They Hunger again

Logan Booker gets zombified by Black Widow Games' undead-themed mod for Source.

Mods are love. Buy a game, finish it, own in the multiplayer and then download a thousands modifications and do it all again. Mods extend the life of a game by at least a couple of years if not more, and polished achievements like Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat show that there's more to a game than what you get in the box.

Some of you may remember a Half-Life mod called 'They Hunger' produced by small startup Black Widow Games for PC Gamer Magazine. Players would take the role of a writer stranded in a deserted town on the outskirts of nowhere. As you know, bad things always happen to people in deserted towns and the bad things in They Hunger took the form of zombies. Hungry zombies. The mod was such a success it spawned two additional chapters, both gobbled up by the series' starving fan base.

Now, seven years on, the same team of designers, programmers and artists has funnelled its efforts into another chapter, this time for Valve's Source engine. Taking advantage of the powerful graphics and physics engine in Valve, as well as the terrific content creation tools, Black Widow already has 75% of the game done and it looks many times better than its Half-Life counterparts.

The new chapter is of course set in much the same way as the original, except this time you play a tourist. From the website: 'In North-Eastern Europe during the early 1960s, strange anomalies culminate with dead corpses rising from their graves. As a tourist recovering from a tragic accident, you seek shelter in an ancient monastery overrun by bloodthirsty zombies, and become involved in an escalading cascade of calamities.' Scary stuff.

Speaking of calamities, this mod (unlike the first three) won't be free, and Black Widow will be charging what it says is a fee that's 'just a fraction of other commercial games'. Considering the quality of the title and the legacy of the previous instalments, a small price tag is, well, a small price to pay. If this mod nibbles at your ankles, then check out the official website: http://www.planethalflife.com/manke/bwg/news.htm