thechineseroom
adventures in first person gaming
(the research page of dan pinchbeck, games researcher, uk)
Antlion Soccer
Sport and the Shooter
Dowload the mod here.
(You will need to be running Half Life 2 Deathmatch in order to play Antlion Soccer. Unzip the file into your SourceMods folder. Exit Steam and re-start it and Antlion Soccer will appear in your games list. Get Steam here).
Antlion Soccer is in many ways a traditional deathmatch multiplayer game - certainly the simplest of the three mods. It pushes the inherent sport narratives of Capture the Flag or Counter-Strike one stage further, making the killing of the oponent secondary to the business of scoring points. As with Conscientious Objector, this is done with the absolute intention of offering something which is qualitively different from the normal commercial deathmatch games without compromising player experience.
Antlion Soccer is incredibly simple as a game concept. It's soccer, with large green alien bugs that will take your head off if you get too close to them. Players operate in teams of four - Combine vs. Citizens in a homage to Half LIfe 2 (and the economics of using existing agents) in an arena with a goal at either end. Players are armed with a gravity gun - the physics manipulating device that was core to Half LIfe 2's gameplay, which they can use to push the Antlion's around.
Each goal has to be operated with a button, meaning team work is absolutely essential. Furthermore, even though it is possible to die in Antlion Soccer - in fact, it tends to happen quite a lot - there is no reward for killing the other team. What counts are goals, scored by pushing Antlions into the goals. Team work is fundamental to the game.
Much of this is not disimilar to existing multiplayer FPS games. Capture the Flag and Bomb Run scenarios also operate around the location of a device from one place to another. The difference here is that guns are removed altogether. In both the examples above, everyone not carrying a bomb or flag are armed to the teeth and primarily run around trying to blast whoever does have it to pieces - with some defensive and strategic play thrown in. There is very little point to this kind of behaviour in Antlion Soccer.
The other thing we want to explore with this mod is its spread. Antlion Soccer is based around an extremely simple map: a basic arena with two goals. There's also a live TV screen, so you can drop in and watch the match. We're releasing the source code and vmf maps (the raw models for building maps) with the mod and what we want to see is what the community of modders out there do with it - because you really can do anything. Will more violent versions emerge, that bring gunplay back into the game? Can we try and seed tournaments and competitions. This has happened before - Counter Strike started as a fan mod - but essentially, we want to see what players make of a game that replaces the traditional protonarratives of combat with something much more obviously sporting in nature.
Antlion Soccer runs on LAN and Port Forwarding. We are currently working on setting up a dedicated server.
| Dear Esther | Antlion Soccer | Conscientious Objector | Blackout | Project Staff |
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or via moddb
i said come in, don't just stand there...