My Complicated Relationship With Mods, Modding, and the Community

Thanklessly bringing dreams to life since 2015.

CONTENT WARNING!

This post contains sensitive material that may not be suitable for all readers. The material in question includes:

- Bad language
- Violence
- Mental health topics (grief, schizophrenia, etc.)
- Political topics
- Mentions of trauma

A Delayed Reaction
Beginnings, If Not Exactly Humble
Old Ain't Always Gold
Finding Gold in Them There Hills
Mods: An Evolving Art
One Doesn't Simply Build Engagement
War in the Time of Love (And Vice Versa)

A Delayed Reaction

Thought we’ve revisited the mid-2000s enough on this blog? Well, too bad, ’cause the world ain’t changin’ anytime soon. In what was either 2006 or 2007, I shuffled through a purer YouTube on my dad’s home office desktop computer, looking up random Sonic videos because I was still ingesting any media related to that series… but then, I found something strange. Somehow, certain users managed to replace character models in the PC port of Sonic Adventure DX, often introducing characters and super transformations from animated fan projects like Nazo (the most common examples had wild multicolored quills and equipment, none of which I recognized other than, say, Shadic or Perfect Nazo.) For reference, I didn’t even know SADX had a PC port at the time, but these discoveries were just beginning. Sharing the same ultra-compressed SD format and halved framerate was a video made on Windows Movie Maker that showcased “Team Dark Sonic” in Sonic Heroes, or Team Super Sonic with dark skins. Why did this stand out? That would be the usage of “Move Along” by The All-American Rejects, which wasn’t only the first time I heard the song, but it was precisely the brand of melodic punk my middle sister Liv lived on. You can still find this video, but it seems the music was changed due to copyright once that started being more strongly enforced… not that I can’t recreate it on this platform, of course.

The next modding memory that I didn’t have a clue was a modding memory took place around Christmas one year, which we used to spend at my dad’s parents’ house in Ashland, MA back when both were alive. I was on my laptop when I found a little something you may remember as Shadow Adventure, one of the oldest conversion mods for the game which only featured a Shadow model swap and a somewhat broken Palmtree Panic replacement for Emerald Coast. I was thrilled to find out it was available for download as its own separate game… only to realize that playing a Sonic game with a mouse and keyboard was a convoluted nightmare. Of course, due to it predating mod manager input patches, the camera would just spin out of control if I had a compatible controller to plug in, so… yeah, I’m not quite wistful enough to hop on the oversentimental “old games are better” bandwagon.

Drag your sorry ass between the decades to 2013, and you’ll find me repeating history by researching the details and origins of the DLC suits for Batman: Arkham City, which I was just becoming fond of. It was then that I found a couple of low-quality uploads showcasing skins that were never officially released—the first two videos to astound me introduced a desert version of the armored suit from Arkham Asylum, a brighter and bluer classic suit, several 1989 suits that mostly just colored existing suits black, and even the famous Batman Beyond X skin. This was a foreign art form, one that I couldn’t wrap my head around until I was able to master it.

Why bring these Arkham videos up, of all things? They were the first time I ever heard the term “mods”.

Beginnings, If Not Exactly Humble

Other than actually being happy and smiling, others would notice during my Exton years that I thought and spoke more mature than most kids my age. This might sound like a brag, but I was talking like a teenager, not a grownup, so I was still immature. Either way, both qualities of mine would change after I moved away, when I would lose any of my genuine contentment and start to talk like any other vulgar, volatile thirteen-year-old. I switched schools twice before my Chamberlain chapter began, and it was around this time that my interest in modding hit its peak, which was in part a result of me owning one of my first-ever PCs. See, I got off the ground with SADX modding first due to how notoriously easy it is to edit assets like textures and audio, but this was somewhere between 2014 and 2015, back when mod managers were comparatively barebones (Dreamcast Conversion was still a very distant dream), meaning I was editing the original files and hoping to god that I remembered to back them all up. While the exact order escapes me, my first “conversion mods” were SADX.exe, a sloppy and lackluster horror mod I lost after posting it once on some forum, and SADX: Trippy Edition. This second one was just as lazy, except with the occasional funny song replacement like “Witch Doctor” over Sky Chase. Aside from aspects like recurring pot references and green vomit covering the characters that proved I had no clue what drugs were, it was an MLG mod at a time when that obnoxious brainrot was king, in which case very few associated memes other than the Eddy Wally “Wow!” GIF still hold up today.

