Fun Times With Friends* – Garry’s Mod Throwback Thursday

That asterisk represents caveat on the very epitome of my experiences with Garry’s Mod or GMod. This game is really more of a sandbox that clever people utilized to leverage their own game making engine. Common and famous games that you may have heard of are Trouble in Terrorist Town or TTT, Murder, and Prop Hunt. These games have been played by YouTube gamers like SeaNanners, Gassy Mexican, RPGMinx, and countless others *cough*BAYOG*cough* but in all seriousness there was a couple years where you would be hard pressed to find a YouTube game video that wasn’t based out of GMod. Originally starting out as a Half-Life 2 mod, like most great ideas based off of that game, GMod exploded to great popularity.

The sandbox itself represented a fun way to create things, ranging from haunted houses, to simply making a fight between Clones from Star Wars and zombie T-rex’s with laser cannons a thing. One of my favorite moments was just playing with my brothers and then having us get into a massive fight including Master Chief, hordes of Marios, and a 75 ft. ninja going toe-to-toe and crashing our 3 computers. In this mode you can browse around and find and download a number of assets such as models, weapons, backgrounds, noises, and script them to perform actions such as a My Little Pony becoming a functional TIE fighter complete with sounds and lasers. You can even modify physics and add magnetism, remove gravity, and create excessive kinetic reactions, turning everything into bouncy balls. Your only limitations are your scripting knowledge and the presence of models.

One of the most commonly played games to be found in GMod is Prop Hunt. Chances are if you are reading this article, you’ve played or watched someone play this game. In it, there are two teams, the props and the hunters. Imagine hide and seek (which is another game type by the way) but instead of hiding in a corner, you transform into random objects in the world, and instead of tagging someone with your hand, you execute them with military grade firearms. While intuitive, at times the controls can be exceptionally frustrating however that is just part of the game type’s charm. Amazing moments arise when you try to hide as a can underneath a cart and then suddenly become a massive 6x8ft cart pointing at a 90 degree angle from the original cart. Another horrible flaw/feature is that you cannot control the angle of display for your prop, so even though on your screen it looks like you are lined up alongside a wall, in reality you could be projecting out like a streetlamp with 6 lights.

My next GMod game type is my personal favorite, TTT or Trouble In Terrorist Town. In it, you play as a group of terrorists, with some being Innocent and a set small number being the Traitors. The Innocent have no idea who is a Traitor, barring the Detective (if there is one) who is clearly not a Traitor. The Traitors (if there are multiple) are aware of each other and have the goal of killing the Innocent while the Innocent have the goal of killing the Traitors. A huge part of this game is manipulation and playing sick mind games, which I take pride in being especially good at, since it’s kind of my IRL job. The Detectives and Traitors get items to assist them ranging from health stations and DNA scanners for Detectives, to exploding health stations and C4 for Traitors. My only complaint is that without more maps (of which there are actually a lot) you begin to obtain a feel for your friends and the maps, and you obtain an almost precognition on who is to be trusted, and who is to be gunned down mercilessly.

All in all, GMod is a friendly and fun experience for parties of people. While you can PUG matches, it gets annoying when server admins ban you because you beat them/their friend or things just become sketchy and break. I highly recommend the 4-pack if they have it or just get the game in general because its only $9.99 per copy and its usually on sale for 50%-75%. You have many other game types like Stop It Slender which is a multiplayer version of Slender where one of your friends plays the tall dude himself, or Murder, which is like TTT but simpler with an Innocent with a 1 shot revolver, and a Murderer with a knife, or even classic Hide and Seek. I’ve invested just shy of 400 hours into GMod and I haven’t even played the game in years. Keep an eye out for some videos as I now have the urge to play this with some of the BAYOG crew. Let me know what you think of the game and if you have some fun stories to share!