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.”

If you’re impatiently waiting for Half-Life 3 but haven’t played Research & Development, you have no-one to blame but yourself. It’s the smartest game since HAL9000 played chess and just as murderous, and since it’s free you’re not just intelligent if you play: you’re dumb if you don’t.

The Half-Life future: so dystopian that ultra-nukes, alien autopsies and zombies are what the good guys are doing

R&D amplifies everything raised Half-Life 2 above every other first person shooter. It has the gravity gun, it has the Source engine’s brilliantly physics-engined environment, it has intelligent puzzles, and it absolutely trusts the player to get on with things. The first defining experience of playing R&D is pressing a button and then wondering if something’s broken, because it didn’t instantly unlock the next area. This game doesn’t hold your hand to lead you through scripted tutorials, making you wait two hours before you’re trusted with all your abilities. The first thing it does is shove you into a room full of dead bodies and fire, and after that you’re on your own.

It’s a brilliant contrast to mainstream games where a tough military commander entrusts the entire world to your magnificence, but then spends five minutes checking that you know how to work a gun. Not just because it dumps you right into the action, but because there are no guns. While most games space out their few original thoughts between repeating firefights R&D doesn’t have a single weapon. Well, none for you anyway - it turns out a civilian scientist up against trained military forces doesn’t always have mysteriously effective weapons training!

Luckily he’s a dab hand with mechanical repair

You won’t even get out of the first room if you don’t pay attention - charging straight forward expecting another Action Corridor With Pop-Up Targets (the standard model for modern shooters) means you’ll burn to death. You truly explore every area because you need to, not because you’re looking for pointless pickups the developers scattered around to make you appreciate how many shrubs they rendered.

An early defining moment comes when you hit a switch to drop a weight on an enemy truck and it doesn’t work. It turns out that things often don’t exactly line up with easy single-button press mechanisms to destroy them! You retract the weight and try again, thinking that there’s some kind of glitch, because we’re so trained in the art of “Press Button Thing Happens” that you genuinely think it’s the game that’s gone wrong instead of you, but it persists in not effortlessly doing what you want. You’re forced to look around, and that’s when you feel the most pyrotechnically intelligent joy you’ve ever experienced. Because you find a store-room of pressurised propane containers, and suddenly it’s so beautifully, pyrotechnically clear how you’re going to solve this problem.

Gas tank, meed Combine truck. Combine truck, meet gas tank.

Games like Heavy Rain and Silent Hill got good press for their psychological impact, but R&D features the ultimate interactive abnormal psychology experience. Because it lets you understand the insane evil scientists in movies. “Don’t breed nuclear-irradiated zombie monsters, duh!” you might shout at the screen, staggered that someone could be so stupid, and half an hour into R&D you’re not only doing the exact same thing - you’re enjoying it. Your descend into megavillainy starts with the ultimate in “Oh, I really don’t want to go out there” views.

Come out an plaaaaaaay!

The only thing on your side have is a mutated fast zombie so ridiculously lethal that tanks of lethal neurotoxin are jused to keep it sleepy and two tracks of industrial machinery so regularly lethal you’d swear they’re a Mario castle level. Nothing tells you what to do, or how to survive. You work things out yourself either from lack of options, or from finding out exactly how bad an idea going outside is (then travelling back in time by loading an old, not-dead save), moving the Glass Tank Of Death through past leaking steam pipes, bashing it around with a forklift and winch, and conveyor-belting it bast smashing pistons knowing that one wrong move will mean a “Killing You” race between the neurotoxin and the super-zombie. (The zombie wins, by the way.)

Containment Cubes: Making companion cubes look like pansies since 2007

And every second of your insane god-mocking scheme is worth it when you throw that box outside.

You finally understand every evil madman, because it was difficult, it was stupidly dangerous, and now all who stood in your way are on fire and in pieces! It’s so, so sweet and that’s just one moment of many. Never mind the time you suck multiple Combine troops out of reality by putting a prototype Zero Point Energy Storage Cube in a microwave.

Where they kept it

Where I put it

Problems, up to and including walls and enemy troops, are thereby solved

That’s a perfect summary of the game: ridiculously advanced physics combined with sheer fun for spectacular effect. And just in case you’re not convinced, what’s the only other first-person game without weapons you can remember?

Portal. Research & Development deserves to mentioned in the same breath, and we understand exactly how much that means. So go play it.

