Melons

New Source mod focuses gameplay on very unusual weaponry.

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By Nathan Davis on 28 April, 2009

I must admit that the hand grenade in multiplayer first-person shooters rarely gets much air time on my screen. When it does, it usually only involves a group of opponents. It’s not a conscious decision – my mind just thinks in terms of bullet lines in these games. Headshot or die.

Well, an upcoming mod for Half-Life 2 tells guns to piss off and centres exclusively around the hand-thrown ball of doom. Known as FragOut!, it’s a mod that simply restricts players to hand grenades, but of all kinds in various shapes, sizes, and abilities. Best of all, most, if not all are hilariously fictional, like deadly exploding watermelons and an orb that has its own damn choir.

At the low end, grenades include two that act much like regular ones. The first, the skull grenade, is like the original Half-Life 2 unit, only it’s a skull with a nose pull ring and glowing eye sockets. The second is called the melon grenade. It’s a watermelon that immediately explodes on contact, although it inflicts less damage and has a smaller explosion range compared to the skull grenade.

In terms of the more interesting varieties, we have the sailboat grenade which can produce a strong wind to push people and objects away, and as a secondary ability, give the player and anyone within range a significant boost up in the air. Another is the holy hand grenade, and when you pick it up, a choir starts singing so as to warn everyone. It’s a special ‘rare’ grenade and instantly kills anyone unfortunate enough to be in its explosive radius. The growing arsenal also includes the cluster grenade, the healing grenade, and even a pull grenade that draws people toward it, presumably upon implosion. Clearly, that’s prime time to lob in another to finish everyone off.

There’s even a grenade that looks like a pocket watch and stops everyone in their tracks within its area of effect. “This mysterious device holds the power to freeze players in time for a short while, leaving them helpless to defend themselves,” explains developer DuckSauce. Interestingly, plans are in the works for it to have a nifty secondary ability – teleportation. The developer says it will “teleport the user and even swap the places of the user and victims of the teleport blast, making it not only useful for escaping deadly grenades, but also to bring your enemies into range of those grenades!”

The first release promises just two game modes – last man standing and last team standing. Definitely a mod made for shits and giggles, but with enough potential for strategy to keep it fresh. FragOut! doesn’t presently have a release date, so meanwhile, check out some of the work-in-progress clips. The first is the latest video that demos a number of the grenade effects in their current form and the last is the mod in action via a play-test match.

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