2007 Mod of the Year Winners

intenscia writes "The 2007 Mod of the Year Awards players choice winners have been announced, capping off a great year in gaming. This year titles which were influenced by the War in Iraq fared well, with Half-Life 2, Battlefield 2 and the GPL'd ID Tech 3 engine polling strongly in the indie games and released mods categories. Crysis mods, though still in the early stages of development, did well in the best upcoming category as indie developers attention shifts to some of the next-gen engines."

Not a bad selection

[Maserati]

Lots of straight-up FPS/RTS action. Beyond the Red Line (the BSG mod for Freespace 2) took first place in its category, and rightly so. the BtRL team has worked wonders in recreating the dogfights from the reimagined Galactica. Sound, voice chatter, environments and visuals all look Just Like The Show. And the dogfights play out like the ones on TV too. Gotta spend more time in multiplayer with that...

It is a shame that the Silent Hunter mod community isn't represented on ModDB. The Grey Wolves Expansion (GWX) is an amazing piece of work. One truisim of sim development is that most commercial projects aren't made up of enthusiasts (IL-2 Sturmovik is lucky to have aerospace engineers and pilots writing code), so commercial sim releases tend to have weak campaign modes and compromises to detail and realism. The GWX mod (now at 2.0) changes damage models, sounds, AI behavior, ship and aircraft models and textures and overhauls the dynamic world in which you run missions. Stock SH III campaigns get boring fast, in GWX you never know what you might run into on your next patrol. Oddly, it's both more varied and more realistic. And SH III always had the fear factor, attacking an escorted convoy is an exercise in applied terror: applied to you. Many SH III veterans will admit that their hands shake after an attack no matter how many times they hear depth charge splashes above them.

If you're at all interested in submarines or naval warfare, try it. Skip it if you get motion sickness, North Atlantic storms make for very rough patrols. SH III is still available cheaply, may still be available for download. GWX itself is a free download, check the www.subsim.com forums for links.