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!

Suicide Survival is the best argument for user modifications since improving coke with whiskey: more fun, less likely to gain official support than a Care Bear firing range, and not for anyone who cares about professional skills. It’s madder than a Katamari rolling up Alice’s Wonderland and filled with more lunatic genius than Arkham Asylum.

It’s not just the insane contradiction of the suicide-survival concept. The concept of fat people gardening against an army of suicidal shrubberies would have a company committee recoiling like Dracula in a garlic-scented cross candle factory. It goes out of its way to offend people: the obese wobble with rage if you even mention that adjective, you’re placed on ten government watchlists if you even read an article with “suicide bomber” in it (sorry about that), and vegans are offended by the idea of homicidal plants. But you don’t have to worry about that last one. When someone’s so dedicated to upsetting themselves in a luxurious modern world that they decide “eating food” can be done wrong, you were going to offend them anyway, and the lack of protein makes them very unthreatening opponents.

It’s also more fun than a rave in a bouncy castle.

It’s the most asymmetrical game since David vs Goliath. The survivors are a team of fat counter-terrorists are put out to pasture, but that pasture is less “easy retirement” than “death by shrubbery.” The suiciders are out to destroy them. And are potted plants.

A bad place to know that green things want to kill you

The suiciders are utterly indistinguishable from the scenery unless they’re moving, making every game a combination of hide-and-seek with yakety sax. Lethal leaves sprint around the map every time the overweight defenders turn their backs.

The entire concept is more a testament to insane fun than LSD in an amusement park. From the flinging of gardening books (the survivor’s only weapon) to the Seriously Sam “Lolololollololoo!” death-yodel of the charging gardening, not a single line of this game was coded with less than laughter. That’s the benefit of the mod: it’s never on schedule, it’s never demanded by for the fourth quarter profits, and it’s never rushed out the door. Most are luckily if they’re ever “officially” released at all, but the benefit is that when they are it’s because the makers loved every second and cared enough to devote their own entertainment time to finishing it.

A game that’s fun to play because it was fun to make, and entirely free. It’s also incredibly easy to set up your own server - as a Half Life 2 server mod Lowpings can run one for you at any time - and it is unspeakably beyond fun. From the first time player to the experienced clan, the fresh experience is priceless. And that’s literally true, because it has no price, becaues it’s free. The game is so different, so insane, that even the most jaded AWPer will be entertained for an evening, and find themselves coming back for more.

The next time you feel bored, remember that you have no excuse. You should be trying this.

The Steam store’s been chasing after Xbox Live, which is like the Mona Lisa getting made up like Lindsay Lohan. They’ve added in-game text chat, shift+tab out to the community screen, even a Steam score for those who need a fictional numerical reason to play games. As opposed to the very real numerical reason of Steam sales, as in “all the financial numbers are way lower and often missing altogether.” An accomplishment Xbox Live strangely seems to miss out on. Even for the packs which are free on the PC!

The upside is achievements, that most beautiful beep when you do something particularly cool and the computer agrees with you that yes, that was totally sweet. (And on TF2 servers it can even earn you new guns, which are even sweeter.) That’s why we’ve looked over our game catalog to find the best achievements.

Killing Floor

An achievement which creates better players is a rare and precious thing, like someone turning their baseball cap backwards that they might read classic literature more easily. Many achievements are exercises in game-ruining, where one team is effectively outnumbered because their most expert player is standing in a corner jumping up and down (we’re looking at you, Batter Up). Protip: make sure your server has a kickvote function.

Philanthropist, however, encourages team-building behavior to create a well-armed squad. And the more well-armed squadmates you have between yourself and this…

AAGH NO PATRIARCH TOO CLOSE GUN TOO SMALL ME TOO DEAD!

..the better everyone will like it. Well, except for the squadmates between you and that, but their opinion will stop mattering in about three seconds anyway.

At the other end of the expert-play spectrum, Merry Men walks right up to a squad of pro players and says “You think you’re so tough? Then why not come and fight death incarnate with nothing but pointed sticks?” Then it insults them a lot because they’ll be dead in a minute anyway.

