ModDB Mod of the Year Winners Chosen

TheRealFritz writes "It's that time of year again and ModDB has released the winners of their annual Mod of the Year contest. Gamers who like to go beyond their initial investment have chosen their favorites for 2006: Point of Existence and Project Reality according to ModDB's Mod of the Year competition. The contest took in over 80,000 votes and narrowed the field from 4,000 mods to the Top 5 released and unreleased mods, as well as a handful of genre awards and the Editor's Choice awards. Perhaps it is ironic that the two top mods of 2006 are both for the Battlefield 2 platform, which has been abandoned by its developer and is notoriously buggy and difficult to mod. Despite these problems, both mods went on to beat out mods from the ever popular Half-Life 2 platform. The much better maintained Source engine is represented with the winners of the third through fifth places: Goldeneye: Source, The Hidden: Source and Minerva."

hmm

[Loconut1389]

Call me old fashioned, but when I hear Mod of the year, I think music. Am I the only one who has MOD inexorably connected with music?

Re:

[FlameSnyper]

Probably.

From one with karma to burn

[Travoltus]

A certified fan of Andrew "Necros" Sega (of Five Musicians) in the hizzouse. Nobody could throw down a joint like him, and nobody ever will. His mods were masterpieces. Some of Necros' music made it into video games, like Unreal (the original) Tournament.

The music mod community was the worse for his departure. There has never been an artist of his magnitude since.

The music industry benefitted greatly from his efforts in the group "The Alpha Conspiracy".

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[pwroberts]

A certified fan of Andrew "Necros" Sega (of Five Musicians) in the hizzouse. [...] The music industry benefitted greatly from his efforts in the group "The Alpha Conspiracy".

I read this and just had to listen to FM-RIFF.S3M again. Coincidentally, 'Aura' by The Alpha Conspiracy has been in the car CD player for the last week or so :-)

For anyone wondering what we're yabbering about:

Selection of modules by Necros [modarchive.com] (use MODPlug Player [modplug.com] on Windows)
The Alpha Conspiracy [alphaconspiracy.com]

We're sooo going to get modded 'Offt

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[Rakshasa Taisab]

Actually, when I see MOD I think of modular arithmetic.

Don't go claiming ownership of words, lest someone else decides to return the favor.

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[srodden]

Yeah you're old :) I remember .mod files from the Amiga days of my youth but TBH when I saw the headline I clicked expecting some neato case mods and was rather disappointed with the FPS junk!

Bring on the CaseModoftheYear compo!

Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul

[Travoltus]

I'm surprised that Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul didn't make Mod of the Year.

What it did to improve the already stellar TES IV: Oblivion was utterly phenomenal.

Re:Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul

[Ford Prefect]

I'm surprised that Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul didn't make Mod of the Year.

It would have helped if it had a Mod DB profile, so that people could have voted for it - you could always create one yourself. Oblivion is a listed game.

Conversely, two big Half-Life based mods, and one Unreal-engined standalone game, appear to have disqualified themselves from actually winning anything this year. Yep, Garry's Mod, Natural Selection and Red Orchestra - all previous winners of the competition, and all gone commercial in one form or another. Good for them - and more importantly, it makes room for young upstarts like me!

Although I did hear that explanation on their games radio show thing they had online - which in a demonstration of its levels of accuracy claimed I was called Adam Smith, and was French. Both incorrect. So who knows. Maybe MINERVA actually is deserving of a fifth place... ;-)

(I'd like to thank my agent, my family, blah blah blah blah *sob* blah blah blah *cheer* blah blah blah ad nauseam...)

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[Kattspya]

Minerva kicks ass. Hurry up and get the third part out please think of the children.

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[lolocaust]

Hey Adam, big fan of your mapping design.

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[samwh]

Agreed. I can't imagine playing Oblivion without it.

I play the "Top Mod", Point of Existance 2

[Kagura]

I was playing Point of Existance 2, the #1 mod of the year, no less than five minutes ago. It's an incredible mod, every map is new, and it fixes nearly everything that was wrong with just plain ol' vanilla Battlefield 2. I wouldn't be playing BF2 anymore if it weren't for this mod.

If you want to play on a populated server with mature adults who keep positive control of their server with a whole lot of personal integrity, check out the server at http://www.game-monitor.com/GameServer/64.34.165.1 34:16567 [game-monitor.com]

Jun Ji-hyun is so beautiful...

[DawnArdent]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jun_Ji-hyun [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Sassy_Girl [wikipedia.org]

Here's a theory..

[QuantumG]

maybe people write mods because they love the game/engine they are modding.. and so the only thing one has to do to get good open source games is to provide a competitive engine in a timely manner. Yes, only.

Re:

[KDR_11k]

Another important bit is popularity of the platform. In fact it's probably more important than the quality of the platform itself. Most modders want their mod to be played so a lot of them pick a platform that's already popular. Usually those platforms are games where the base content is already highly popular. Source is hardly perfect, in fact I'd say it's worse than many other engines but it comes with two very popular games (HL2, CS:S) and that means almost everybody has it.

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[Pxtl]

Well, a lot of modders are having fun with DarkPlaces and the other various Quake-derivatives opened by Id. Witness Alien Arena, Nexuiz, WarSow, Tremulous, OpenArena, just to name a few. Most of them are a little dated, but they all look solid. The (from-scratch) Sauerbraten OSS engine is shaping up pretty sexy, but it's only technologically impressive features are it's shaders and it's mapping topology - everything else is Quake2-era tech.

Wrong direction for your logic

[BeanBunny]

I suppose you were being intentionally simplistic, but I think you're missing an important point. To quote the summary:

Perhaps it is ironic that the two top mods of 2006 are both for the Battlefield 2 platform, which has been abandoned by its developer and is notoriously buggy and difficult to mod.

This is not to say that HL:2 was a bad game - far from it. And there were many fine mods for it, and for the Source Engine in general. But as one poster commented above, certain mods "fix everything that is w

Minerva was good...

[SanityInAnarchy]

Actually, I liked "Something Else" a lot better. She had a lot more personality in that one.

Correction

[SanityInAnarchy]

Actually, I liked the original, Someplace Else [hylobatidae.org], a lot better. (Minerva is a sequel to Something Else; Minerva seems to be distributed as a full mod, whereas Something Else was pretty much just a map for the original Half-Life.)

Aww

[pissedoffamerican]

I voted for SMOD:Tactical for HL2. Bummer.