Game(s) needed: Any Steamsource game, such as Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, or Portal. The Left 4 Dead games don’t count.

Today, we’re gonna go back in time. A time when men were courageous, women were masculine and didn’t have as many rights as they have today, and when a younger, college-less me wrote his first article for GameCola, about Pirates vs Vikings vs Knights.

I was originally going to check out another mod, but then I learned that this game is not only officially supported by Steam, but they’ve added a new class! So I figured, what better way to reintroduce my column with one of my favorite mods available out on Steam?

For the uninitiated, Pirates vs Vikings vs Knights is a neat little Steamsource mod where you choose either the seaworthy and rustic pirates, the berserker murdering PETA nightmare Vikings, or the solidly dignified and somewhat Catholic knights.  That’s it. What’s that? You want a story? Go read a book while you sit in a scented bath while you wash your vagina, you pussy! This is a multiplayer mod, about three deadly groups of people from three very different time periods, so the story is about as essential as a turtle in a House of Commons meeting.

No, the main attraction of this mod is the gameplay, which is balls-to-the-wall stabby sword wahey fun. PVK switches out the shooting aspect from Half-Life for some good old-fashioned head-decapitating melee combat. Instead of holding down the fire button until everything in front of you breaks, the game has you slicing, stabbing, and blocking in various different ways, and even lets you charge up your swings for maximum carnage. Each class even gets their own special attack meter, which you fill the better you do in combat. The Captain can fire an explosive shot, some of the Vikings can do a special charge move, and one of the pirates can stick his sword out and fly through the air like he snorted a line of Tinkerbell’s fairy dust.

Every character class has melee weapons, with a few of them having any sort of ranged weapon, and for the most part, the big muscular barbarian is going to do more damage then the small rogue armed with a crossbow, despite what logic might tell you. Apparently, the developers look at historical accuracy the same way a ten year old boy would, because I seem to remember the crossbow and black powder rifle ending the age of knights and traditional warfare; instead, anybody primarily using a ranged weapon is basically a free meal ticket, so they might as well glaze themselves in honey so that the Vikings will have an easier time roasting their heads.

The pirates, Vikings, and knights aren’t like your standard red vs. blue thing—they are all different and unique in their own special way. You can play as the Vikings if you like raping and pillaging various countrysides, or the pirates if you like raping and pillaging various countrysides on a boat, or maybe the Knights if you like raping and pillaging various countrysides with Jesus! Oh history, how I love you so.

The Knights have the Heavy Knight, the self-righteous collection of plate mail and hypocrisy who is pretty much the game’s tank, and the Assassin, a rogue who uses his crossbow, longbow, and stylish goatee to punish opponents from afar. Because the Assassin is the only primary ranged class in the game, most of your time is going to be spent decorating the walls with your missed arrows, and running away like a little bitch. Granted, when these two work together,  they have a distinct advantage over the other classes, which is hilarious since they get their asses kicked all the time by the other forces in history.

A knight is about to educate a viking on his theory of constant motion.

The Vikings come to the fight with  the Beserker, a mighty barrel-chested bearded man who goes into battle wearing only a loincloth to hide his massive testicles; the Huscrl, the one with the foresight to go into battle in full armor and carrying a shield; and the Gestir, the spear-toting cousin of the Huscrl.

The Beserker comes from the school of thought that armor is for girly men, and he blocks incoming arrows with his massive beard, which apparently has the properties of kevlar, because he’s got some of the most armor and health in the game. Not only that, but his special attack is screaming at the moon, which makes him fly off into a rage of dancing blades and decapatated limbs. There isn’t much to say about the Huscrl, really—he’s got a large two handed weapon, a sword & shield combo for when you want to hit something, and throwing axes for when you feel your opponent needs a laugh. The axes are hard to aim, you only get six of them, and they do so little damage that you might as well rush headfirst with your battleaxe anyways.

Finally, we come to my favorite swashbuckling, grog-guzzling, women-stealing pirates! They are the only ones with black powder rifles! They also have the lowest health, paradoxically, but we’ll get into that later.

The pirate classes are the Captain and the Suicide Bomber. Yes, that last one is pretty much true. I know the game might trick you by labeling the latter class as the “Skirmisher”, but the only skirmish going on is between kegs of gunpowder and limbs. The “Skirmisher” has a cutlass that does no damage, several flintlock pistols that do no damage, and a huge keg of black powder on his back that does ALL DAMAGE.  Despite carrying this on his back, he’s also the fastest class in the game, and the weakest. If you so much as sneeze on him, his bones will disintegrate before he hits the ground. This also means that your strategy is to throw your powder keg at your opponents, then dance around them and poke them with your sword like a fat kid on the playground.

The Pirates also have access to the Captain, who is equiped with a better cutlass, a blunderbuss that is basically a single-fire shotgun,  and an attack parrot! Yes, polly doesn’t want a cracker, he wants your fucking eyeballs. The best part is that, in the options menu, you can name your parrot, and thus begins the adventures of Muffins, THE DESTROYER.