The Ball

Our fine (and extraordinarily improbably appelled) friend Harchier Spebbington demonstrates the standard “Do what the game is all about” achievement. Which makes it onto this list despite its unoriginality because it’s just so much fun. The Ball is a sweet Source combination of Half-Life physics with a Portal-style single weapon, and while “huge boulder” is significantly lower-tech than Aperture Science’s handheld Portal Device, that’s only because you can’t flatten foes into smears of ex-eneemy with a tear in spacetime.

How do you even get a name like Spebbington? Did his ancestors piss off the first census worker?

And since Harchier can appear on Killing Floor servers thanks to a cool crossover, you can achieve the world’s first officially Merry Archaeologist!

Poker Night At The Inventory

Possibly the most unimaginative achievement name in history, but it could be called “You’ve just been diagnosed with horribly pustulent things” because it gives you this:

Unfortunately the Iron Curtain it doesn’t do anything beyond “Look Awesome.” Fortunately it looks SO awesome it doesn’t have to. And be honest: any Heavy Weapons player should be stylishly rewarded for resisting Natascha’s siren, slowing, enemy-annoying song.

Counter-Strike: Source

Counter-Strike servers running on the Half-Life engine – this couldn’t be a more perfect combination of videogaming beauty if it were presented by Joanna Dark. Normally these “you used a weapon to kill enemies” achievements are more superfluous than a third appendix, but on a CS:S server it isn’t just a message. It’s proof that you’re playing the game properly.

Though it’s odd that the makers, while talking about the most important weapon in the game, should be typing this “Magnum Sniper” nonsense instead of AWP. The most lethal acronym in existence outside of OMGIAATAB (Oh My God I Accidentally Armed The Atom Bomb.)

Achievements are both fun and terrible, not least because they’ve given puns a whole new lease of life. A life more more painful than being on the wrong end of a shrapnel grenade, and by wrong end here we mean “while you’re on the toilet you spend your last second discovering one in the bowl. ” But this one is simply so enjoyable - both to read and to achieve - we included it anyway.

Day of Defeat: Source

Taking out the emplaced guy because he’s distracted killing the idiots charging him. Such sweet joy, here the achievement isn’t a goal or even a reward, merely an electronic high-five for doing something cool.

You can view this as heroically saving the day, or mercenarily using your own teammates to detect emplaced enemies, or simple annoyance at being stuck on a team with so many idiots. “Don’t charge the heavy machine gun” shouldn’t have to be explained. Though for anyone who does need that demonstrated, multiple high-velocity ballistic death is probably the least powerful tool their cro-magnon skull will notice. Whatever the reason, a sweet snipe into someone distracted by thinking of how brilliantly they’re doing is incredibly enjoyable and the key to capturing the next point on any Day of Defeat server.

Team Fortress 2

With 368 achievements and counting, players used to be obsessed with achievements to get the new weapons. The Mann Co. store has released this pressure valve for those who simply have to have the latest items immediately, and allow the rest of us to enjoy the sheer joy of achievements like Search Engine. The Engineer’s was the last update, the delay building up so much spy hate in every mechanically minded player, and finally we can pay it back the way an Engineer should. With hundreds upon hundreds of rounds of sentry gun ammunition.

Revenge is a dish best served repeatedly at high velocity by robotic death machines

D.I.P.R.I.P. Warm Up

D.I.P.R.I.P., the incredibly fast fun and free Mad-Max-madness game you can install from Steam right now, closes out our list with the achievement version of screaming “YEEAAAAAH!” Ramming enemy cars might seem obvious, but DIPRIP servers aren’t a game of bumper cars. You have four weapons ranging from machine guns to mortars, emphasizing various non-zero distances of combat, and you’re far more likely to use your turbo to rush for a repair crate than ramming an enemy.

Which just makes those times you dare their fire to hit you and detonate a damaged enemy with a faceful of engine block that much more glorious.

KICKASSSSS!

While Xbox Live experiments with the idea of making players paying for demos (Dead Rising 2: Case Zero: When you know a game’s going to be popular you can charge before they even buy it Edition), PC players are getting entire games for free. There are dozens of excellent user add-ons for your favorite games, just waiting for new players to realize “Wait, you mean someone not only made my dream game, but wants me to have it for free? And I’m not going to wake up in a minute?”