A good couple years later, I pulled an Elseworlds and created SADX: Rise of Batman, which featured Sonic characters taking on the roles of vigilantes and supercriminals after Batman’s death. Sonic became Batman, Tails became Robin, Knuckles became Nightwing, Amy became Catwoman, Eggman became the Joker, and Chaos became Clayface (the last of those choices was admittedly inspired, I will say); beyond the usage of Arkham music and Sonic donning the armored suit from The Dark Knight Returns in the final battle, it really wasn’t much better than the crap that came before, but it was a step in the direction of acting a lot less juvenile and a bit more creative, so much so that I eventually remade it as Rise of Batman: Redux. Every stage now takes place at night or during a storm, easter eggs and references to the games and comics abound, Big is now Bane as he originally lacked any changes, Gamma is fully Jokerized, and Pachacamac and Tikal were turned into Sonic iterations of Ra’s and Talia al Ghul, respectively. I did have it in mind to create Rise of Batman 2 for Sonic Adventure 2, which would have seen Amy as Batgirl, Shadow as Red Hood, Rouge as Catwoman, and Gerald as Amadeus Arkham, but work on it never started as SA2 is harder to mod than SADX. That and I simply didn’t feel motivated.

Now, if you’re coming here from my modding channel, you probably remember when I “reuploaded” what was meant to be my final upload during a very uncertain period, but in retrospect, it serves the sobering purpose of showing how much I’d evolved even then, and would continue to evolve. Minus the opening text and a Mystery Science Theater 3000 clip at the end saying it sucked, it was my first-ever mod showcase of the Arkham games from my long-since-deleted first channel, that being the low-effort first chapter of the bizarre House vs. Kyu gimmick I keep bringing back for some reason. If you’ve seen it, you must’ve noticed that not only was my speech impediment far more prominent, but my language was just overall more crass and obnoxious. Granted, if you were wondering whether I planned on finishing my “Looks like she wants some…” line at the end with something very different from a clip of Young the Giant’s “Cough Syrup” music video, well… no. I always planned on using that snippet. I wasn’t quite immature enough to go the filthy route. Anyhow, I later made a lighthearted follow-up to this video by rereleasing the ancient long-lost showcase for SADX: Trippy Edition, which I found on the same recovered hard drive as the House vs. Kyu video. Where that hard drive is now, I do not know, but should I dig it up again, stay tuned for more self-humiliation!

Old Ain’t Always Gold

Speaking of House vs. Kyu, not only would that be far from the final mod video of its kind on the same channel, but it demonstrated my at-the-time raw skill in the two fundamental methods of Arkham modding before they were rendered outdated in recent years: TexMod and mesh-swapping. The former acted as an unofficial game launcher from which you could (a) load the game with added keybinds that allowed you to cycle through and extract textures as highlighted in green, (b) build extracted textures into a .tpf file, or (c) launch the game with one or more TPFs applied. As for mesh-swapping, recent breakthroughs have left it nearly as pointless as TexMod, but it involves the usage of console commands to copy and paste preloaded meshes over others, most commonly those of NPCs and other characters over those of the one you’re playing as. You set a keybind to execute a text file in or outside the main executable’s directory, press it to copy the meshes from the current scene as entered in the text file, and mash it like Trump on the “bomb Iran” button while the game reloads until the meshes are applied. Learning to do this for the first time was highly unfulfilling until the magical moment it worked—I started off with playing as Ra’s in Arkham City this way—and I may have gotten just a kiss too confident in my modding abilities as a result. See, I proceeded to release separate packs of my own batsuit TexMods based on comic and film suits, respectively, and boy, oh, boy, did they suck. I then made a “””””short film””””” titled PRISON-BREAK in which I completed the processing center intro sequence as several reskinned character mesh-swaps, and boy, oh, boy, did it suck. Finally, I shared a mega-pack of character TexMods and mesh-swaps from Deadpool and Darth Vader to Jeff the Killer and Patrick Stewart—not to mention the guys I knew in school at the time—and boy, oh, boy, did they all suck. For the record, I have the folder containing all these mods open as I write this, and the least demoralizing aspect is seeing the earliest stages of my comic series ElectroNuke recreated. This includes an embarrassingly bad Yoko with haunting anime eyes scribbled over Talia’s face (as of now, ElectroNuke combines several ’90s and 2010s DC art styles rather than going full anime) and Elias before he went from a blatant self-insert to a flawed and original protagonist. This was also before The ElectroNuke and either of his partners were fully realized, by the way, and nothing I tell you in words can sum up the sheer lack of quality.

