Hot Mods: Mods at the Movies

13 Mar 2009 at 11:40:27 by Spanner Spencer

It’s games that keep us entertained through the winter, but now the snows are finally subsiding, we can feel the movie season fast approaching.

There’s some hot stuff winging its way toward the big screen this year (personally, it’s Star Trek and (more tentatively) Wolverine that’s got me reaching for the popcorn), but that doesn’t mean it’s time to hang up the mouse and keyboard for six months.

To help us through those difficult daylight hours – when other people, who don’t know any better, start going outside and exercising and wasting time on holidays – we thought this week’s Hot Mods could get us back into movie mode through our gaming habits. Kind of blur the entertainment boundaries, if you like.

Of course, we could look at official movie tie-ins, but as everyone knows, they cost money and generally suck donkey balls. The modding community has been there to pick up the licensing pieces left by the micro-management hurricanes of film studio marketing for years now, and here’s five Hot Movie Mods we’d recommend to usher you back into the cinema.

GoldenEye: Source

http://www.goldeneyesource.net/



Golden Eye on the old Nintendo 64 wasn’t the first FPs by any means, but it was undeniably a defining moment in the genre’s evolution. It was here that we saw the potential this kind of game promised, and we saw that potential being put to use.

Where it really did blaze trail was in FPS multiplayer action, of course, and it’s that aspect the Team GoldenEye: Source modders have aimed to recreate here using the Half-Life 2 engine.

Even on a half decent modern rig, recreating an N64 game really isn’t much of a chore (speaking from the point of view of a slice of silicon, of course), so the team behind this mod have themselves a difficult, secondary task – adding to the Golden Eye gameplay without interfering with the feel of the original. Damn tricky.

But they’ve succeeded through simplicity and an underlying respect for the source material. GoldenEye: Source delivers the nostalgic experience by fully fleshing out the classic gameplay and expanding on the maps and events; adding in all the technological quirks that would have stymied Nintendo’s console, giving the whole thing a lick of digital paint and punching up the resolution a bit.

The result is the game you remember, on a far more accessible system and with bigger, better action sequences. Golden Eye rebooted.

The mod has been dedicated to the original team leader, Nickster, who sadly passed away at the far too young age of 27. His team have done his memory proud, however, so get online and give Nickster’s game a good go.

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