Unfortunately people are insane. When they have to pay sixty bucks, they get so excited they’ll queue up for the chance to pay double that. When a game’s free they won’t even bother to try it. That’s why we’re using all our skills to promote these titles, and all our skills are in videogaming, and that means VIOLENCE! We’re pitting these mods in a deathmatch league, starting with D.I.P.R.I.P. vs The Hidden!

This kind of crossover only happens in videogames, which is why we love them

CONCEPT

DIPRIP is what happens when someone plays Mad Max and realizes “Every other FPS has done the walking bits.” It’s an insane kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland where there’s no law or morality but lots and lots of explosive petrol (i.e. the BEST kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland!)

Dystopian conkers is much more fun than the nut kind

The Hidden is a horror-action movie, and not the kind Left 4 Dead already did. Instead of an endless army of undead gradually wearing you down, you’re all pitted against one amazingly dangerous super-killer - except for the games where you get to BE the amazingly dangerous super-killer!

WINNER: We’re going to have to call this round a draw.

PICK UP AND PLAY

It’s important for any game to engage you instantly, especially when you’re running it through Steam (and could therefore be playing Counter-Strike instead). DIPRIP is the ultimate instant action game, where driving straight at enemies and exploding isn’t just fun but an acceptable strategy. The array of weapons is extremely intuitive, and if there’s any more understandable objective than “Be the last one not-dead” we don’t know what it is.

The Hidden isn’t as easy to grasp, if only because even door-handles aren’t, but it counters with a well-polished tutorial explaining the different powers of IRIS agents and the psychotic Subject 617.

WINNER: DIPRIP speeds into the lead, streaming flames and firing twin-linked machine guns.

LONG TERM APPEAL

After half an hour or so of everything being fine is when mad-science genetically engineered killers usually start to cause trouble, and this challenge is no different. The gasoline/adrenaline mixture of smashing vehicles to pieces is instantly entertaining, always fun, and easy to improve at, but lacks the opportunity to truly sharpen your skills as much as a full FPS. The Hidden rewards tactics and teamwork, and every time you get to play the invisible killer you’ll noticeably improve - and successfully wiping the enemy team, which involves eating their corpses, is so much fun it proves why humanity needs psychologists.

WINNER: The Hidden.

POLISH
This is where most modifications lose out, with overexcited casual gamers biting off far more than even a sumo wrestle could chew. This leads to half-finished kludges of textures with longer install instructions than an artificial heart and less customer support than the Nazis. It’s why so many players aren’t excited about modifications. It’s also utterly inapplicable here.

The Hidden is available from their website (which is also linked through the Steam store) in an automatically self-extracting file which takes care of everything, even adding itself to your Steam game list. DIPRIP turbocharges past even that (PS DIPRIP has turbochargers and they’re awesome) with an instant-install link in Steam itself.

WINNER: DIPRIP, the game so good even Valve want you to play it for free.

VERDICT

DIPRIP detonates the competition, the other players, and pretty much anything within ballistic range!

If you’re wondering why we haven’t reviewed graphics and sound, it’s because they’re both great and who cares. When the most advanced shooters are comparing polygon counts instead of play modes, it’s because they’re all so similarly grey-brown they only way they can tell them apart is by numbering the things. DIPRIP and The Hidden are both entertaining, original shooters - and in this deathmatch the spikified nitro-boosted missile-barraging DIPRIP has to be your first choice.

(Then The Hidden should be your second. You don’t have to choose one or the other when they’re both free!)

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.

The most badass family tree in history

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!”

Next time Activision claims mods are too hard, tell them Sid Meier disagrees.  And makes far better title screens.

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.

You could be playing this right now, for free.
Which is why its still selling on the occasional Steam sale, while they can’t shift Halo 1 even in the Best Buy bargain bin.

The X-chromosome seems to screw up computer games by sheer proximity, and we’re not talking about mutant Magnetos electrocuting the hardware. One’s fine, but two together destroy characterization, removes focus on gameplay, and seems to evaporate all clothing beyond the g-string grade. A while back we saw the five worst attempts at forcing girls into games, and it’s evidence enough to convince an alien court to vaporize every testicle on the planet.

