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Mac Daniel's Advice

Finding Mods for Your Old Games

Korin Hasegawa-John - 2002.07.16

Here are my picks for favorite mods and what games they work on. Enjoy!

File sizes and system requirements are included as well, since mods can be hefty.

Absolute Favorite That I Play All The Time

That would be Infiltration. It remakes Unreal or Unreal Tournament into a highly realistic modern war simulator. The new release, 2.87 (out soon, hopefully) includes lots more weapons (all modeled on real-life weapons) and new maps and gameplay styles.

The installer weighs in at around 75 MB, and you need a boatload of RAM - I recommend 192 MB minimum, as well as a good graphics card. Not low-end, but worth it.

Pros

  • New motion physics. This allows you to lean around corners and takes into account the bulk of your gear in how fast you can move. It also lets you crawl, walk, jog, run, and sprint - as well as go prone and slither like a snake. Very cool. Also includes stamina, so if you run the whole time you'll find yourself moving very slowly quite soon.
  • Realistic weapons. It's more fun to carry around a PSG-1 sniper rifle or a FAMAS assault rifle than the original Unreal Tournament's non-real arsenal.
  • Cool maps. Allows more cover and stealthy movement, as well as strategy, than the original Unreal Tourney maps.
  • Attention to detail. For instance, when someone is aiming a sniper rifle and holding their breath (for better accuracy), one of their eyes closes. Wow. Also, in the dark you can flick on glow-in-the-dark scope lines and when you look through a scope, the scope becomes partially transparent (like sticking your finger about a foot from your face and focusing on something beyond).

Cons

  • Big.
  • Needs a beefy Mac.
  • Takes a while to launch (a little over 2 minutes).

A Cool Idea that Makes Marathon 2/Infinity Looks Great

Aleph One. If you have Marathon 2 or Marathon Infinity and a GL-capable graphics card (anything from ATI or 3dfx), you should get this. For Infinity, the installation is simple: Just drag the contents of the Aleph One folder to the Marathon Infinity folder, then launch Aleph One. It allows a sight - very handy - and makes all the graphics OpenGL accelerated.

Requires a Mac with a copy of Marathon 2 or Infinity and some sort of OpenGL acceleration board. 40 MB RAM and PCI Power Mac recommended. 500k download.

Pros

  • Brings graphics up a couple notches. Textures look smoother, and there's now a sight, making it a lot easier to hit things. (The sight can be turned on and off with a key)
  • Fast and small. Can run on a 7500 with 40 MB of RAM and a 4 MB ATI XClaim 3D card. Does one thing and does it well.
  • Easy to install on Marathon Infinity.
  • Customizable. Many many options. Easy to customize and optimize graphics settings.

Cons

  • Difficult install on Marathon 2. Involves changing the creators of the Shapes and Sounds files from shp2 and snd2 to shpÉ and sndÉ, respectively. Use ResEdit to do this.
  • Doesn't change anything about gameplay. It just adds OpenGL acceleration.

If neither one of my choices really appeals to you, there are plenty of places to find more mods. Best places are:

MacGameFiles.com (under Add-ons): In addition to an extensive library of mods for almost every game on the Mac that allows customization, demos and shareware/freeware games are available as well. A neat feature allows you to sort by OS: Classic or X.

Download.com: Harder to use (search for Unreal Tournament Mods, for instance) but still has quite a few good mods.

PlanetQuake and PlanetUnreal: Both sites are PC-centric, but there are Mac-compatible mods available as well. PlanetQuake is dedicated to Quake III Arena, and PlanetUnreal is dedicated to Unreal and Unreal Tournament.

Ambrosia Software has listings of plug-ins for all the EV series games. Just look under the game and find the Add-ons link on the main page of the game you're interested in.

If you still haven't found a mod that you like, well, build your own! Of course, you'll need programming skills, 3D modeling skills, texture mapping skills, and maybe plot design skills (depending on how extensive your mod is). Still, you could do it, and if you do, please email me a copy!

Mods are a great way to add life to an old game. They're also cost effective, since most mods are free. It's a lot better than buying new games at $50 a pop, and I think they're at least as much fun. Happy gaming!

Not sure if you should upgrade your old Mac or replace it? Check the Mac Daniel index to see if we've already addressed your problem.

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