 Good evening. Have you ever downloaded a TF2 mod? Chances are a good amount of you watching haven't because it's kind of a pain in the ass. You have to go to third-party websites and download files and put them in some folder somewhere, and they only work on community servers anyway, so what's even the point? Most of the community's talent doesn't even make mods anymore. They instead just make custom hats and try to get them added into the game officially so they can make some money. At least, that's more or less how I viewed it for a while now. However, I've recently realized that not only does TF2 still have a small but very die-hard modding community who's dedicated to creating and maintaining all kinds of new and creative content, but in the time since I grew up and stopped caring about TF2 mods, it's somehow gotten in some ways even more insane than it was when I was a kid. And that's saying something, because I used to turn my mercenaries into goombas and fucking turkeys. So I figured what time is better than now to look back on and see what's shaking in the fascinating world of weird TF2 mods. The first thing I gotta get out of the way is that in the world of TF2 mods, there's three main categories. First, there's Source Mods, which are basically new versions of TF2 built from the game's leaked source code, and they can be highly transformative. Open Fortress turns TF2 into a free-for-all-death match mode, and TF2 Classic provides a stripped back and nostalgic experience with sprinkles of new and exciting content like a VIP mode. There's also Server Mods, which run on top of real TF2 and custom community servers, and can also easily transform the game into something it's not, like WarioWare or Death Run. Some of you watching might know that the versus Saxon Hail mode they just officially added into the game last month actually started as a Server Mod. And then finally there's Individual or Client Side Mods, which change how the game looks cosmetically for you and you alone when you boot it up. These are your custom gun reskins, new player models, reanimation mods, etc. They only appear to you, the guy who installed them, and they don't work on official servers because Valve somehow thinks me using Turkey Medic is a bigger threat to the game's integrity than the bots that have been tormenting every casual server for five years straight. Anyways, with all that out of the way, the first mod I'm gonna talk about in this video is a Server Mod, one that I remember being fond of as a kid, and one that some of the older viewers might be surprised to learn is still around. Parkour Fortress is an ancient mod for TF2 made all the way back in 2012 by one Jonas Kylev, better known as Mecha the Slag. I remember seeing tons of videos of this mod way back in the day as a kid and thinking it looked absolutely awesome. From what I can remember, it's basically a parkour game a la Mirror's Edge built directly into TF2, and it was one of the most unique things the TF2 community server browser had to offer back in the day. Both TF2 and Mirror's Edge are great games that we look back on today as 7th gen classics, and I think people back then really love seeing them mixed together in such an imaginative way. However, with time, TF2 started getting updates that would regularly break parkour fortress plugins, and with Mecha the Slag moving his priorities toward creating the indie game a hat in time, it was slowly abandoned as the servers running it completely broke due to a lack of maintenance. Up until recently, I had figured it was lost forever, but I was recently informed that sometime in the last few years, a team of dedicated fans has recreated parkour fortress from scratch in an open source project called Parkour TF, and while I don't think it's exactly one to one, from what I can tell it's pretty damn close. So I looked around online to find a server hosting parkour TF and decided to go see if this mod was as cool as I remember it being. The first thing I noticed upon joining is, though it's certainly not popular by any metric, the mod isn't actually dead. There were a few other people on who seemed to be pretty experienced and knew the levels pretty well, so it seems this mod still has somewhat of a cult following, which is neat. I also pretty quickly realized that me saying it was Mirror's Edge inspired earlier might have been a bit of an understatement. Coming back, I've realized it's a lot more than just inspired. It's literally an attempt to port all Mirror's Edge mechanics to TF2 as closely as the source engine will allow it. They've brought over the pipe climbing, the wall running, sliding, door busting, ziplines. Hell, if you take much damage on a fall, the game even emulates Mirror's Edge stagger animation by stunning you with the Sandman mechanic, which I thought was pretty funny. I mean, even the logo is clearly meant to look like Mirror's Edge's, so I guess it shouldn't be that much of a surprise, but I feel like I don't remember it being so one to one. There is one obvious place that differs from Mirror's