So, video games mods, huh? I?m no fancy coder. In fact I?m no kind of coder at all. I can fiddle about a bit with very basic HTML, but otherwise I?m completely clueless when it comes to making things happen with computer code. I tried to learn a bit as a kid, but it turned into a dizzying swirl of things that didn?t make a whole lot of sense and the can-can music started playing in my head.
This is BASIC we?re talking about here, the same language we were forced to use in computer studies, so you can imagine the miserable, though musical, time I had of that particular class. As much as I tried, I couldn?t work out how to get the damn thing to work ? and I so wanted to know how it worked. This was the first suspicion I got that I?m a bit on the dumb side.
Still, even now, as a sophisticated ? but still dumb-ish ? adult, there?s something fascinating to me about the whole coding side of gaming. It fills me with wonder that they can put together strings of gibberish which coalesce in the characters and worlds floating around on your screen ? often trying to kill you. It?s something I?ve always found sort of arcane. I just can?t get my brain around the whole business at all; to the point where I?m almost Rain Man-style punching myself in the head. Nyaaaaaaaa!
Even more fascinating to me are those folk who crack open games and fiddle about with their innards, like mad Roswell autopsy doctors, rearranging and replacing the quivering innards of the game to come up with something different. Not always better, mind you, just different. I?m fascinated by this world, mainly because I don?t have access to it. I just hear things about it on the internet wind, whispered by those in the know or all-capsed by crazies who insist it?s all just the Illuminati or whichever organisation is flavour-of-the-week.
Modding isn?t a new phenomenon ? the early days of home micros had plenty of modding. To be honest if it weren?t for modders, if what I?m led to believe is correct (I refer you to my statement about dumbness above), a lot of games on the Spectrum and the C64 wouldn?t exist. There were also those who came up with ?pokes?, the quaint (and, let?s not kid ourselves, hilariously dirty) term for creating strings of code that by-passed the game?s functions to make them easier ? you know, a cheat: infinite lives, infinite time, invulnerability or infinite ammo.
They were great, when they worked. About ninety-five percent of the time you sat through the loading of your prospective game only to discover the pokes mangled a bit too much and it crashed or, even more infuriating, the game loaded fine, just as if it was running normally, which you soon realised it was. Someone, somewhere was cackling ?Suckers? to themselves.
Whether the game worked or not wasn?t the point; the fact was that there were industrious folks out there breaking open the code of games, prodding around inside and making changes. Fast forward today, and you have guys prising up the hood of a game engine and tweaking it in different ways. They?re adding their own signature to the game, and going to great lengths to do so, often creating entirely new features and areas worthy of the title of ?expansion?. It?s a shame Warner decided to hammer down on the Lord of the Rings expansion for Skyrim. It looked tantalisingly good.
There are even those who improve games. Our old, buggy friends Bethesda have benefited greatly from those industrious little modders. These guys have swooped in and covered over the cracks in games like Fallout 3 and the Elder Scrolls games after the company has left the games alone.
How great would it be to have that kind of resource on the consoles? We?ve kinda been left with still-broken forms of the above-mentioned games. Imagine if Sony allowed players to get in and faf around with the code of certain games? What wonders we could behold! A game of Fallout: New Vegas that doesn?t have a seizure when you go to too many settlements. How great would that be? Of course there would be the other side of the equation: nasty little creeps messing with the code and creating malware.
As it is we already occasionally get that with the PS3, like the evening I was playing Modern Warfare 2 online and suddenly the game seemed to decide that psilocybin mushrooms would be good in an omelette. No harm was done to the system, but it did kind of break my game when I was getting millions of XP for kills. I couldn?t really look at Modern Warfare 2 in the eye again after that, like I?d seen it get into a car for money.
We?re never going to see the wonder of modded games (outside of the very limited ways some games will allow) on consoles, but a man can speculate on the world that could be. As time goes on, I yearn more and more for the chance to try out some of the mods I?m hearing about. Anybody who?s seen Skyrim screens with graphical mods will know what I mean ? so will anybody who?s wanted to extend and enhance their role-playing by adding creative items and outfits. Maybe I should build a gaming PC. Maybe they call it the Master Race for a reason of video games mods.
Source: http://www.thegamerschallenge.com/tgc/video-games-mods/
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