The PC Does What Nintendon't: Modding Games

Since the Lode Runner lost levels appearance, I’ve been thinking about others games I’ve created levels for in the past. The list is not very long, most of it again got lost, and this time I’m fairly certain it won’t ever come back. Still, it is interesting to think about the concept of game modding in context of the platform I used to spend most of my gaming hours on: the PC.

Before the Playstation’s CD-ROM, there was no way to quickly modify a file on a cartridge to customize the game you loved dearly. And even then it took a few years until everyone got a modchip installed and knew how to crack open and alter an .ISO file. That’s not to say that the console side of things never received any modding treatment: thanks to the rise of emulation, romhacks exist, including the much-needed fan translations for games like the GBA’s Mother 3 I still have to play. The easiest way to mod a game is when developers provide the tools—which happens (almost) exclusively on the PC¹. So in a sense, the PC Does What Nintendon’t.

Let’s try to categorize the mods I used to rely on and/or created myself.

Map Packs/Levels

The fairly obvious choice here is to download new (un)official maps when you’re tired of the existing ones. Who hasn’t played a custom map in a shooter game? There are the ones I remember:

• My own Lode Runner: The Legend Returns custom levels (see above).
• Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield map packs (still online at moddb.com), including a favourite of ours called “old market” that had a TV playing with a couple insulting each other’s parents, akin to the official “import/export” map where the Formula 1 races were on. Splendid.
• College Quake was a local map pack that turned Quake into a first-person viewport of my wife’s college. I’ve been trying to hunt down the files but no luck so far. I presume that’s because it’s a gray area to walk around in a school shooting your teachers, even if it’s “just a simulation”?
• I also created lots of random Age of Empires (II) maps as the editor was very newbie-friendly but none of them were especially noteworthy.

The amount of love fans put into the creation of these beauties is mind blowing. I cannot begin to list all the amazing stuff out there. A fully fledged Heroes of Might & Magic III expansion, your average DOOM total conversion² that turns the game into something completely different, … I don’t think I ever dabbled in DOOM modding, although I did help port it to the DS. Does that count? What else did I use or create:

• Baldur’s Gate II mods adding weapons, NPCs, quests, mixing up the difficulty, … I have tried countless ones and the WeiDU Infinity Engine Mods are still the best.
• Flamestryke’s Wizardry 8 MM8 & item mods were top notch thanks to the unofficial Cosmic Forge item editor. She even added in textures from Might & Magic VIII.
• Custom campaigns of Warcraft III that turned into the hero-centric Defense of the Ancients, although I still prefer the vanilla experience.
• BioWare’s Neverwinter Nights came with a huge change: the Aurora Toolset that allowed players to create immersive role-playing modules themselves. I remember it even including an expressive programmable dialogue tree. I re-created my home town in it and remember putting my granddad in who gave you a quest. It was never finished though. Yup, you guessed it: lost in limbo. Pieter Spronck’s thesis was on NWN’s Adaptive Game Opponent AI and that nearly inspired me to pursue a Master in AI. Thank god that never happened.
• I joined a Tactical Ops clan at one point, which was a total conversion for Unreal Tournaent; basically the Unreal side of Half-Life’s Counter Strike.

Quality of Life Improvements

If you like playing old games like me but don’t have the original hardware, no worries, the community has got you covered. Most games come with some form of widescreen mod although some of them just… don’t work?

• Might & Magic VIII: Day of the Destroyer. I played through this at the beginning of 2023 with the help of the Grayface patches.
• Before Beamdog Studios dug up the Infinity Engine games, there was the community providing widescreen mods. Now, you can even play BGII on your Switch, although I have no idea why you would want to do that.
• The most important Oblivion mod of the hundreds of files at Nexusmods.com is probably the one that greatly reduces the bloom effect. The recent remaster shadow drop might have rendered most of these useless, but still.
• Is the infamous Hot Coffee mod of GTA: San Andreas a QoL improvement? That depends on how much you like… coffee? Okay yes, I took a peek, but only a short one! I took a longer peek with one of the nude mods for the original The Sims. I was 15, don’t put the blame on me. I’ll let you do the Googling for that one.

In the early nineties, “modding” your game by tinkering with configuration and sometimes even data files was often a requirement just to get things running thanks to the ever changing hardware lacking uniform drivers. That’s one side of modding I won’t miss!

Cheats

Oh yes, your wallhack, aimbot, hex edit unlimited live changes, password hacking and the like. I never cheated with shooters but did rely on those auto-gold pickups for Diablo II before that was banned as well. I can’t remember if that hack also auto-grabbed precious runes.

When do you explore mods for a game? During the first playthrough? Probably not; you’ll likely want to explore the vanilla experience first before going off the deep end, and that only happens if you end up really loving the game. It’s been ages since I’ve been that invested in a game. It’s a bit sad but perhaps also normal: having a family and a mortgage comes with responsibilities that claim your precious time, and having more money means generating a huge backlog of games yet to play reducing my motivation to stick around.

The urge to create and to experience others’ creations is coming back. I do miss being heavily invested in just a few games. My primary gaming platform shifted to the Nintendo Switch as well. Maybe I should get into Super Mario Maker 2…

retro   games  modding