Edge, though, and that's in the fact that you're playing as the Scout. The Scout is the only selectable mercenary you can play as in this mod, which I guess makes sense since he's the speediest of them all, and the Scout can still double jump, which does make the gameplay feel a little bit more unique. The actual gameplay is a stopwatch racing game mode where whoever gets the fastest lap around the map wins. Despite there being two teams, there doesn't seem to be any PvP mechanics, and to me it generally didn't seem very competitive at all, though then again that might have just been because there weren't too many other people online. I also want to say that, in spite of how much we love to talk about source jank and source spaghetti, Parkour Fortress is actually a surprisingly smooth experience. It's not quite as buttery as Mirror's Edge, but I was honestly shocked by how natural it felt to do wall runs and climb up ledges. The fact I could see my legs in first person sometimes with some kind of black magic fake body awareness also impressed me. It's no small task to write something like this into TF2 with nothing but an external server-side plugin. In my time playing, I visited three maps. The first one seemed like a pretty standard attempt to emulate Mirror's Edge levels using TF2 assets, until I started climbing through a building and the rules of gravity broke as I was led into this giant space void outside the city. This map was kind of tricky and the time ran out before I could even finish a single lap on it, so I unfortunately didn't get to see what else it had to offer after this void. The second map was a lot more of what I was expecting out of this game mode. Just a regular daylight cityscape you could have plucked directly out of Mirror's Edge, and even out a cool little part where you bust out a window and slide down a big ramp. Unfortunately however, I found this map was remarkably short, and it looks like the other players on the server agreed with me. And the last one, well it was probably the least like Mirror's Edge, but in some ways it was my favorite. It was a giant spooky Halloween mansion, where you have to jump over holes in the floor, scale chandeliers, and eventually make your way all the way to the front door where you're finally set free. All of these levels had some airy, up-tempo music, and it generally felt really cool and breezy to fly through these interesting maps that almost everyone today has probably forgotten about. It's obviously not perfect. I noticed that the HUD was kind of broken thanks to the ugly match HUD they added in the Meet Your Match update, but Parkour Fortress is still a really cool relic of TF2's history, and I honestly had a lot of fun coming back to it. It's funny to remember the times when you were a kid who couldn't afford new games like Mirror's Edge, so you instead tried to play them vicariously through TF2 and Gmod. And to me, it's still really interesting to see TF2 in its movement transformed in such a crazy way. It's sad to see such a cool, well-loved mod strangled by TF2's updates making it jankier and jankier as it slowly fades into obscurity, but now that I'm an adult, returning to it kind of just makes me wish I was playing the Real Mirror's Edge, because it's a really good game. Moving on though, next up we're going to be looking at a TF2 Source Mod, and it's one that is a lot weirder than Parkour Fortress. Almost all TF2 Source Mods come from a pretty simple interest, and that's returning to Team Fortress' roots. TF2 Classic, as I mentioned earlier, tries to take us back to how the game felt in 2008, and Open Fortress takes us all the way back to Quake DM, but there's another TF2 Source Mod that's not talked about nearly as much, and its premise is a lot different. What if Team Fortress 2 was a co-op game? The Source Mod I'm referring to here is Lambda Fortress. If you're like me and have dreamt of a co-op game set in a TF2 universe since you were a little kid, Lambda Fortress might take you a little bit closer to that dream. It takes the levels from the Half-Life series and lets you play through them cooperatively as the TF2 classes. People might not know I actually have a deep history with this mod and was at one point listed as a developer for its spin-off Lambda Fortress Extended. There was really just a glorified ideas guy. I decided to check back on how Lambda Fortress is doing in the years since I left it, and the internet redirected me to what is apparently the most common way to play it nowadays, a spin-off of the Lambda Fortress Extended spin-off called Lambda Fortress Community Edition. I was genuinely excited to see what all this has to offer. I thought maybe in the time since I left somebody's finally gotten the vehicle segments working seamlessly, or maybe there'll be some other new tasteful changes to sink my teeth into. The first thing I noticed upon opening this game is that everything is purple. The logo is bad, and the game's wallpapers look like GMOD screenshots. But I don't know, that's not where it ends. Because the last time I