The images you’re about to see are ten years old and unusually disturbing.

When it came to House vs. Kyu, it was a combination of both methods, namely my fight against a retextured Harley during her DLC as Bruce Wayne’s retextured mesh copied over Robin’s. Did I manage to make him look remotely close to Dr. House? Well, considering I tried to do so from memory alone… nope, he still looked terrible, thanks in part to the giant pretzel stick he was holding instead of his cool flame-patterned cane. The kindest thing I can say about it is that it was a step-up from the painful MLG meme edits that could not have possibly come from the mind of the same person. I refuse to believe it. It was also around the time I’d grown up just enough to record my first thorough evisceration of HuniePop, and after all, the start of my modding channel a few uploads later, while not good, was another stepping stone on the arduous path to who I am today. I turned the Batman, Inc. suit into a second version of the ElectroNuke batsuit from my Arkham City character pack (I went on to make one such suit for each game, as well as for other franchises like an ElectroNuke Mandalorian in EA’s Star Wars: Battlefront II), a mid-quality Deadpool skin two-pack for Nightwing, halfway decent skin packs based off The Long Halloween and ’60s TV Batman, and even recreations of the VanossGaming crew because some corrupted iteration of me watched them regularly. At least Vanoss himself had a fairly high bar as far as comedy went.

Oh, and some City Escape video I made earned over a million views. I guess.

Finding Gold in Them There Hills

Bad news: I was the target of bullying and emotional abuse while my family’s lives went on. Good news: the PlayStation-exclusive Joker DLC for Arkham Asylum and Knightfall DLC for Arkham Origins were unofficially ported to PC! That balances it out in my book! When the Scarecrow Nightmare challenges for Arkham Knight will receive the same treatment, I do not know, but as you’ll see, recent advancements have made that day feel closer than ever. Funny enough, I was really starting to learn what SA2 modding had to offer at the same time that Asylum, Origins, and Knight were all covered on my channel for the first time, and sure enough, it didn’t take long for mesh-swapping in the final Arkham game (as of 2016) to become the new norm. Of course, between making easter egg and beta secret videos for both Adventure games, unearthing yet somehow underutilizing the magic of Action Replay and Gecko codes through Dolphin Emulator, and turning Arkham Knight into a first-person experience akin to Arkham VR, it inevitably dawned on me that I couldn’t stay limited to Sonic and Batman games for much longer. You know what that means!

Launching GTA V to have Batman get a lapdance while Sonic rains blood and brimstone down on his road to Mount Chiliad. Hey, to make a school like Chamberlain less miserable, you take what you can get.

It’s only natural for that game to join the modded library, and this would later be followed by Smash Bros. Brawl, Mafia II, Gmod, and others; besides, I’d be lying if I said videos like Batman’s Family Therapy Session and What Azrael Did After Arkham Knight didn’t hold up as still being somewhat funny. Granted, sometime before the long-awaited watershed that was the release of Dreamcast Conversion for SADX, I decided to take a gamble and see what modern Sonic had in store… which is to say I played the one true Shadow Generations (literally just a playable Shadow mod), a creepypasta conversion mod, and Episode Metal for Generations before taking a healthy two-year break until the first Sonic Forces video. What I did squeeze in between them many times, however, was none other than Sonic World, which meant something radically different to me at the time from what it does now. From what I can remember, it was still in Release 7, as I would move on to showcase Release 8 and then Release 9 even later. Of course, texture editing did simultaneously become possible in Arkham Knight, if indeed using a different program called Resorep that required the automatic unpacking of textures for which mipmaps of every size had to be edited. You heard that right. Every texture size from 128×128 to 4096×4096 had to be loaded by getting nice, long, detailed looks at your chosen subject from every angle. It’s no wonder why I only made skins for that game sporadically, with modders like TheEspio001 and CapLagRobin even being kind enough to praise examples like Blackest Night Batman and The Punisher, respectively. As for Sinestro Corps Scarecrow, there’s really only one sequence from that showcase worth watching.