GoldenEye: Source is the coolest combination of shooting technologies since a Terminator was upgraded with liquid metal. It’s cooler than a freeze ray and even more fun to play with. It combines the two of the greatest leaps forward in multiplayer combat history: the N64’s incredible GoldenEye and the unstoppably awesome Source engine. The game is a labor of more love than most marriages, and more hard work, blood, sweat and tears than an orgy in a meat packing plant. Five years of work result in GoldenEye 4.1, the official result and an exe of pure nostalgic joy for anyone who remembers running around the Facility.

The first spinny-shiny logo we haven’t hated for delaying the game, but loved for its sheer beauty

The first thing that hits you is the sound. It is glorious. It is divine. It’s everything this HL2 mod has become in sonic form: an incredible upgrade to a beloved subject which improves everything while somehow preserving every drop of soul. We didn’t even know soul was a liquid until this team poured it directly into our hearts through our ears. We cannot state this enough: if you enjoyed the N64 version, this game will make you a fundumentally and happier person. You will be kinder to strangers because they live in a world with such beautiful things in it.

A work of art within a work of art

While most improvements are opposed by hardcore fans (with Counter-strike players still complaining about source’s sloppiness), the only ones who could possible oppose GE:S are the Dark Elder Gods. Because the sheer level of joy generated by this mod will delay their rise for at least a thousand years. This immaculate improvement is helped by how the original N64 GoldenEye has aged worse than a hippo carcass and, to the modern gamer, is less playable than “hunt the dodo.” I tried it recently, and it was like discovering that your childhood puppy was still alive but also the Boston Strangler, only more painful to spend time with.

Nostaljoy #1: The blue combat armor is more essential to your survival than lungs

The mod is so good that even the Egyptian temple is now playable. You can walk outside and look at the pyramids!

Even the caves have more than one shade of brown!

Not MANY more shades, of course

But best of all is how true they’ve stayed to the the gameplay, flaws and all. It’s the exact reverse of meeting a high school sweetheart at a reunion: they’re looking far better and everything you loved and hated about them is exactly the same. They’ve resisted any urges to make it beginner-friendly. If there’s an AR33 or a rocket launcher on the map you either know where it is or die, repeatedly, while the infamous Golden Gun has an entire game mode built around it.

The Source Engine means you can enjoy both liquid AND gas effects as you die a second after spawning!

The one-hit-killer is up for grabs, and the literally terminally underequipped players without it need to gang up and take the wielder down. Better yet, this isn’t enforced by team dynamics or score, so there’s brutal betrayals as players jockey for the ultimate weapon.

Nostaljoy #2: Your happiness at seeing the Klobb is almost immediately countered by remembering the useless thing. An emotional rollercoaster!

They even have Oddjob, and to the eternal credit of modern gamers I haven’t seen a single person using him on any GoldenEye servers. The upgrades are everywhere and inspiring - the first time I shot Baron Samedi’s hat off I was so happy I barely noticed that it meant I’d missed his head, or that one second later he didn’t miss mine.

You might recognize this new level as abso-bloody-lutely perfect to the movie

The mod is constructed from pure love somehow poured into a computer, with more polish than most major releases and more love for history than a museum. It’s free, and the .exe even auto-installs itself into your Steam games list. You have less than no excuse not to play this - in fact, you’ll have to work very hard to convince us that anything else you planned today could be more important. Even if you’re a heart surgeon.

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.

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.

We already know games are better than horror movies: they involve you, they provide genuine surprises, and instead of shouting “Don’t go down the dark corridor alone asshole!” you get to be the asshole.  Which is apparently better.  Where Left 4 Dead simulates “Ragtag survivors versus hordes of undead,” cunningly converting the fact there’s always an idiot on your team into a cinematically-accurate fact, The Hidden is “Heavily armed SWAT team taking down a single mutant ohGOD HOW IS HE KILLING US ALL HGHRHRRLLLLL.”

The titular “Hidden” is a half-invisible hybrid of Hunter, Predator, Gravity Gun, knife-wielding lunatic and just for fun he’s got grenades.  It’s fantastic.

It doesn’t always work out for them

The First thing you learn in IRIS is to look up

Can you see that faint blue trace on the right? Because they can’t.

There are two types of gamers in the world: those who know Valve are the best, and those who haven’t played Portal (also known as “fools”). Obviously we’re enjoying Team Fortress 2, excited about the upgraded Counter-Strike, and looking forward to Episode 3 (and its inevitable inclusion of a Portal gun), but which other games should be given to Valve?