YES MUFFINS YES! TASTE THE BLOOD OF THE PHONIES! THE TIME OF REKONING HAS COME! DESTROY! DESTROY!

As for the game itself, well, it’s damn fun. Not just fun, but DAMN fun. Each class is unique and special in its own way, the combat is fun and engaging, and other than a few balance issues, this might just be on my top ten list of favorite game mods. Even the ranged combat is fufilling, once you get the hang of it. If you’ve got Steam and a copy of Half Life 2, you have no reason not to check this out.  It’s a fun game, if a little unbalanced, and attacking vikings with your parrot will never get old. Which reminds me, let’s check on how Muffins is doing.

MUFFINS! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

You can check out the PVK website here. This mod is avaliable on Steam in the Tools tab.

Today we are taking a look at:

Neotokyo.

Usually when people think about the future, their thoughts are influenced by the sci-fi show they grew up on. For Star Trek fans, it’s a fun and adventurous future where everything shoots lasers and Captain Kirk forces some green-skinned woman to get her tits out. For fans of Mad Max and Fallout, the future will be a barren wasteland with humanity all but extinguished in the cataclysm that preceded it, which resulted in a lot of men wearing nothing but leather jockstraps while fighting giant fire-breathing ants. For Firefly fans, the future doesn’t exist, since Joss Whedon shows have a shorter lifespan than a gerbil in the tumble dryer.

But I personally subscribe to the idea that, in the future, we will still be the same aimless petty idiots we are now. Oh sure, I don’t doubt that we’ll invent flying rocket cars and machine guns that shoot around walls and eject chocolate bars instead of bullet casings, but the only thing we’ll succeed in is finding newer, sexier ways to kill people. The best part of this theory is that I’ve found a game that fulfills my fantasy of the future quite nicely: Neotokyo.

Neotokyo is a Steam source game that takes place in the mysterious far future of 30 years from now, and it stars everyone’s favorite xenophobic katana-wielding racists: Japan. They’ve woken up to the fact that, although making huge samurai sword-wielding butler robots to fight Godzilla is awesome, it isn’t exactly commercially viable, so the economy has fallen into the shitter. Thus, some government types start wondering where the good days had gone, when they used to exert military power over everyone else unfortunate enough to be born with a different skin color. This sparks a bit of a split between the Japanese special forces members whom want Japan to rule the world with violence, the JINRAI, and the people whom believe that World War II was a bad idea, the NSF. Thus beings a hidden war between the two factions that has them shooting up malls, tourist traps, and the occasional subway or two in search of some cyborg torsos with breasts…for some reason, the game doesn’t really explain that part. I just pretend that the Japanese special forces are all horny womanizing buggers who want a decent pair of tits around but don’t want to deal with all of that “talking” crap most boyfriends have to put up with.

OK, OK; in all seriousness, these “ghosts” are desirable because they contain military intelligence that is vital to the security of Japan. (My explanation was better.)

Oh, synthetic torso. Nobody will ever understand our forbidden love.

The gameplay is a bit of a drastic shift from the usual affair. In most first-person shooters, you’re a hybrid between man and Sherman tank, and you can take an entire clip to the face before even so much as coughing; Neotokyo throws that idea in a bin on the surface of Venus. If you go into this game with the mindset of, say, Halo, and run full sprint into the enemy stronghold gleefully spraying bullets, your corpse will be strung up and re-purposed into a nice taxidermy model before you can say “regenerating shields.”

The emphasis is more on making use of the lean buttons and tactical movements with your team members and the various classes you have access too, each of which brings its own unique flavour to the table. There’s the Assault class, if you’re indecisive and boring; the Support class, if you feel the need to carry around big shotguns and machine guns in order to compensate for your small penis; and the Recon class, if you are into wearing leather so tight your squad mates can see their reflections on your well-toned ass. The classes all have different abilities and levels of usefulness. While each has its own place in a squad, though, the Recon class can run a marathon while the Support class has to stop running every five seconds to chow down on a sausage roll, the fat bastard. But the tactical movement combined with the different abilities come together to paint a realistic view of what urban combat could be like in the future.

That is, until you discover that you can turn invisible.

Yes, the Recon and Assault classes have the ability to magically turn invisible with the press of a button! Well, more precisely, it makes you harder to see, because I still ended up getting shot up just as much as if I didn’t have it on. You could be invisibly stalking around, doing your best Solid Snake impression, when you suddenly find yourself occupying the same space as several .50 calibre bullets because the other guys were using heat vision, which every single support class has access too. They can also see you if you’re running, firing a gun, bleeding, doing back flips, or reading Sherlock Holmes to a bunch of underprivileged inner city kids. And why the hell does each one of these soldiers have access to one of these things? Do they come in cereal boxes in the future? Last I heard, those things are bloody expensive, and how come nobody’s found a way to counter that with a better stealth unit? It shouldn’t be that hard to hide heat signatures—just rub each of your soldiers down with coolant before each mission. That’s what that stuff is for, right?* Though, I can’t say the ability’s entirely useless, because you’ve got to know someone’s there before you actually check for anything. It still works; just don’t rely on it.

