Alien Swarm Add-on for UT2004 Showcased

Crusader writes "Black Cat Games has announced the release of Alien Swarm, their Unreal Tournament 2004 modification that features an overhead POV cooperative multiplayer battle against AI-driven aliens. There's torrents for both the trailer and the mod itself. Linux users are catered to as well: the ZIP package contains a shell script-based installer."

Comments

This game mod looks nice.

[antdude]

Does anyone know if this game has first perspective? I watched the trailer, and it seems it is like only from top view.

Re:This game mod looks nice.

[homb]

It's only 3rd person from above. That's a design choice, to encourage a more squad-level tactical experience.

Re:This game mod looks nice.

[DrEldarion]

If you want a game like that, play co-op in pretty much any other FPS out there. The whole point of this is to be an overhead squad-based tactical action game.

Sort of like a real-time multiplayer X-Com.

Re:This game mod looks nice.

[antdude]

Actually, I found out there is some 1st perspective but only in spectator mode. You can watch up to four different close players. The camera sizes aren't big, but very cool. I will have a ball playing this!

NS

[Anonymous Coward]

This looks like Natural Selection to me. Except not as cool because you can't play alien in this mod. www.natural-selection.org

NOT natural selection

[Anonymous Coward]

this is not a deathmatch mod, it's coop and single player. Its alot of fun really and pulled off very professionally!
BTW, no you cannot switch to first person mode, but that is very intentional..
Find a few people owning ut04, set up a teamspeak server and have fun with this :-)

Re:NOT natural selection

[PhrostyMcByte]

Why TeamSpeak? UT2004 has its own voice support.

Re:NOT natural selection

[NecoX]

Which sucks ass and doesn't have voice activation, and eats resources.

Re:NOT natural selection

[Anonymous Coward]

Although NS isn't just a deathmatch game, this game is nothing like NS. (NS players, I am a constellation player who's been playing since first release. Trust me, this is nothing like NS.)

This game, you control up to 4 characters (1 at a time, rest are either "hold" or "follow") in a top-down game. There's no building (although you can pick a deployable sentry as one of two weapons for any of your characters) and no resources. Really no "RTS" to this at all. More like old-school scrolling games although it looks pretty nice.

The graphics are pretty good although a bit dark in spots. Gameplay is fairly hard (at least for the 2 of us who were playing) and you'll probably want to take a smart rifle for yourself. (The ai players are fast enough with a regular rifle.) A flashlight or flare will also be a huge blessing.

There IS a slight RPG aspect to the game. Team members that make it through the level gain medals and skill points that can be used to improve your characters. :D

Quite enjoyable althoug long-term it may not hold your attention.

Definitely worth a download though.

Re:NOT natural selection

[Robmonster]

Actually it DOES have voice activation. You just have to edit the .ini fgile to activate it and set the volume level. They dont give you a way to set this up in the main game.

It works pretty well too.

Multiplayer troubles with the Linux client?

[SilentStrike]

Is anyone having trouble connecting to multiplayer games with the linux client? The game works fine in single player, but whenever I try to connect a multiplayer game, I always recieve a "connection failed" message.

Re:Multiplayer troubles with the Linux client?

[Anonymous Coward]

This happened to me. I installed the Jailbreak mod the other day and the game seems to act goofy like that when switching between unofficial gametypes.

Here's what I did to fix it. Load up the game, hit join multiplayer, select a normal gametype (DM, CTF, etc) in the drop down menu like you would if you were searching for a server to join, then hit back, and exit the game. Start up the game again and then connecting to Alien Swarm games should be no problem. It worked for me, but I am running on Windows. You might have to do this again if you switch between custom mods often.

More Mirrors

[CrusadeR]

http://www.fileshack.com/file.x?fid=5020

http://www.3ddownloads.com/Action/Unreal%20Tournam ent%202004/Mods/AlienSwarm

There's also a Loki Setup-based Linux package here:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/liflg/alien.swa rm_1.0-english.run?download

Re:More Mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

AlienSwarm_v1.zip:
Mirror 1 - 3ddownloads.com
Mirror 2 - icculus.org
Mirror 3 - Brody
Mirror 4 - nim-rod.net
Mirror 5 - Fileshack
Mirror 6 - Fileplanet
Mirror 7 - ut2003hq.com
Mirror 8 - extreme-players.de

On another note...