Now, it should be noted that my PC game library almost never gets added onto—recent exceptions are the genuinely impressive skate. remake and the former Xbox One launch title Sunset Overdrive, the latter of which I get to have another vibrant and chaotic blast with in more ways than one after eleven long years—and mods are a critical reason for that. Older games like The Sims 3 never truly get old with the right mods (call it cliché, but Sims 4 never quite reached the same entertainment factor, even with mods installed), like using the pose player to screengrab a more faithful Dr. House alongside his buddy Wilson as they commit battery and assault on Kyu’s entire household. And maybe sometimes set the racist brat on fire with the Disasters & Blessings mod, it depends on my mindset in the moment. You have Smash Bros. Melee, for which v1.0 of the Akaneia Build added Tails to the roster so he and Sonic can bring an infamous prerelease magazine hoax to life, plus the more or less perfect expansion for Super Mario Sunshine in the form of Super Mario Eclipse. You can start with the abilities to travel between worlds via added pathways called “junctions” and obtain multiple shine sprites in each world without interruption, but vast portions of Isle Delfino are remodeled en masse to include a plethora of worlds so faithful, well-designed, and flourishing with both fun missions and collectibles that it would, without exaggeration, lead you to think it was an official expansion. These include known Mario locations like Peach’s Castle (it essentially becomes a direct Mario 64 sequel once you complete the game) and Daisy Cruiser as well as worlds like Erto Rock and Warship Island that otherwise act as unused world names, meaning the Eclipse Team had to design such brilliant landscapes off lines of text from the game’s files alone! The soundtrack is held to the exact same quality standards, the scrapped Delfino Express is restored in all its glory, cutscenes are animated in a way that almost matches the game’s FMVs, the premise of making Hotel Lacrima a hideout for the Pianta Mafia is one of the greatest concepts brought to a Mario game despite not even being official, and there is a goddamn SpongeBob movie reference at Lighthouse Island. What makes it beautiful is that it’s just what seven-year-old me would’ve added if he could. Eclipse even makes Luigi and Il Piantissimo playable, but although Mario’s low HP voice clips were cleverly replaced and remapped for Luigi as adding voices wasn’t possible, some like his damage and victory lines haven’t been, meaning you hear him say a lot of Mario’s lines. Maybe we just need to wait for another update.

Then, there’s Minecraft. I’ve never spoken much about this game, but not for a lack of anything worth saying. I’m far from obsessed with it, but it’s no doubt a pleasant and charming little experience (well, okay, maybe not little), and it’s a great thing it became so popular, as it’s essentially building with LEGOs without blowing hundreds of bucks. It’s the simplistic charm of it that made hearing about the movie so frustrating, more than anything for facets like Jack Black and the “Chicken Jockey” theater nightmare that rip away any hope you might have left for the current and future generations. In fact, I’ll recount something I never thought I’d do, which was giving Spirited Away the benefit of the doubt at my day program for being a slow, mature experience with some actual artistry to it, even if it doesn’t work for me at all—a guy I know there even said an approach like Fly Away Home would work better, and I can’t possibly agree more. Regardless, I’ll make a radical suggestion and recommend that you revert back to the 1.12.2 build in case you already play the game, as it’s still one of the best versions as far as mod compatibility goes, but for no better reason than a mod called Custom NPCs. I made a fun little video of it, but it was the first one I edited using DaVinci Resolve and I was a moron who hadn’t yet taken the time to map mono tracks to separate channels. As the name suggests, you can program and customize your own NPCs from the ground up, apply health and behavior to them, turn them into bosses with custom health bars, edit their inventories, change their factions or create new ones, give them unique roles and jobs, copy and save them should you decide to clone or delete them, design side quests around them, and the absolute funnest feature of all: a suite for crafting interactive dialogue systems. Yes, you get to choose what you can say to them as well as how they’ll respond, transforming the game into an RPG like Fallout or Mass Effect. Akin to the Pedestrian War and Evil Cars cheats for Saints Row 2, this keeps the game from ever getting boring, as I’ve spawned both a Rich Evans from RedLetterMedia who laughs at the touch as well as Ball Cop from the Best of the Worst movie The Satan Killer, the latter of whom’s programmed to blow Kyu away on sight while repeating his utterly batshit lines from the movie. WHAT’S A MOTHERFUCKER HAVE FOR BREAKFAST?!