The fatality rate among the Japanese special forces must be pretty astronomical, because the game is extremely unforgiving toward the young recruits whom are fresh off the pan and filled with so much patriotism they’d probably stitch themselves up with the white-and-red flag when shot. And by “unforgiving,” I mean killed a lot. And by “recruits,” I mean newbies. This game is a big change for a Team Fortress 2 player to make, because there’s no way to heal, no respawning till the round is over, the guns are deathly accurate, and you’re sort of required to read the manual so you know which button picks up things and what button gets you killed, which sometimes is every other button. This isn’t really a strike against the game, but more of a warning to you. Here’s some newbie advice: Join a squad, stay in groups of two or more, and don’t be afraid to play it safe.

Get used to seeing this. A lot.

Overall, though, it’s an astounding modification. The environments are beautiful, the guns are sexy, and it’s a very interesting take on the FPS model. Aside from the difficulty, it’s definitely a game I’d like to see actually get published. Maybe this game concept could be Modern Warfare 3. MAKE IT HAPPEN.

Mod Score: 9/10

The holiday season is almost upon us! Like me, many of you are probably looking for the right gift to give to that person you hold so dear to your heart, but also, like me, you’re probably wondering “Hey, if I’m spending all of my money this holiday on my friends, how am I going to be able to buy a game for myself?” Or “My friends always get me horrible gifts that aren’t worth enough money to buy an ice sandwich! What am I going to do?”, or “How could I meet the astounding composer behind these amazingly penned words whom is probably a sexy and virile Canadian man that no doubt saved a puppy orphanage on his way back from the gym?”

To answer those questions in no particular order: Sell your body, sell your friend’s body, and download Pirates vs Vikings vs Knights, a Half-Life 2 mod available on Steam.

Now, for those of you whom just woke out of a thirty year diabetic coma and the concept of three-dimensional graphics gives you a great big stiffy, a mod (short for “modification”) is a game that is created using an existing game engine such as Source, as used by such games as Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, etc. Game mods and total conversions have been known to make good games great, and horrible games fantastic, and, best of all, they are free. This is perfect for me, because the closest thing I get to a new game these days is when the Girl Scouts arrive in the deadly trap-filled labyrinth that is my front yard.

Swashbuckler vs Berserk vs Templar features three teams with three very distinct classes, oh and what noble classes they are! You can play as the savage Vikings if you like pillaging towns of all their wealth, food, and women. If that’s not your bag, you can play as the swashbuckling Pirates! They were best known for…pillaging towns of all their wealth, food, and women. But not to worry, because you can play as the gallant Knights! Holy vanguards against all that is unjust whom were known for pillaging towns of all…their…wealth and…food…

Well, regardless of which historically inaccurate resource-stealing jerk you wish to be, the gameplay of Privateers vs Norsemen vs Priests is pretty solid. It replaces most of the guns from Half-Life with axes and swords, so there’s less of a focus on feminine girly shooting  and more on wholesome masculine hand-to-hand combat, or, rather, battleaxe-to-face combat. It’s pulled off surprisingly well. There are options to attack and defend in multiple directions and targets, while each class comes with a super attack of some sort. The weirdest one of these is the Pirate Swashbuckler one where he thrusts his scabbard forward and practically flies at you like he just snorted a line of Tinkerbell’s fairy dust.

The maps are also some of the best-looking areas I’ve seen coded into a Steam game, with huge sprawling arenas, as well as an attention to detail in the environments, as well as specific traps that give the mod a whole life of its own. Although, saying that it’s better looking than other Steamsource games is like saying that a sedan is better looking than a unicycle with a dead vulture wrapped around the wheel, so that might not be a good comparison.

The only gripe I have with the game is the fact that the Pirate’s flintlock pistols don’t fire bullets so much as they fire little rolled up pieces of newspaper covered in black marker. Seriously, it’s a wonder how the age of the knights was ended by these pieces of shit, because I was barely able to kill anything! There were several moments where I was close enough to a Viking Berserker to smell the homoeroticism on him and firing balls of lead directly into his skull, only to have him laugh it off and send my swashbuckler to the giant grog-filled brothel in the sky. I mean, come on guys, I know they haven’t exactly perfected the technology yet, but Christ, I’d be better off getting a funnel and throwing the gunpowder down the throat of my enemy along with a lit match.

But regardless, Cool Ranch vs Spicy Mexican vs Salt’n’Pepper is a rewarding experience all on its own, and it’s definitely worth the zero dollars you pay to get it. If you’re a fan of online shooters and are looking for a reason not to sell off your old Valve games, then Amputees vs Furries vs Pedophiles is more fun than several barrels of particularly whimsical monkeys.