The Bottom Line

Issue date: 4/4/07 Section: The AT Wire

Media Credit: Derek Hidey Derek trying out his third-party Spartans in battle in Rome: Total War.

Video games are, without a doubt, one of the most manipulated forms of entertainment to date.  Gamers, programmers, graphic artists and writers come together on occasion to provide gamers with different ways to play their games.  Third-party customized games (mods) have a varying degree of success.  Some of them such as Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat, which were originally mods for Valve’s Half-Life, become full-fledged and endorsed video games that you can find on retail shelves.  These bands of minimum-waged, underrated and underappreciated people, together, have the ability to create some of the most unique and creative experiences for gamers.  The inspiration for these bands of modders can come from almost anywhere.

Movies and television shows are huge wells of information just waiting to be tapped by creative game designers.  The unfortunate part about this is that game software developers tend to obtain the rights to these wells and then produce a sub-par game that a majority of gamers hate.  On the bright side, this is partly why those creative minds among us work so hard to produce what those big shots over at Electronic Arts or Sony Online Entertainment couldn’t. 

I recently saw the movie based on Frank Miller’s comic book called 300.  I had seen the trailers for a while and was more excited than I was when my Black and Wonderful Chocobo gave birth to a Gold Chocobo.  Immediately after seeing the movie and loving it, I found the nearest computer and started doing searches.  The PSP game based on the movie looked thrown together and just sloppy overall.  We (gamers) can’t even trust these “professionals” to provide us with the ideal video game experience we crave.  How could we possibly expect them to deliver something of value to us when they are struggling to meet the movie release deadline?

Despite the fact that the PSP game based on the movie is lack-luster at best, gamers from across all genres are working to bring the movie experience to an interactive level.  For example, there are a number of small, independent mods in the works for Medieval II: Total War and Rome: Total War, real-time strategy games based on history.  Both games are very similar to one another with the only major difference between them being their visual appeal – Medieval II: Total War is significantly prettier than Rome: Total War.  At the current time, there is no single mod team working on bringing the movie to life.  However, there are a number of skinners, graphic designers who create textures that are placed on 3D models, and modelers, 3D designers and animators who create the models and animations on which the textures are placed, who have created their own unique units for both games that resemble 300’s depiction of Frank Miller’s Spartans.   For example, the best model/skin out for Rome: Total War was made by “King Louise Assurbanipal,” a mod contributor renowned throughout the Total War modding community.  Believe me, once you get these models loaded into the game, all you want to do is find a nice valley somewhere in Greece and just let the enemy armies crumble beneath you.

The original version of Rome: Total War, despite being historically based, begins around the year 280 B.C., long after The Battle of Thermopylae took place.  Therefore, it was up to the creative third-party map designers to create a convincing and appealing Thermopylae map for gamers to place their customized Spartans.  As always, the modding community was up to the challenge, and several different takes on the map design of Thermopylae were released.

Third-party mods and third-party content, in general, are things of pure beauty and creativity.  Games are, and will always remain, in the power of the gamers.  Game developers, however, are very frightened by the notion that ordinary people can create games and content that is beyond their own ability.  Therefore, developers are constantly looking for ways to suppress and eventually halt our modders’ progress.

“The thousand companies of the video game industry descend upon you.  Our law suits will blot out the sun.”

“Then we will mod in the shade.”

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