Mods: An Evolving Art

Human progress might not be automatic, to quote Dr. King, but modding progress is inevitable. Not too long after the release of Dreamcast Conversion and, even more excitingly, the Dreamcast character pack was a delightful slew of AutoDemo restoration mods, with the most obvious favorite among them being a damn-near-perfect recreation of prototype Windy Valley (some smaller mods would later perfect this one even more, though.) It was this milestone plus SA2 Prototype Conversion that further ignited my fascination with beta content, but between all the Adventure game subjects, Arkham pre-alphas like those for Asylum and Origins, and for god’s sake, even in-dev changes made to the obscure Nickelodeon GameCube games from my childhood as discussed here before, the resonance of this subject would only grow further with time (then again, this emotional link is another anomaly that’s easier felt than either seen or described.) Of course, even more advancements were just around the corner, such as the particularly recent SA Mod Manager for both Adventure games and SA2 Render Fix, the latter of which I didn’t think I needed as it was mostly devoted to minor Dreamcast restorations… until I found out about fixes like the restored kart racing billboards, that is, which had been missing in all post-GameCube releases for no clear reason. Thanks to emulators, I never felt the need to bring a full Dreamcast conversion to SA2, but having just paired SA2 Prototype Conversion with standout additions to SA2 Render Fix like Dreamcast lighting and specular maps, it seems to me like we’re practically already living that dream! Get it? “Dream”, as in the… oh, whatever.

Then, you have the Arkham series. Oh, my lord. While Asylum modding has stagnated beyond pre-alpha additions like the 2007 batsuit, characters, and gadgets (even the low-poly Batman model from the DS prototype has been ported over), what has been released for it are the results of the two ultimate saving graces for the whole modding scene: TFC Installer and UPK Explorer. What these sophisticated applications allow is the intensive editing of Unreal Engine files, which was something that could never really be done before, but it’s more than that. Of course, the former app allows mod patches to be easily installed and uninstalled without the impracticality of TexMod or Resorep, meaning you can switch between the pre-alpha and DS batsuits pre-launch should you so desire, but as for what UPK Explorer allows, well… let’s just say, Asylum is relatively limited due to lacking the same suit or character selection as the rest of the series. As for Arkham City on, you may have found mods on Nexus that, after a certain point, started to include the parenthetical “New Suit Slot” label in their titles. Your eyes do not deceive you: mesh-swapping is more or less obsolete as you can equip any playable character with a new skin in the form of any mesh from the current game, any other Arkham game, or any other game period, right from the character selection screen! Plus, as you might’ve guessed, any mesh swaps or reskins can be applied via TFC Installer, making every modding process far less of a chore! Community patches have gone on to utilize these advancements as much as possible, such as suit selections for Arkham City‘s main story (as in, not just for new game plus) and even additional free roam modes for the other playable characters. Hell, both Unreal Engine programs happen to support Arkham Knight on PS4, meaning the Scarecrow Nightmares for PC are already somewhat within reach, but would you believe that even all-new characters have been modded in? The greatest examples of this so far are Robin in Arkham Origins singleplayer and, more recently, Joker in Arkham City, who comes with his own moveset and gadgets from Asylum and Origins like his gun, joker cards, and swirly specs! Of course, his gun is basically just Nightwing’s dart launcher with the proper sounds and animations, and the swirly specs’ overlay is a rotating rectangular FMV that doesn’t loop quite right. Still, with the surprising functionality on top of all the fantastic addon suits he’s received, it’s a fantasy come to life nonetheless!

