moddb posts

There's no doubt that the PC game industry is moving more and more towards a digital distribution model and today another such service officially announced its presense. The ModDB.com web site, perhaps the single biggest online resource for learning about and downloading third party mods for games, has just announced its plans to enter this growing market.

The service is going under the codenam Desura and ModDB.com claims their service differs from others like Steam and Direct2Drive in that they give mod and game developers more control over how they share things like news, screenshots, movies and other things to the public. Currently the service is in a private closed beta stage and there's no word on when Desura will go live to the public.

A few weeks ago, Epic Games announced the winners of the second phase of their Make Something Unreal mod contest, which game recognition and prizes to mod teams that used Unreal Tournament 3. Today the game mod web site Moddb.com announced the winners of their annual Mod of the Year contest which covers the entire PC game mod community.

While there were several mods that were made from the Half-Life 2-Source Engine in the top 10 this year, the final grand prize winner in the Best Released Mod category was Project Reality, a Battlefield 2 mod that aims to be a more realistic military simulation that its source game. The mod was voted as the best of the year from both readers and the editors of Moddb.com so its the undisputed winner. Head to the web site to check out all of the winners.

Eternal Silence may not be the newest Half-Life 2 mod around but it's certainly one of the more compelling projects. We're always up for some epic space battles, which his what Eternal Silence is all about. ModDB recently ran a preview of the newest beta build (the 3.0 build, if you're curious) and gave their overall impressions.

It seems as though the space environments have been markedly improved, especially the lighting and shading elements. However, being a beta build means there is still work to be done and in the case of Eternal Silence the interiors have yet to be finished. It should be mentioned that indoor visual improvements have been promised by the development team, Crank Shaft, for the next beta build. It's all part of the mod experience and means we have something to look forward to in the near future. There's plenty of screens and even videos towards the bottom of the preview, so check it out if you'd like to see the game in motion.

Anybody who is a big fan of videogames will no doubt hear the phrase "Get a life!" sometime in their life. A group of modders has apparently taken this to heart, and indeed, have gotten a life. To be precise, they have released Get a Life, a single-player total conversion for Half-life 2. You play Alexander Zemlinsky, a subway technician with leukemia who wakes up in a strange laboratory without knowing what is going on.

The game has a slew of features, including approximately 11 hours of gameplay, 25 levels, 11 weapons, 24 music tracks, a completely new gameplay system, and voice-acting with subtitles. It's a rather impressive feature list for a singular mod, so if you're into downloading and playing mods, give it a whirl! You can download it at modDB, and the trailer is embedded after the jump.