This week we’re looking at the opposite: excellent additions which understand that maybe it’s possible for females to wear things which cover their midriffs, or even function like real clothes instead of sparkly wrapping for a T&A buffet!

1. The TF2 Medic

Frau Doctor is fantastic, a model which really recognises the unique style of TF2’s eternally-in-demand übermensch.

The Doctor will see you now. And she doesn’t like it.

The only problem is that since she’s doesn’t seem to be displaying any sex organs in plain sight, many modelers might have difficulty recognising her as a female. “It has a higher-pitched voice but nothing jiggles!” they wail, before going back to drawing nude Cheetarahs. It’s worth noting that such scribbles have a tendency to suck…

“I couldn’t fit the other set of stripper models in the screen shots” - actual description of a custom Specialists skin

…while this fully clothed character was created as part of a Masters thesis. Just in case the inverse intelligence/want-to-shoot-at-exposed-breasts relationship wasn’t clear enough.

2. Unreal Samus Aran

You want a strong female character? How about an armored warrior holding a giant gun WITH ANOTHER GIANT GUN?

Her right hand is holding more weapon than the Hulk scratching himself

A custom skin for Unreal Tournament 3, and possibly the coolest thing in it. As well as standard levels of Retro-Joy, the distinctive color scheme is a seriously welcome relief from the spectrum of “Brown, Grey, Blood Red and Bits of Black” dominating almost every modern shooter. And while she can’t convert into her morph ball here, neither has she been “upgraded” by people who grew up fantasizing over her first games into a skintight lycra showgirl. Unlike actual Nintendo games, unfortunately.

3. CS Female Urban

Another excellent example of clothing restraint is Counter-Strike’s female urban counter-terrorist, thought that could just as easily be technical limitations. Running on the original Half Life engine, any attempt to render breasts would have given her two extra bladed weapons, as well as the ability to cut parallel lines in glass by pressing against it.

We’re one white fill effect and an i away from an Apple advertisement.

4. Joanna Dark

If you’re unclear on why the Carrington Institute would enter their agents in an Unreal Tournament, it was part of a brave attempt to update UT with a Perfect Dark mod. Which would easily have been one of the best things ever. It was abandoned, but the skins were saved and are available for download.

In their defense, none of them look happy about this.

Unfortunately it’s more an anatomy lesson in Epic’s inability to draw character models thinner than an oil barrel. Samus survived above because she wears a full suit of armor, but poor Joanna ends up looking like a human/giraffe hybrid who got stuck on a taffy-puller before battle commenced. But it’s still one of the best mods ever, because honestly, anything involving Joanna Dark that doesn’t end in “zero” is one of the best things ever.

5. Have a little Faith, pal!

Possibly the best cross-dressing crossover in videogaming history, the TF2 scout gets a fashion update from gaming’s greatest freerunner.

Man, if you thought sad people complained about her chest size before (and they did)

We admit it’s a tiny bit horrifying but it’s half-way to something spectacular: someone sorting out a full Faith conversion for the Scout model. Unfortunately we might be waiting a while, as most modelers are still too busy regressing the last ten years of character development by putting the Pyro in a bikini.

Wrongness on more levels than Dante’s Inferno

An even better, if less playable, rendition of the runner is in Half Life - where we finally explain exactly how a headcrab zombie can be so fast. After all, the resonance cascade opened up portals across reality - all we would need is one in New Eden. And for a headcrab to hang around a red drainpipe for a while.

We’d advise you to run, but, you know…

Achievements are gaming squared: they’ve been mocked as wastes of time (by people who apparently think destroying the Covenant armada was a real matter of national security), but they take you into an incredible fictional world to do even more incredible and funner things.  It’s true that some are stupid, but the challenge involved in the more abstract examples couples to a incredible sense of insane satisfaction you simply don’t get when detonating Evil Overlord Number 3,223 (6,446 if you count ‘twist’ he-wasn’t-quite-dead returns).

The best example is Little Rocket Man from Half-Life 2 Episode Two - you have to carry an ornamental gnome all the way through the game.  A game that’s challenging enough when you’re using your hands for incredible weaponry, never mind when they’re full of porcelain garden figure.

Pictured:  Garden gnome.  Not pictured: Effective weaponry for combating Combine ground and air forces.