[Jaysyn]

... Jailbreak 200x is also out (yesterday) & is lots of fun!

Jaysyn

Patch

[dryan]

FYI, this mod requires the latest patch.

Pretty cool

[Fiz Ocelot]

Downloaded and played through the tutorial and first campaign level. It's very well done. A little too easy to roast all of your team mates with the flamer though...did that the first time I got a hold of it.

The top down perspective makes things feel like there's something around the corner but you can't quite see far enough....but it's beeping at you..gah!

hrmmm

[ShadowRage]

does this mean now we'll be seeing more
"KEKEKEKEKEKEKE ZERG RUSH!! ^___^"
on ut2k4?

Link to the Google Cache

[tacarat]

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:bA95RIAgNowJ: www.blackcatgames.com/swarm/
Sloooooooooow copy, though...

Mod Community Comes Through Again

[OmegaBlac]

I am absolutely enjoying this mod of UT2K4. Just played through the tutorial and will probably hop online later tonite. The AI for my teammates is average nothing exciting, they did what they were supposed to do. Will see how they handle the SP missions later on. One of those alien species moves very quick so its nice that the teammates are able to track them and kill them before they overwhelm your main player.

The mod communites that pop around PC games never cease to amaze me. Ever since Wolfenstein 3D & Doom I have been totally awe-struck by the level of innovation and creativity that mod creators contribute to well established games. These are the people that make games like UT and Quake have a prolong lifespan in the lives of gamers like myself. Congrats to Black Cat Games for an excellent mod for UT2K4 and just in time too! I was getting kind of bored with the same old onslaught, CTF, and DM. Now this mod breathes new life into the game!

Re:Linux users are "Catered to?"

[Profe55or Booty]

this was "insightful"?

jesus christ, so you're bitter because they're finally accepting you as a market and you whine that they're just "jumping on the bandwagon"? what exactly do you want them to do? either way you're going to be bitching.

/trolled, i hope

Looks like...

[galaga79]

A lot like that game that came out years ago called Alien Breed.

They have definitely been inspired by the movie Aliens, as the opening scene in the trailer is almost a direct copy of the USS Sullaco orbitting LV-426 except that the ship is called the USS Actaeon.

Are the aliens the same as that in the aforementioned film? If so they are asking Fox to shut down this mod.

Try the game.

[ReKleSS]

Although both games are conceptually similar to Alien versus Predator, Alien Swarm has a completely different style of gameplay. Personally, I prefer AS because it's much more original. For NS, I can just play AvP 1 or 2. -ReK

Re:Linux users are "Catered to?"

[ravydavygravy]

The parent comment sickens me - as a long-time linux user, I welcome anytime a company thinks of us when releasing software (commercial or not).

Jeez, you're pissed just 'cos you might have to pay for software every now and again? come on...

Re:better than UT's version?

[Neophytus]

If you're looking for an improved game of invasion try Fraghouse Invasion.

"It was Slashdotted from orbit..."

[celerityfm]

It was the only way to be sure...

heh

On a serious note-- is there a way to get the bots in single player to respond to voice commands? You can do it in vanilla UT2K4 single player, but so far I haven't been able to get that working in the Alien Swarm mod/tc.

md5sum problems

[Glyndwr]

Hmmmmm....

[~]$ md5sum alien.swarm_1.0-english.run
81a8f7e45c7a5e9cdb9e0 9ab4365ff25 alien.swarm_1.0-english.run
[~]$ cat alien.swarm_1.0-english.run.md5
2a372dcfae4621051 db0ee97af4f7c95 alien.swarm_1.0-english.run
[~]$ sh ./alien.swarm_1.0-english.run
Verifying archive integrity...Error in MD5 checksums: bcc7daefa6fb3c0a04789b9419afd7ff is different from c4fb1c402cd02027e3392292efa1538e

Charming! Four different md5sums. Wassup, doc? I'm just going to get the tar.bz2 from BitTorrent, I think.