Speaking of mods, I don’t post enough about them. My addiction to trying out mods continues at a frightening pace. Recently I’ve been cycling through a few.

There’s the Half-life Source mod named BattleGrounds 2. It’s a bit obscure, as it has only a small amount of players each night. It’s an American Revolutionary War mod. I played the original Half-life version alot, and the new one is designed for Source. It’s even better, especially the far off battle sounds which are just as good as the ones featured in Day of Defeat: Source, and really add to the immersion. Full-on regiment charges are a blast, and pigsticking with bayonets is satisfyingly effective.

True Combat Elite is a mod within a mod. Return to Castle Wolfenstein had a cancelled expansion named Enemy Territory. The developers were a third party group and since their project was canned they decided to release the source code and a working version to the public for free. The mod was generally fun, but I never got too hooked on it. True Combat Elite modernizes the weapons, models, and sounds, and generally tries to up the realism.

The one that spawned this post is a mod that has hooked me a bit, as I play it almost every night for the past couple weeks. Project Reality Mini Mod (PRMM) is a conversion for Battlefield 2. The scenarios are quite similar but it has so many tweaks and changes it just feels right. I grew bored with BF2 shortly after buying it. It, like the other Battlefield series, feels very arcade-y. The respawn times made medics and resupplying an afterthought, and made dying a non-event. I mean, don’t we remember one of the key features of Counter-Strike, the fact that when you were dead, you were dead for the whole round!

There are a slew of changes, but the ones that I like, notice, and/or remember are:

• Respawn changes – It takes longer to respawn. The more you die, the longer it takes for you to respawn.
• Increased effectiveness when near a Squad leader and/or the Commander
• Physics tweaked. The first time I hit someone with a jeep in this mod I was laughing. The tanks feel more like big heavy tanks, the trucks move more like trucks, and people don’t flop around like they are paper.
• Weapons are deadly again.
• Iron sights and scopes only
• The commander fights alongside you, and artillery can only be asked for and set by squad leaders. The commander decides to actually pull the trigger, but cannot mark his own artillery.
• Support troops have a very effective machine gun, and are supplied by other troops, the way it really happens, instead of the reverse as in vanilla BF2. The assault troops supply the ammo packs, which are actually mini supply drops, you need to stand near them to resupply.
• Engineers get a lot of explosives
• Special Forces get a timed detpack. This actually works better for me, as I often died before detonating my packs in BF2. Now I can just plant and run.
• Medics have to be very close to heal people, and cannot just drop medpacks everywhere.
• There are many new play modes, but the most popular is much like BF2, except you have to capture flags in a certain order. It brings the battle to a concentrated front line which is exceptionally fun.

There are a slew of other tweaks, but the above are the most prevalent ones in my experience. All in all, it makes a very good package that is getting things right. It’s still in heavy and rapid development. I see myself playing this one for awhile. It makes me feel better about throwing down change for BF2.