Mark Rein: 'Playstation 3 Only Known Console Thats Gonna Let us Create Mods'

In an interview with Gamespot Mark Rein continues his love affair with the Playstation 3, explaining that Unreal Tournament 3 is running better on the Playstation 3 than Gears of War was on the 360 last year.

Furthermore he said that one of the reasons why Epic was going Playstation 3 exclusive was because of the openness of the Playstation network' and that Unreal Tournament 'is all about mods'.

SIXAXIS controls will be used to control some vehicles which according to Mark Rein will be 'very natural' and even better than analogue controls. Other matters discussed is cross platform multiplayer and downloadable extras (which will mostly be free).

Flipside

Half-Life 2 is a first person shooter, right? People make mods for it involving shooting right? So just how is it that someone makes a Half-Life 2 mod that is a platformer centering around a schizophrenic nutcase? I'm not so sure, but I'm glad they did, 'Flipside' is the most creative Half-Life 2 mod in every way, from graphics to art to gameplay.

'Flipside' is a mod made by Team 3, you play as Hanibal Hildorf, a shadow puppet suffering from multiple personalities, one in which he percieves the world as happy, another in which he sees the world as evil.

Changing between personalities is completely up to the player, As you jump your way through Hanibals world you'll find that you need to change between his two psyche's, Hanibal as evil cannot jump high but can climb walls and attack enemies, Hanibal as good can jump high and his 'enemies' are cutesy animals that push him around without dealing any health damage.

Both worlds are quiet imaginative, while trees may be nice'n'green on one side they are eyeballs on the other, a happy nurse bunny is an evil nurse bunny drenched in blood when viewed from Hanibals alternate personality.

Heres an example of both worlds:

Yes, there are many gameplay possibilities in Flipside and many are exploited, it is a very unique game and undoubtedly one that deserves lots and lots of attention. Unfortunately some of the gameplay elements feel underdeveloped, jumping and attacking just don't feel right. Perhaps I've been spoiled by the likes of Super Mario, but it would have been nice to have a little bit more response from the attack key.

Download Flipside

Firearms 2 Mod is a No a-Go-Go

I can in part imagine what the Firearms team think and feel, after years of developing a mod it was snatched away from them by a bunch of over zealous 'fans' and now using the Firearms name are making a sequel to a mod they never created but stole.

The same can't be said for the Firearms 2 Team, who kicked off their mod in August 2005 by hijacking the Firearms Forums, FTP, and servers using back-door access supplied by our server provider, ReconGamer. Every single team member and most of the forum admin/mod staff were banned, and we lost all of our art source and personal files stored on the server. As a result, this website was rebuilt from archived sites. The server takeover didn't affect the domain names, so the FA Team still controls those. For a while, they redirected to the site of our follow-up mod, World at War.

Full Story

The developers of the original Firearms mod don't want to remember this gross past, (understandably so) they are moving on and making World at War, a Half-Life 2 mod.

What I don't understand is how the gaming community can allow this sort of behavior and even support it (yes people do support Firearms 2). While Firearms 2 may turn out to be a good mod it was stolen no less, if we took all legalities out of the equation and said that Sony stole Bungie and plans to release a second rate knock off on the Playstation 3 would anyone agree much less support Sony in that move?

Is it different that this is the mod community? Shouldn't it be even more aggravating to the community that such a mod is in fact profiting off the name of another teams entire efforts, even the original creator didn't like the idea of giving Firearms 2 to another team:

During this period, Zerk [creator of Firearms] consulted with the DICE legal team and learned that, despite having signed a contract, no legal action could be taken against the theft of intellectual property online.

I don't see how people can be shallow enough to say 'yes we support this mod because it looks cool' despite it being a complete ripoff of someone else's work, better or not it's stolen and if we continue this line of thought we could see more of this happening - more startup mods having their thunder snatched from them due to such and such glory hogs who think they know better.