It’s one of the most painful experiences outside of stapling your head into a Virtual Boy, but James of PCGamer turned it into incredible fun (and produced the above image).  And one in twenty Episode 2 players have actually done it.

It’s all well and good when it’s your own time you’re double-wasting but L4D2 servers are an entirely different situation.  You’re hooked up with three other players and while a team taking on the challenges is fantastic meta-fun, wasting the time of a trio of strangers is a gaming crime up there with “Stealing healthpacks” and “Choosing Gon in Tekken 3” (the fighting game equivalent of blowing your nose on your opponent’s controller.)  Annoying others instead of playing the game properly is a simultaneous proof of

1. the fact you don’t have any friends to play with
2. the reason for that.

Here are the most awful antichievements to inflict on others:

He’s back and he’s bad!  How bad?

Bashing in undead-skulls bad, which is orders of magnitude more badditude than achieved by any other lawn decoration in all of history.  A terrific adventure for a willing team (and another one tackled by James, from whom the above image originates), but in any other situation you’re telling a desperate team of survivors “Good luck with the undead hordes guys, I’m going to cuddle a triple-fake virtual-statue-mythical figure instead of my gun.”

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Melee weapons are for when things get too desperate for firearms, and these melee-only challenges make sure that’s happening all the time.  You might think unknowing strangers are a great way to get this - after all, they’re using their guns to keep most of the enemies away - but there’s a reason over 95% of all Left4Dead games have friendly-fire incidents.  And kick options.  At least the original Left4Dead offers Akimbo Assassin, where the spirit of Chow Yun Fat can help you.

John Woo + Gun + Gun = Invincibility

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ANYTHING telling you not to shoot in this situation is not your friend.  It is trying to kill you, and at this moment you have 1000% enough things trying to do that.

Only available at the end of the Passing.  Also available at the end of the Passing: the chance to ask Louis “What the hell do you mean you’re doing okay on your own, Captain crippled-legs, you just lost 37.5% of your team on the same bridge we just cleared!”

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Here’s where you earn Stache Whacker:

And here’s your complimentary Stache Whacker checklist:

1. Hold still in a game where holding still means more Special Infected and special Horde deliveries straight from the evil Director.
2. Do so while shooting at carnival game instead of said Special Infected and Hordes.
3. Your reward for doing so is a loud noise which trigger another horde.

You couldn’t hurt your team harder if you hacked the server and set it to ignore their fire buttons.

Video games are the ultimate in capitalism, and not just because fanboys will queue all night to spend an extra hundred dollars for some fancy packaging (as long as you remember the magic word “Collector’s”)

Spartan Utility Cash Kollection/Extraction Receptacle System

In video games buying better equipment really does make you a better person, just like advertising’s been telling you.  You’re faster, stronger, more powerful and - depending on the level of choice and palette - significantly more fashionable.  You can tell you’ve joined a losing Counter-Strike team when they storm out of the buy zone with pistols, running along hunched over not to shrink their hitbox but to scan the ground for loose change. Gotta save for that AWP somehow!

In real life a better graphics card means smoother graphics (you might even be able to run Crysis), and a bigger monitor - well, if we have to explain what that’s good, someone’s reading this out to you and it would be cruel to describe the glories of sight.  But what other equipment enables you to blast better?

1.  Wolfking Warrior Pad

With a name like “Wolfking Warrior Pad” this should be the most tragically uncool contraption since the first fridge prototype caught fire.  The way it advertises “Fire Red” and “Mystic White” make you start looking for the Razer tag, but here’s the thing:  it’s absolutely fantastic.  Utterly indispensable, in fact, and I would no longer dream of logging on without it to the point where I use “I” in an group-voice-”we” article.

Using WASD on a standard keyboard means you have real access to less than half of it - how many times have you juggled keys, working out that you need to toggle grenades more often than the flashlight so the light source gets shunted over to T or Y?  Where do you cram all the quick-talk keys?  How many times have you been killed in the extra millisecond it takes to stretch across to hit rockets with “6″, before giving up and training yourself to hit “Next Weapon” five times fast?

The Wolfking arranges half a keyboard in circles around the sacred cross of WASD* with special attention to big fat buttons for the thumb - or as I like to call them, “reload” and “deploy.”

