Garry's Mod #1 - This'll Probably Only Last a Half-Life
I've always said there's no finer game to play (and write about) for Iron Man Mode than a sandbox game, and when it comes to sandboxes there's no finer sandbox than Garry's Mod.
It's so sandbox that some of it is, literally, a sandbox:
And while I don't know who this Garry bloke is, he's doing alright for himself, isn't he? His game has made him over 22 million dollars, which is pretty tidy considering none of it is actually his game. It's barely even a mod. It's a tool, at best.
I remember making a .bat file once which launched any DOS game you wanted right from the desktop, except with the colour spectrum inverted. Nobody rushed to my school's IT department to throw 22 million dollars at me for it. But that's probably because the ability to boot up Wolfenstein in crappy X-ray vision mode was the most pointless function ever created on a computer by anyone, ever.
But despite my inability to grasp how Garry's Mod - or anything with a name as goofy as Garry's Mod - can get so monetarily massive without being crushed by an End of Level Lawyer first, I'm of the understanding that Garry's Mod is really good fun to play with. I first came to this understanding some eight years ago when my favouritest comedy writer in the whole world, Chris Livingstone, created the Half-Life 2 webcomic Concerned: The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman.
(I hesitated momentarily to link to it since if you start reading it now, I'll lose you forever. But I always feel like I owe a lot of credit to Chris anyway, since I'm very much an environmentally-friendly comedy writer - by that I mean I've been recycling his material for years now.)
But yeah, Garry's Mod. You use it to pose Half-Life 2 characters and make highly acclaimed webcomics. Or something. In fact, you can do absolutely anything you please - using all the items from Valve's Source games (namely HL2, Counter Strike, Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress), you can plonk down live NPCs or dummy-like actors, glue items together to make contraptions, and use physics tools to manipulate them until the sun comes down.
Given the open-endedness of the physics engine, it has lead players to come up with some pretty creative uses for Garry's Mod.
Want to use Garry's Mod to simulate a zombie apocalypse? No problem!Want to take the main cast of Half-Life 2, give them derpy facial expressions and have them pose for a snapshot? Why the hell not!How about making a hundred-strong line of Dr. Kleiners dance around the level in a conga line? With Garry's Mod, anything's possible!And what if you want Alyx Vance to... if you wan... erm...
... What?
Jesus. Seriously? Is this what people are using Garry's Mod for these days? You people make me sick.
Let's leave the non-safesearch image searching for one day. It's time for me to dive right on in and start my own adventure... in Iron Man Mode!
As usual, I'll have to stop playing and abruptly end the blog as soon as I die for the first time. When will the end come? At the time of writing, that is uncertain. How will I die? Almost certainly as a result of my own buffoonery. As the old adage goes: give a man an inch, and he'll take a gravity gun and accidentally drop a six-tonne Combine airship onto his stupid, squishable body.
I don't have any semblance of a plan for this series. I figured I'd just act on impulse and do whatever pops into my pretty little head. Firing up the game, I'm given the option of joining a multiplayer game or starting off in my own sandbox level. I choose single-player mode since I don't want to risk my one and only life around others at this early stage. I'm slightly terrified of what I might find in a multiplayer setting anyway, given the image directly above.
I'm greeted by the standard sandbox level. I'm slightly disappointed that there isn't a Dr. Kleiner conga line emerging from the bunker, but as it is I'm completely alone and without any instruction. I can't quite figure out how to spawn anything into the map, but I don't want to run before I can walk anyway.
In fact, either walking or running would be rather nice right now given that I appear to be stuck ten feet in the air.
After looking up how to turn fly mode off, I check out the map. It's fairly small, has a deep lake in one corner and a few high-rise buildings. The interior areas are fairly basic, but will provide some nice spaces for combat when I inevitably try to simulate the Battle of Thermopylae with 60,000 zombies later on.
For now though, I've worked out how to create balloons! Adorable, yellow balloons!
Truly, I've become a God Among (kinda effeminate) Men.
Power mad from my newly-discovered omnipotence, I spawn a load of balloons in a pattern which spells out my name, but as you can see it's indecipherable at floor-level. I walk to a higher part of the map and look down, expecting to see my masterful creation appear to me like some kind of inverted Sistine Chapel ceiling. Alas, it still just looks like a vague jumble of neunundneunzig luftballons.
To survey my handiwork, I need to get higher. Using science.
I already know how to make balloons. I figure out how to spawn a bathtub. If you've ever heard of Larry "Lawnchair" Walters, you'll know where I'm going with this.
I hop into the tub and start adding lift, and in the process I somehow become the only man on the planet who can cause himself damage by colliding with a helium balloon. Hmmm. I've now got 80 points of health to last me the rest of the blog, and I've not fought anything yet.
I add six balloons as symetrically as possible, but the cast iron bath weighs roughly as much as - if not more than - a cast iron bath, so I have to add another seven hundred balloons or so before it starts to rise. One more balloon puts it into a stationary hover roughly a foot above the ground. Another one sends my tub into an incredibly slow but steady ascent.
One final balloon unbalances the entire thing and tips me overboard. Given that I appear to weigh as much as, if not more than, a cast iron bath myself, the sudden loss of balast sees my cleverly-designed aircraft zoom upwards at a rate of knots rivalling most rocket missions.
I'm going to need something a bit more air-worthy (and safer) to act as my carriage. Really, it makes me shudder to think I could have been up in the stratosphere right now in something as unstable as the bathtub. Scouring the item catalogue, I find a minecart. Perfect!
But that's enough for today, I think. I've successfully put a bathtub into orbit in only the first post, which is a first for the site (I think). We'll repeat this little experiment in Post #2. Here's a sneak preview:
Do join me next time as I find myself dangling at 5,000ft (and rising) from an upturned minecart with only a sliver of rotting wood between me and a gravity-assisted landing.