As a contrast, Rockstar Games series like Grand Theft Auto have been experiencing a more tumultuous modding renaissance for a while now. You have that one time even singleplayer modding in GTA V was flat-out blocked per the demand of publisher Take-Two, leading to the game being review-bombed on Steam to the point that the ratings were “overwhelmingly negative”, as well as the cancellation of an enormous Liberty City map project (also through a cease-and-desist by Take-Two). Of course, that hasn’t stopped maps like Liberty City and Vice City from being remastered and ported over to the same game alongside next-gen graphics overhauls like NaturalVision Evolved; GTA IV has been given its own graphical remasters like the recent and game-changing FusionFix, which marks the first time I can personally play the game without incessant bugs or stuttering; neither of the Red Dead Redemption games—the first of which got a phenomenal PC release and the second of which has long since been covered on my modding channel—have seen any shortage in modding output, with few releases sparking more excitement than the Mexico expansion mod for the second game in the works; and not only was San Andreas just transformed into a film noir Manhunt spinoff called GTA: Carcer City, but I only just found out that every Rockstar map has been linked together via populated expanses and original cities into a multi-state country ahead of GTA VI called GTA: America or “Project Eagle”, which is set for a v1.3 release this month! Pop that merlot open, people!

One Doesn’t Simply Build Engagement

Not sure why I’m channeling J.R.R. Tolkien with these headings. Other than that we appear to be heading into Mordor, that is. See, I’ve come to get along with a lot of fellow modders since I started doing this both in private and publicly, but I no doubt have my fair share of mental problems, and they’ve naturally bled into my online exchanges in ways that… well, really haven’t helped a whole lot. For starters, I’ve spoken about how my time in middle school (if you can call it a middle school) left me exposed to some of the most vulgar and vile language you can possibly hear, and considering some of the people I knew had quite literally been to prison, it makes sense why. Then again, this was meant to be a special education school, but if you read up on it through news sources like GBH, you’ll likely find out how poor its reputation has been since 1998. A Massachusetts state investigation actually hindered my class sessions during my last weeks there, but not that I would mind it doing so. Between that and just moving away from everything and everyone I knew in Pennsylvania, I’d developed a real bad tongue during that timespan, and whether it was a coping method or not, it’s no surprise that it got me into trouble. A lot of trouble. I mean, Christ, it took me almost getting beat up in high school to realize putting an “A” at the end of the N-word doesn’t make it okay! So, the fact that I would embarrass myself getting into unwinnable arguments with commenters almost feels as inevitable as the greatest modding feats in recent years. Not that it’s any way to justify my actions, of course.

The common result of these habits would come in the form of an apology video (on YouTube? Who would have thought?) or even the decision that it was time for a mental health hiatus, but these were short-lived. Sometimes, commenters would be the voices of reason, like politely dissuading me from being the wrong one in an online squabble. Of course, then, there were times where it was pure vitriol in response to an expression of my harmless opinion, like why I thought one Sonic villain was better than another. Yes, it does sound stupid, but it would and continues to sting me far harder than you’d expect. Later in my modding channel’s history, I put together my best intro yet, which went from using Panic! At the Disco’s “Mercenary” from the Arkham City album to some song from Death Note that Blameitonjorge would use in his videos, and it featured my eyes glowing green to match the recurring Matrix rain code visual while the channel logo would be zapped onscreen between my fingers. The reason to bring this up? Well, a couple of times when my own viewers would turn on me over something innocuous, considering I’d gotten into trouble in the pastover language that was actually problematic, I would upload a modified version of the intro where my smile had disappeared, the voltage was weak, and the whole screen had dimmed. I would even incorporate the New Order song “Turn” as it echoed the helplessness I felt in the moment. Suffice it to say, the whole purpose of the channel was harmless, but it can sometimes be surprising how much personal turbulence can seep through the cracks.

Now, on this post, we’ve gone over the funny, the hopeful, and a touch of the troubling, but there’s one thing I’ve never quite lost in the world of modding: gratitude. It might sound hard to maintain nowadays, but when modding goes in a new and vastly innovative direction, it’s rarely like the AI boom where it feels as terrifying as it does intriguing. In fact, it’s almost exclusively hopeful as long as you root out the weird or distasteful stuff that seems to flood Nexus. Let’s just say, it’s looking pretty good in our shitfest of a political situation. Whenever I play SADX as a definitive AutoDemo experience, experience Sonic World Ultimate as the fan game I helped make it, kick the crap out of Arkham City Black Mask as the more comic-accurate Black Mask from Origins, blitzkrieg the Epsilon Program compound with vulkan cannon rounds from an airborne DeLorean as my GTA Online self in singleplayer, or dress up a mannerly high-honor Arthur in Red Dead Redemption II as Elias from ElectroNuke while switching between horses named Richard and Yoko, the giddyness I feel about the ability to do these things through this genuine art form never really fades. It’s satisfaction without an expiration date, and I’m grateful for every second of free time I have to engage in it, which is a feeling that’s only bound to grow as my intentions of working a real job and moving out are on track to limit said free time…

…but there’s something keeping others from feeling the same.

