items modern games have evolved out of.

Keep these simple tips in mind and you can have an awesome time.  Just remember: rockets beat shotgun, and Quad Damage beats everything.