5. Final Fantasy

Square Enix have defined what it means to be a JRPG, selling almost a hundred million units, but that definition is seriously skewed. They’ve perfected the apparently important fields of androgyny, pointless minigames, and playing dress-up with electronic Barbies, but they’re worse writers than Stephanie Meyer after headbutting Dan Brown. Which is odd, because:

- If you want us to Play a Role in a Game, ideally you would make the characters engaging/not retarded

- Every Final Fantasy game contains more text than a special edition of War and Peace with an insurance warranty.

The only place a row of dots have in videogaming is Pac-Man’s maze.

Just imagine: a Final Fantasy game where the text was entertaining and relevant, where the cut-scenes were as good as “Meet The Spy“, and where equipping a hat could actually made your character better at things!

+2 to resist fire, -1 to mmhhmm-hmm

4. Starcraft: Ghost

If you haven’t heard of Ghost, you aren’t Korean or someone who really cares about FPSes.

Claiming to like cool games but not knowing about this armor is a blatant contradiction.

It was to be a third-person shooter set in the StarCraft universe, which has absorbed more man-hours and energy than most of the real actual universe. It’s also more delayed than “Christ 2: The Return.” First announced in 2002, it’s been through around more development companies and release dates than most videogame journalists, and is currently listed as “cancelled” by anyone even pretending to pay attention to reality.

So give it to Valve! They’re rather good at this whole shooter thing, they’re great at giving female characters actual character instead of skintight lycra, and with them the eight-year delay will look normal!

Ghost is currently suffering a fate worse than death: a book-of-the-not-even-game

3. Kid Icarus

We don’t care who makes it now as long as somebody does.  And since Nintendo seem to be really really busy with, er, both of the other massively popular franchises they still actually develop, why not let Valve have a crack?

Give him a double-jump, tell him to kill vegetables and we’re golden.

2. Modern Warfare

Did you know that Valve release multi-million selling award-winning games, and then

- People can actually play those games online, and it works?

- Valve don’t publicly cheat and fire people responsible for making the games?

- The rest of their staff don’t then jump ship like freed slaves?

- Valve’s games only feature the standard number of online cheating scumbags, not a scumbag wrath as unto Moses unleashing an electronic plague of hackers on some kind of online gaming Pharaoh?

- They release new levels for free, instead of charging $15 for levels (including levels you already paid for in previous games)?

Because Activision don’t! And they (used to employ the people who) make amazing games like Modern Warfare!

1. Every EA Sports Game

It’s been a long, hard battle for Mac fanatics but they’re finally being taken seriously.  It’s all thanks to one company led by a passionately beloved tech-celebrity.  One bold, forward-planning firm which is the very definition of thinking different - and then doing things that aren’t just better than everyone else, but that its sluggish rivals wouldn’t even have thought to do.  A company with the very smartest staff, the most polished products, and an understanding that style and substance aren’t mutually exclusive.

Valve.

It’s half-right: the PC is upgradeable, but the Mac doesn’t fall over so easily

After years of suffering occasional half-converted cash-ins, ported to the Mac after everyone on the PC was done with them, Valve have announced that Mac gamers will enjoy future Steam games released on Apple products.  And that’s not eventually, after conversion, or “several years after even Australia get the game assuming they didn’t ban it” - this is actually at release, just like a real computer, because the Mac version was developed at the same time as the other systems, just like a real game.

Apple gamers have been - well, for a start even that term still sounds stupid.  For years Apple computers were programmed to tie two arms behind their backs in order emulate a Windows environment.  Specifically, a Windows environment with none of the custom graphics hardware most games require as standard (and now using half its own processor to pretend that was a problem).  It was like Linford Christie building a scarecrow out of stir-sticks, then tying himself to it so he could enter a three-legged race.

The single sexiest piece of hardware ever (including fembots, Decker’s Rachael, and the T-X)

But now they can play!  We’ll have Mac users on Team Fortress 2 servers, where we’ll see if the rumors that they’re more community-minded than the PC community are true (go Medic!).  We’ll have fanboys on Counter-Strike servers, an experiment in obsession to see if one soul can support two passions.  We’ll even have white, cool lines running on Left 4 Dead 2 servers - and players running for their simulated lives on the same.

When asked “Will people have to buy their games all over again?”, Valve did NOT answer “Remember that we’re the company who do things like three years of free content without subscription fees?” but they totally could have.  They also did NOT glare incriminatingly at Activision, EA, and other companies who release zero-day DLC or yearly updates in full price boxes, but again, they totally could have.

The first new release in the unsegregated online world will be Portal 2.  Which makes Adam and Eve having the first sex ever look like a boring way to Genesize.