World Of Padman == great fun

I downloaded World Of Padman on Saturday morning, and I've been playing it a fair bit ever since.

This must be the first ever FPS where the maps go upwards more than they go horizontally. For those of you who haven't seen the promotional video or played the game, the characters are only a couple of centimetres tall in our scale, and they battle it out in an ordinary room. One level is a diner, another is a bathroom, another is an attic, so on and so forth.

Not only are the maps very unconventional (for FPS games), but they are made with exquisite care and detail. You've really got to play it to see what I mean. One map is inside someone's study. There is a computer sitting on the ground level under the desk. A transparent panel actually shows the motherboard and a graphics card... how exquisite is that?

And everything is cartoony. The graphics, the voices, even the weapons look non-threatening. But this isn't a game for kids - Padman swears, and the female Pad characters have cleavage showing.

There's the standard deathmatch ("Free For All"), a team deathmatch ("Team Play"), limited-lives deathmatch ("Last Pad Standing") and a team domination gametype ("Big Balloon"). But, as is customary for open-source FPSes, there's a brand-new gametype: Spray Your Colour. The promotional video explains it very simply:

1. Frag an opponent
2. Collect 1-8 cartridges (from the opponent or opponents)
3. Locate the teleporter
4. Spray your colour to score

Easy? No! Sometimes you can get lucky and find cartridges that have been dropped by fragged players but not yet picked up. On the way to the teleporter, you *will* get attacked, and if you're not careful you'll be killed. Of course, all your good work with fragging will go to waste, as an opponent is likely to pick up your cartridges and score from them.

When you use the teleporter, your weapons will be temporarily taken away from you and replaced with the spray gun. That's a nice touch, but it can be frustrating to see the bots spraying 5 cartridges at a time with you being unable to do anything about it. It can, however, be very satisfying to kill a bot that is trying to get to the teleporter with 5 cartridges, and you steal them away and score!

I'm sad to say that open-source FPSes seem to crash a bit, in general. Nexuiz crashes when I select certain gametypes. Warsow and Alien Arena 2007 crash when I select certain maps. Happily, World Of Padman has not crashed on me yet. Even better, it allows you to choose whether or not to use OpenAL for sound - great for computers like mine which don't seem to get along with OpenAL!

Padman was a popular comic strip in a console gaming magazine. World of Padman started life as an award-winning total-conversion mod for Quake 3. When the Quake 3 engine became open-source, the team behind the mod created a stand-alone World Of Padman game. You can still see evidence of the game engine's origins - the "Options" screen is exactly the same as Quake 3', albeit with new artwork.

There's no single-player mode yet, but if you start a new game server and put bots in it, that will give you a satisfactory match to start you off with.

There's only one real hitch with this game: I tried joining some games online, but was automatically booted because the server thought my copy of the game was modified. I understand that they want to get rid of cheating, but this is an unaltered copy! Maybe I should apply the patch to bring it up to the latest version.

Anyway, if you even slightly like FPSes, you should really get a copy of this game. It's about a 500 megabyte download, but the level design and artwork will blow you away even before your own Balloonys do :-)  Spray Your Colour is fun, the weapons are innovative, and it runs well on modest computers. There's also an avid community out there making new maps based on real rooms in their houses! Definitely worth playing and replaying. Easily the best open-source FPS.