*It even works for obscenely obscure configs like my UOEK setup.

2.  The One And Only Awesome Mouse Mat Ever

It’s an absolute fact that every “gaming” mouse mat in existence is a money-sucking scam rendered harmless by how it only targets idiots.  But someone with a solid-steel serrated sawblade can alter absolute facts, and the awesome metalworkers at greensforged have brought the most badass gravity gun projectile out of Half Life 2 and into the real world.

The Ravenholm isn’t cheap at $50, but if you ever need another mat after getting this you won’t want to play games anymore - what with having the super-powered secret agent anti-zombie life that enables you to use up a 9″ circular saw blade.

(Greensforged provide a range of mousemats and you could technically choose one of the others, in the same way you could use three wishes from a genie to wash the dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner.)

3.  USB SNES Pad!

You won’t use it on Team Fortress, but if can’t see the awesome in a USB SNES pad we simply have nothing more to talk about.  Go do whatever important modern clicking you feel you have to, we’ll be over here playing Super Mario Bros 3.

4.  Razer Naga Gaming Mouse

We mock a lot of Razer gear, and they deserved every word of it and a thousand more for building the DESTRUCTOR GAMING SURFACE, but we have to admit that they’re onto something with the Naga Gaming Mouse.  Mainly because (unlike the “Imperator” and “Abyssus“) they stopped trying to think of scary names and new ways to say “detects movement” and instead actually improved the thing.

It’s obviously designed for MMO play (all they way down to the advertising copy where they stress its comfort when playing “for hours on end”) but those twelve extra keys could be seriously useful in any game (especially since they’re customizable, and double especially if you use macros.)  In a perfect final touch, the panoply of pressables doesn’t necessarily interfere with normal mouse function, as the now-standard “two thumb keys” are still in place further up the pommel.

Well done, Razer!

Dino D-Day hasn’t won the Lifetime “Gravity Gun Throwing BFGs” Award for Best Concept Ever, but only because that award doesn’t exist. And the award doesn’t exist only because we never knew that Dino D-Day would be invented, creating an impossible spiral of awesome which risks destroying the laws of logic by being a better concept than our universe was built to withstand.

This isn’t some trash flash web-garbage where the ‘funny’ title took three-quarters of the development time: this is a full Source engine game pitting a lone hero against the entirety of a Jurassic Reich. With a free demo already online you can go download it right now and be blasting dinosaurs within the hour, for free, effectively making the next sixty minutes an intelligence test. Because anyone who doesn’t do that is a fool.

All your old favorites from World at War, MoH, and Day of Defeat servers are present and correct: the Thompson, the stick grenade, and of course the Garand which - as always - musically ‘tings’ as it ejects a spent clip. What isn’t as always is that it tings because you’re desperately pumping those shots into a charging triceratops, which is exactly the sort of shakeup you need to make these weapons fresh after approximately one million World War II titles.

The only time it’s acceptable to NOT shoot a videogame Nazi.

Because this game doesn’t rely on its gimmick: it’s a real shooter, and if the demo level is anything to go by that’s short for “really fantastic shooter”. In a single level there are several modes of play: standard Nazi-plugging; a three-way armed misunderstanding between you, Nazis and a Triceratops; being stalked through a maze of ruins by a swarm of raptors; and a final battle against if-I-even-need-to-tell-you-what-you-won’t-get-it.

Now you tell me

Particularly pleasant is the tightness of the weapons: like Half Life 2 Deathmatch servers before it, the game really rewards accurate shooting instead of spraying. Yes, that does extend to dinosaur headshots. A phrase so incredible we’re going to say it again without even pretending to have an excuse: DINOSAUR HEADSHOTS.

You can also do this! (If you don’t want to do this please leave our site.)

There’s also real humor and skill in developing the brilliant concept. The website is stuffed with great propaganda material (including an announcement that Eisenhower is serious about sending only one man against the entire Dino horde). The full game will be released on Steam later this year, featuring a full multiplayer deathmatch (so you can see Source physics on something other than Counter-Strike servers for once) and all sorts of goodies. But don’t just take our word for it: watch this, and if you’re not excited by the end please check to make sure that you aren’t dead.

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.