Eyes Bleeding. Hands Shaking. Must... PLAY MORE GAMES!

I'm officially unemployed. Since it's only been one weekend, it doesn't really feel that different yet. Well, I did let my sleep schedule go. But I'll do that over any holiday or even some normal weekends. I haven't finished many more games, but I've mostly been playing multiplayer, which you really don't finish per se.

Partly by way of justifying my continued investment in PC gaming and partly because it had been a long time since I could stay up late enough to really enjoy populated server times and partly because I wanted to see if I could find anything to recommend for our next LAN party, I grabbed a bunch of mods (almost exclusively for Valve's Source engine) online. I'd heard about many of these before, but the source engine often crashed on my old PC (that one sound skipping crash they could never diagnose), so I never tried them out.

Zombie Panic! Source


The Pitch: Try and survive against the zombies. If you don't survive, become a zombie and hunt down your former comrades.

My Opinion: The game feels sparse. You spend a lot of time seeking the good weapons or hiding. Occasionally you can barricade, but you don't have Half-Life 2's gravity gun so you can't pick up anything heavy enough to be useful. I suppose that works for some people. I found it dull.

Synergy


The Pitch: Half-Life 2 co-op (since Sven Coop for Source may never come out :)

My Opinion: In theory, this could be fun. In practice, it's usually like Sven Coop, i.e. not fun. Some servers have ridiculous jumping puzzles that take hours. Some servers are playing weird variations on capture the flag. Some are playing the Half-Life 2 levels, which are way too short. There were a few levels I enjoyed, but overall playing co-op with strangers was pretty lame. Someone would occasionally say thank you for healing them, but mostly it was just a rush to the next encounter and the next set of weapons, just like Sven.

Zombie Master


The Pitch: Play an RTS where the other players try to survive as you destroy them with zombies and traps.

My Opinion: In a crowded field, Zombie Master is my favorite zombie mod thus far. It has its share of bad maps, the learning curve is a little steep, and it can lag the crap out of your system when a hundred zombies have been spawned. But the interplay between the zombie master and the players is really cool. On a good map, you never know where the next attack will come from. Will the zombie master try to put up a meat wall to block the team? Will she instead save those points and try to kill them with traps? Will she box the team in with slow movers, or harass them with faster creatures? As you can guess the replayability (again, on a good map) is quite high.

Dystopia


The Pitch: Armored warriors fight it out while hackers in cyberspace hack turrets and doors to give their side the advantage.

My Opinion: The models are very pretty. There are a lot of good ideas. But the linear progression of mission objectives and the maps themselves keeps the game always feeling like the same siege, over and over, just in different environments. Also the fact that hacking is clicking on menus, occasionally interrupted to fight an enemy hacker, is pretty dull. Computer defenses you had to actually fight / disarm could add a lot to the game. Dystopia's good fun, but it could be brilliant with a few more improvements.

Pirates, Vikings, and Knights 2


The Pitch: Hack, slash, and occasionally shoot as you fight over booty.

My Opinion: I've never been a big fan of hand to hand in first person, but PVK2 does it about as well as I've seen. And the game generally has a good crazy atmosphere (largely thanks to the pirates' powder kegs and attack parrots).