War in the Time of Love (And Vice Versa)

As Rich put it on RLM’s Beyond the Black Void episode about AI slop, we’ve been spoiled with technology like cameras for decades. In their discussion, the concepts of mass surveillance and being able to capture anything on the spot have become excuses for invasions of privacy and the recording of awful things we don’t need to see more of. In this discussion, the downside of mods bringing our gaming dreams to life comes in two prominent forms for me when excluding malicious or fetishistic intent: (a) the willingness to take advantage of creators who make them and (b) an unnecessary sense of entitlement by said creators. The first form is something I’ve encountered with my own mods, like never taking “no” for an answer for when I’m just not interested in adding a feature to one of them. When I suggested that a commenter on my Sonic World Ultimate release page add the lower-quality stages they wanted to see ported from R9 because of how easy it is, they basically told me, “I don’t need to listen to you ’cause it probably won’t work for me anyway!” Whether or not they’re a twelve-year-old, which they very well might be, this is ridiculously petulant, and my response was simply not to stoke the flames with them at all. In fact, when CapLagRobin responded to my Punisher mod for Arkham Knight, they took notice of how bizarre the amount of dislikes I received for it was—once you’ve experienced the litany of Resorep retexturing for that game on top of mesh-swapping, it becomes a whole lot harder to flip off someone else who has, especially given the level of quality they’ve managed to achieve.

Trust me, I’ve seen a ton of cases like this, but I still get a pretty fair share of respectful responses, so I prefer not to dwell on the bad ones. If anything, I’ve been far more troubled by what certain creators are capable of. Again, it’s hard to, well, be hard on modders who spend countless man hours and sleepless nights on this stuff—the best of them spend a thousand times more than I do—but I’ve run into instances that have seriously regressed my self-confidence for the sake of something they may or may not even own. To clarify, when Sonic World started showing a notorious flickering pixel bug after a PC upgrade, which occurs as a result of the buggy bloom effect, my favorite Sonic game past Heroes was left almost unplayable due to how distracting this was. So, for the fun of it, I went back to SA2 and tried to modernize it in a similar way, but as to not edit any actual models as I had no experience in that. Now, sure, it ended up looking pretty good with the right ReShade effects and Hyperballic’sCinematic Textures applied (they were obviously credited on the release page), but Modern SA2B: Simple Edition, as I called it, was not all that popular. Looking back, I can understand the problems, as it really was just a personal placeholder and practice trial until R9 Plus for Sonic World added a toggle for the bloom effect, but one of the co-creators of the cancelled original Modern SA2 project had quite the rant to offer. They seemed to believe I copied assets from the mod’s earliest versions when I’d extracted them myself from Generations, and it was a demand that I remove their credits from the project because they, out of genuine disgust, wanted no association with it. It even contained a knock at my choice to use a track from the romping family classic Cannibal Holocaust due to the atmosphere it provided (it was a suspense track I used in a number of mod videos, hence why I worked it in as a cutscene theme), and the amount of support his rant received left me stunned and ashamed for quite a while. I later responded by explaining how I felt and made it clear that nothing was stolen, which seemed to win them over, although they did say the classic shoe skin I made for Sonic’s SOAP shoes was terrible. Hey, opinions are like assholes in that there’s plenty in this community.