was active in the Lambda Fortress community, I remember people talking a lot about implementing an inventory system just like TF2's, so players could switch out their weapons. So the first thing I did on the menu was go to the loadout screen, and there are by my account five new classes to pick from. Classes, I guess, being used pretty liberally. The mercenary and VIP from TF2 Classic and Open Fortress seem to have been directly ripped and copied over to this game, which is a bit odd since that's basically just a guy with no weapons and the guy from Quake. But even stranger, there's a Zombie you can play as, as well as Mael-07, or sorry, John Freeman, and Jerry? Jerry the Ant-Lion. And all of these characters, if you go to their loadout screen, have some of the most bombastic fucking loadout options I have ever seen. It looks like whoever's behind this mod has ported not only nearly every single item from TF2, but they've also added an insane catalog of completely custom weapons with seemingly no rhyme or reason. Everyone gets an assault rifle, the pyro and the scout get shotguns that might as well be fucking miniguns, there's weapons from CSGO, TF2 versions of basically every handgun in human history, golden wrenches and crowbars, a giant fucking tire that straps to the medic's back, Minecraft weapons, and just a ton of other insane shit that's seemingly been duct taped to the game in the years since I last played it. I decided to boot into a game with my friend Rat Lobber, and it is so insanely unbalanced I don't even know where to begin. I want to call it silly, but no. The original premise of Lambda Fortress, where TF2 marks play through the Half-Life 2 campaign is silly. This is just fucking stupid. And from what I can tell, I've only witnessed a fraction of what content this game actually has to offer. I found out once I got in-game that there's apparently at least one other class that doesn't appear on the loadout screen, which is called the Repressor and takes on the appearance of that one soldier from Half-Life Alyx, and there's apparently whole other game modes like whatever the hell opposing co-op is, so God knows how much else there is in here that I haven't seen. Frankly, it's just like a 13 year old's idea of how to make a cool mod, and that's not even hating, because as much as I might be shaking my head at this mod's direction, I can't pretend for even a second that it didn't keep me thoroughly entertained throughout my entire playthrough. There's a part of me that wants to despair at how far the funny TF2-HL2 co-op mod has fallen in terms of standards and direction, but honestly, who fucking cares? This insane salad of ideas with no rhyme or reason connecting them entertained me much more than the original mod ever did anyway, so if you want a truly demented TF2 mod experience, then I'd honestly recommend it. Just, uh, expect it to come with a generous helping of game crashes. And finally, to round us off, I figured it wouldn't be right to not talk at least a little about some weird client-side mods. Booting up game banana, unsurprisingly, Fempyro is still the king, or I guess queen of player character mods. It's still easily the most popular one on the internet for two very obvious reasons. I rediscovered this classic deformed mercenaries mod that turns the characters into disgusting dehydrated polygons. My beloved roast chicken medic is still here, thank god, and so is Gabe and Pyro, which I honestly never thought looked that much like Gabe, but it's still pretty funny. I came across a few relics of the dank meme era like Shrek Heavy and Thomas the Train, and maybe some of you watching will remember this ancient TF2 meme, Gentleman. What a classic. There's also one of the sniper with a jar of pee in his mouth, which is just nasty. Demoman Creeper. Get it? Because they both blow up. Looking at the more recent submissions, it looks like what's left of this community is now making mods involving Fortnite, uh, Among Us sandwiches, Roblox, and other Zoomer shit. Oh, and also a bunch of nasty horny mods. You know what they say, old habits die hard. Anyways, while it's cool and dandy to see that this world is still limping on, TF2 modding is unfortunately still just not the same community it was when I was a kid and when modding was more at the forefront of this game's identity. And I don't want to harp on too long about it, but that does make me sad. There's a lot of factors to blame for that culture disappearing, the video game industry growing and stagnating, refinement culture, and TF2's botting crisis to name a few, but at least if nothing else, even if TF2's modding culture completely died tomorrow, we'll always have the memories of these classics, and we'll also always be able to boot up the disgusting Lambda Fortress extended source mod and tinker around in a six-year-old's idea of a cool TF2 mod. In that sense, TF2 modding is immortal, or something. I don't know how to fucking end this video, man. Thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed. Subscribe for more, and have a good day.