Fun Source Engine Games That Need More Love
Sauce is the best.
I am a bit of a connoisseur of janky old games, but Source games the most. Source, the engine behind Half Life and HL2, is accessible enough for anyone to use, incredibly janky, and runs FPSes very well. Though some insane people made HL1 into a Rally Car simulator.
There were a lot of fun multiplayer games on Source that lived briefly and died. Here are my favorites.
NeoTokyo is basically an album attached to a game. It has an amazing soundtrack that isn’t even played in game unless you select it. It’s a serviceable Counter Strike clone made by people who regularly watch Akira and Ghost in the Shell on endlessly loop. The visuals are fantastic.
There are also custom classes with special cyber abilities. The main mode played is Capture the Hostage. In this mode, they replaced the Hostage with a creepy Geisha-bot that has intel on it. There is a group that plays NeoTokyo regularly every Saturday, but they have been literally playing it for 20 years, so prepare to die a lot. Or just get the album on iTunes.
I am very fond of this game, as I played it religiously for a few years. It’s a fun cowboy team death match game, but you only have revolvers and other Western weapons. It has a unique feature where you can chain weapons together. I personally loved to dualwield sawed-off shotguns and knives, so I could fill someone with buckshot and then kill them with a knife to the head. I then picked up the knife and went on my way. The unfortunate thing is that the creator nerfed and changed certain weapons, killing a great deal of the player base. So enjoy playing on Mexican servers with 300 ping.
Double Action Boogaloo is an update of Action Half Life/The Specialists, which is an update of Action Quake, et al. You play cool action hero man and get points for killing people stylishly. Which means diving constantly. You also get higher points for using certain weapons as well. It’s fun but was mostly dead when I tried it last.
Do you want to play Left4Dead 2, but don’t want to spend money on a game that regularly goes on sale for 1 dollar and has been literally given away for free numerous times? Just try this. It’s super fun. See also No More Room in Hell.
The par excellence of cheap Steam game. It’s a game where you fight Nazis dinosaurs. Do you need to know more?