And that’s not even the worst or most recent example! See, when sharing my progress with Sonic World Ultimate here, I gave kudos to the DX team for their generosity in allowing me to use assets from their build, but before I released my full build on Gamebanana a matter of weeks ago (you can check that page out here), let’s just say the cadence the team used on the official Discord wasn’t always polite. What, on Discord? Go figure! It started when someone asked about editing a Vanilla the Rabbit mod for DX using FragMOTION, to which I brought up that I’d recently reanimated her from scratch in the same program. For some reason, level designer Sergeant Gerbil changed the subject to yelling, “PEAK!!!” alongside a Beevus & Butthead GIF in response to the release of a Minecraft stage for DX, to which I shared a screenshot of the more accurate Egg Bishop and Egg Magician from Ultimate and joked, “Are you one of these weirdos? ‘Cause you just made the topic disappear!” Somehow, the sarcasm and pun were completely overlooked, and the head of DX’s development Deefor said I only wanted to show off how I took the hat off the Egg Magician. Considering the sleepless nights that went into Ultimate, I posted the release of that very build to prove I’d been working on far more than that, and even then, I was called a dick for the attitude they thought I had. I guess this is what happens when only one of many, many weirdos on the spectrum understands sarcasm. Or rhetorical questions.

Moreover, once the DX devs saw the full mod for what it was, they were rather impressed by the end result… but before that, on the other hand, I shared some of the progress in my own separate thread, part of the reason for which was to request permission to use certain assets. When I say they were generous, I mean the vast majority of what I asked for was accepted, with the only exception being Chemical Plant. I’m not exactly sure why, and it was a little disappointing given how iconic Chemical Plant is and how dated the iteration from R9 is, but I respected this and omitted the stage from the mod’s release… yet somehow, I managed to hit a nerve with them. I shared the Chemical Jam video I posted here, which takes place in the same stage I already told them would not be included—this was a brief comedic callback to a SpongeBob episode, for reference—and the stage’s creator xDOTA told me to remove the stage from a mod package that did not exist yet. I was told I was “crossing a line” by Deefor, to which I reiterated that nothing was packaged at all yet. I WOULD NOT. INCLUDE. THE STAGE. If I sound bothered, it’s because Chemical Plant as a stage belongs to SEGA and Sonic Team, not these Sonic fans, yet they think even making a goofy video containing it somehow infringes on the rights they claim to own over it. Yes, they made their version of the stage, but not the stage as an intellectual property. In fact, I later received the advice to request that they provide the legal documentation for their ownership over the stage, but I haven’t done that as I have no desire to raise tensions now that the mod’s been released to almost unanimous acclaim.

Oh, and when Deefor heard that one feature wasn’t included, they said the mod wasn’t much of an ultimate edition. Charming fella!

Why go on about this now, though? I said I don’t like to dwell on negative exchanges, after all. Well, beyond the obvious point of getting my emotions out there for therapeutic purposes, I see mods as equal forms of creativity and escapism to the games they’re made for… well, okay, except if anyone mods HuniePop, which I’m sure they have. Don’t seek escapism in that. I theorized on my first channel that it was the first game developed by someone in a catatonic state. In fact, mods aren’t even bound to the same legal parameters as their intended titles—yes, it counts as a gray area, but as the GTA V modding kerfuffle proved, copyright holders are often limited by the response their legal action triggers. It’s as vague and malleable as YouTube’s copyright policies. As for me, I get aggravated by modders’ at-times harsh enforcement of their projects’ ownership because of my own attitude towards how my work is used. Hey, as long as you aren’t defacing it or making pornography of it, I don’t care what you do. If you have my permission, should you credit me as needed, and as long as there’s nothing libelous about it, you are within your right, and as for a lot of examples? You can potentially even improve them, best of all in the case that they’ve been abandoned. I mean, that is part of the magic, if you ask me, as upholding a harsh policy against offline mods and hacking is as cumbersome as outright banning fan art, especially when a number of prolific studios and publishers like Valve and Bethesda actively embrace the practice. The former created the Steam Workshop and publishes unofficial projects like Gmod and Black Mesa as standalone titles; the latter operates Nexus-style download services where players can install content on a dime; and Sonic Team recruits fan game developers for what more often than not end up being wise conceptual and design choices, even if I’m not a fan. Nintendo might despise community contributions, but in their defense, they were formed in a country with few if any copyright laws in place, and that hasn’t stopped the modification of titles old and new. All I’m saying is, if you don’t want to treat mods as an art form, treat them as a sport: if it can draw people together, only idiots let it drag them apart.