Mods vs. Rocking?

OK, so a really clever title it ain't. But something occurred to me the other day; I don't really play ANY vanilla games anymore.

Not that I play a whole lot of games anyways right now, not with a full-time job and two kids. But I still manage to get an hour or two in a day, and a bit more on the weekends, so I manage to keep my hand in on 4 games. Chances are you've never heard of 3 of them, so let me educate you a bit on them and what freely available mods have done for me.

Going in alphabetical order...Europa Universalis 3. This is a grand strategy game, mostly real-time but with programmable pausing for people like me that have the reflexes of quaalude-addicted sloths. The best thing about this game? The ability to pick ANY country represented in the game on ANY given date between 1453 and 1793. Want to play as Austria? Go ahead! France? Sure! Japan? You bet! Baluchistan? It's in there.

Now, this is cool...but mods make it better. Manga Mundi Gold is a totally free, completely fan-written mod, using the tools that the developers in the game created (this is a theme you'll be seeing a lot of). It GREATLY enhances the original game, adding in a workable and realistic Holy Roman Empire, events about the Protestant Reformation, the Sengoku Jidai, and lots more stuff. It's not perfect, but I can't even imagine playing the game without it now...nor without the excellent graphic mods that I've found as well. And therein lies the curse of the mod: once you've got one, you just can't go back. And if something goes wrong with your game or your system, it's no longer just a matter of plugging in a disk and going to town.

Similarly, Flight Simulator X has the same problem for me. Without the additional scenery and especially the excellent World of AI mods that add almost 200 real-world airline AI's to the game, the world feels empty and lifeless...even though, in it's base vanilla form, you'd never know it. It's the best-populated and best-detailed FlightSim to date...but a few hundred people from around the world, working on their own time, have made themselves irreplacable for the unfortunate ones who find out about them. And I haven't even started on multiplayer yet! When Penny Arcade invites a major commercial game designer to write on their website, and all he talks about is VATSIM, you know there's something really special going on.

Football Manager 2008 isn't affected in gameplay by any mods...but with a new skin, real-world logos for almost every club in the game, and, most importantly to me, stadium background pictures of the home grounds of almost every club, I can't image reinstalling anytime this millenium. Hundred and hundreds of megs of hard drive space devoted to a game that will be updated in a year, and likely made obsolete. I must be insane.

And last, but perhaps the most powerfully...Silent Hunter 4. This is a subsim, based in the Pacific Ocean in World War 2. Now, for this game, there is a HUGE community of modders out there, people who are famous for modifying skins just to get the number of rivets represented on the hull right! These guys are certifiably insane, and, while I use a couple of gameplay mods (namely improved campaign layers), the mod for me that is the most impressive is the radio. Here's how it works.

In the game you can click on the 'radio' button, and, in the vanilla version, generic background music will play, and occasionally, war bulletins will be played over the radio, keeping you up to date as to what is going on. But, and here's the fun bit...it's quite easy to make your own stations.

90% of the users of this game probably toss their own mp3s into the folder and forget about it. But thank goodness for obsessive-compulsives! Thanks to their efforts, with a bit of searching, you can download not just period music...you can download entire radio stations worth of broadcasts, from around the world, all of it cued to the proper dates in the world. It's amazingly immersive to be cruising around the SW Pacific, hearing the static slowly fading out, and fading in, the voices of KLX Los Angeles, reading the lastest bulletin by World News Today (brought to you by Admiral!), or perhaps some Burns and Kelley...maybe even a CBC frontline reporter, speaking over the rattle of heavy machine guns. I've got gigs and gigs of this stuff...and without it, the game would just be a boring exercise, rather than a historical involvement.

And all of this is because the developers had the good sense to leave the tools available in their game. This can be dangerous of course; the Sims 2 and Oblivion are famous for their 'X-rated' content (side note: more nudity in games, no matter how blurry, is ALWAYS good), and a good naked mod is always good for whipping up the outrage. But game developers can't think of everything; in FlightSim and EU3 particularly, the freely and readily available tools are perfect for filling the holes that the developers didn't think of, the holes that 90% of users wouldn't care about anyways...but for that extra 10% who do notice, makes the difference between a good game, and one that destroys your life.

Maybe I didn't really have that much to say about mods...but the realization last week that I don't play any games WITHOUT them sort of struck me as interesting.

Giant Robots. C'mon, you think we come like this STOCK?