The Gay Games of Garry's Mod

Gay Games aren't limited to just Warcraft 3 anymore, thanks to the infinite modularity of Garry's Mod, the Half-Life 2 source engine physics engine abuser and posing utility. Originally comprised as a fun way to fuck around with the Source engine in interesting ways (such as creating huge, physics-y Skinner boxes to kill yourself in or spawning fifty antlions to see how fast they eat you, or possibly a combination of the two), Garry's Mod has become a neat little way to make minigames and stuff LIMITED ONLY BY YOUR IMAGINATION.

In a drunken rage I bought Garry's Mod online from Steam, and it was only too helpful in complying with my need to spend money. It was so helpful, it even let me buy Counter-Strike: Source about 10 minutes later after I discovered that half of the objects and textures in Garry's Mod require you to have it installed. So, 30 bucks or so later, now I can just join a random server and all the files I need (for the most part) are helpfully downloaded into the computer and the Gay Games can begin.



Zombie Survival


While sort of crude, this mod was obviously made with a lot of interest and effort. The people who took the time to put it together are not just a bunch of teenagers dicking around, but zombie film fans hoping to re-create the experience of a horror flick in which you're one of the hapless living trying not to get munched.

The player models are all from Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike, and the Zombie models are all from HL2, so the whole thing has a sort of HL2 feel to it at first glance. You'll see a bunch of Alyxes and Kleiners and Combines desperately trying to barricade doors and other bottlenecks with sofas and tables while a headcrab zombie (minus the headcrab) swats at them and screams horribly. One player in each game is randomly chosen to be the first zombie who initiates the infection process by killing the humans. It might take him a while, as humans generally at first camp the poisonous green smog that designates the Zombie spawn zone to get kills to earn better weapons, but eventually some idiot will get too close to the slavering jaws of the undead and fall over dead, only to pop back up as another zombie a second later. Everything just escalates from there, as more zombies means more dead humans which eventually leads to a rotting horde bearing down on the last cowering survivors.

Zombies unlock different player classes as the game goes on and they whittle down the human side, allowing them to choose headcrabs, fast headcrabs, fast zombies, chem zombies, etc. Each zombie has its strengths and weaknesses, and the basic zombie never becomes useless. However, only fast zombies can climb walls and only headcrabs can get into small spaces (and, like tiny little crack spiders, are next to impossible to kill with a pistol.) Also, to make things more fucked up, zombies can see the glowing heartbeats of the living wherever they try to hide.

The best part about this mod is that it very closely follows the classic sequence of events in zombie films which lead to the complete infection of everyone in the area. You'll at first be hanging out on a rooftop, sniping away at the few shuffling zombies you see without a damn care in the world, when suddenly after a few minutes you find yourself trapped in a small room with 10 other panicked individuals all firing wildly at the stream of undead climbing through the windows. If one of these survivors falls and comes to life as a zombie, for the most part it's basically over. Even if you're the most loyal human survivor on the planet, the very second you become undead you're going to start eating your former buddies like tater tots, I promise you.

Score: 5 out of 5


Prophunt

In PC Gamer they listed this mod as the best Garry's Mod game of the bunch. I'm not so sure about that, but it is pretty fun for being so simple. Combined with that, it's also pretty polished, so it isn't that gay of a game at all. One side are the Hunters, brandishing shotguns and machine pistols and such, and the other side are the Props. Props spawn as scientists and have 30 seconds to find a random prop strewn around the map (A CS: Source map, there aren't any custom ones out yet) and hit the E button. Doing that, you instantly become a clone of that prop and are free to run around and try to hide yourself wherever you think you won't stand out.

It's fun to make yourself a barrel and try to sit innocuously somewhere while the hunters run past you, but it's even funner when they find you out and chase your ass around the map. You'll see combine soldiers chasing half-empty beer bottles, oranges, traffic cones or concrete blocks as they try to score a kill. If a hunter shoots an object that isn't a player, his health goes down, so they have to look closely at things that look out of place. Props can also use random taunts to give hints to the hunters.

The problem with this mod is that little teenage faggots like to play it and disguise themselves as the smallest, most hard-to-hit object they can find (like a money clip from CS_Assault) and jump around like idiots at your feet while you flail around trying to hit them. All the time somehow they're able to type "lolololololol" and eventually the game ends with you pissed off. This is the only real problem with this game.

4.5 out of 5


Stranded

The mod that originally drew me to the Garry's Mod scene is Stranded, a wilderness survival mod ('cause I'm obsessed) that puts you on a desert island with a bunch of other survivor types with nothing but your wits and a gravity gun to save you. The wilderness survival aspect comes from you having to eat, drink and sleep to keep from dying. You can forage the ground for seeds to plant and grow watermelons to eat, you can attack a tree for wood and rocks for stone and iron, and when you have enough resources you can build things like campfires, tools and objects from HL2. You see people building some cool stuff like little shacks and lean-to's, skulls on sticks and ramshackle gates to keep people away from their watermelons.

The real problem with this game is it's mainly pointless and the map never changes, so it's mostly a bunch of bored people harvesting resources and building things to keep themselves amused. Once you exit the server, all your stuff disappears and you have to harvest/remake everything when you rejoin. Combined with that, you have some people who've been playing on the server for years at a time and their harvesting skills are so high that they get like 100 wood from a single swipe at a tree. Then they somehow build a stargate and warp to a completely different map. I'm not even kidding, this is what they do. I can see them chatting about it, and it makes me wonder what the hell I'm doing with my pathetic shelter that consists of a board on top of two traffic barriers.

4 out of 5


Spacebuild

This mod expects a lot of the people who are playing it. It expects us not only to know what we're doing with the Garry's Mod tools (I don't) but to have a knowledge enough of rocket physics to launch structurally sound vehicles to other planets. Spacebuild's maps are enormous in scale, comprising about 10 planets which you can vaguely see from your starting launchpad, all of which are reachable. In order to cross the interplanetary void, you need to weld together an abomination of metal and random HL2 objects, stick a bunch of rockets to the back of it, get in and hold on tight. This won't, however, save you from extreme temperatures and the lack of Oxygen in outer space. You need to have a power plant, life support, heat shields, some other stuff I have no idea about, and tons and tons of free time in which to put all this crap together.

I have never actually been able to get into outer space yet, mostly because my brilliant creations explode or fall over or get fucked with by some other player, or most likely I just run out of interest. A bunch of important Spacebuild objects (like cockpits) don't work for me for some reason, replaced with huge ugly ERROR messages (which are physics objects in themselves) that make everything look like crap. Maybe if I can figure out how to make it work I'll be able to launch myself to another world, which would actually be really cool.

3 out of 5


Defend the Core

This game is ugly and stupid, presumably made by the same guys who made Zombie Survival, but still inexplicably bad. Some of the ideas are cool: you build up your base at the beginning with turrets and walls and shields and other crap in order to defend your core, then choose a class to play as as you assault the enemy's core while defending your own. You can be boring things like magicians or knights, or interesting things like the Gun Mage or Leeroy Jenkins. The Gun Mage is cool because you have a revolver pistol, but you supplement it with spells like fire bullet or bouncing bullet to make things interesting. Leeroy Jenkins you have to purchase with "silver" which is the currency for the Noxious Net servers (the guys who made the mod). You can also purchase a big stupid snowman head to replace your own, or maybe a traffic cone or bucket to wear as a hat.

Anyway, the game is ugly as sin and the gameplay is anything but smooth. People are running around and are incredibly hard to hit, and smacking the "core" with a crowbar as a weak Pilot (because they blew up your vehicle spawn points and piloting vehicles is all you're good for) while avoiding lightning bolts gets repetitive really fast. Also there are teenaged little psychos who will rant at you for not defending the core well enough (???) and Leeroy Jenkinses suiciding into you constantly, combined with a few other factors making it an unpleasant experience.

2.5 out of 5


Simple Games

Simply put, simple games are simple. There's footrace, where you try to run a circuit while picking up powerups and shooting the guy you're racing against. There's freeze tag, where you run around smacking people with a crowbar to freeze them. There's dodgeball, where you shoot bouncy balls at your fellow PE students trying to kill them. They're fun, except for footrace which is just stupid. Actually I haven't gotten to play freeze tag yet, but PC Gamer says it's fun so I'll just believe them.

Edit: The "Freeze Tag" PC lamer was talking about is a completely different mod from the one in simple games, so I guess I've never played either one. You know what, fuck simple games.

2.5 out of 5.


More Gay Games to follow as I discover them. If your computer can't run Source, give the fuck up and just upgrade.