While Half-Life 2: Overcharged is just a version of Half-Life 2 that sincerely embraces the Spartan Kick memes of yore, it's good fun. As a fan of kicking shit around in video games, it's no Dark Messiah, but for what's there, it's good fun.

The problem with Overcharged is that, at most, the developer's attempt to build off of that was adding slow motion. Everything else is a mess. None of the new weapons added feel as silly or absurd as they should. The closest it gets to that camp is giving you the ability to rip turrets off their hooks a la Just Cause 2, but there's not much novelty in that. All of the other weapons added are Beta(TM) concepts, assets ripped directly from Counter-Strike, and other minor additions like the wrench from Opposing Forces. Some of them are fun to play around with, like the Dual Wielding pistols, which can be set to automatic, but many of them are functionally identical and serve little purpose in a game where you don't have to worry about limitations on what weapons you can carry. Easily the weakest aspect of this mod is its attempt to bring some of the beta concepts and aliens from the original Half-Life back into the fold. Disregarding the fact that many of these are just assets lifted directly from the original Half-Life that haven't been touched up to fit Half-Life 2's art style, the placement of many of these enemies is fundamentally borked. Small areas used to break up the pacing and give you a pause if you're low on health are now littered with houndeyes and the like. The Beta enemies, which have no basis in familiarity, are thrown into levels with no thought as to how an introduction would work.

When it's not playing out like a slapdash effort to pack in as many gimmicks into the base game as possible, and when it's not crashing or hilariously broken, Overcharged can be decent fun. The biggest problem with this mod is that you could easily reproduce it with more polish and quality in Garry's Mod, so the only real use in giving this a download is if you're that morbidly curious.

So, funny story: when I was around eleven, maybe twelve, I was at my cousin's house playing Garry's Mod on his computer. He wanted me to get off but in a very subtle way. So he challenged me. The ultimate challenge, he called it: enough Combine Elites to slow his computer down to the point where a hard reset was the only way to close the game.

Mystery Comabt Man 3 emulates this experience with a stable framerate. I kind of wish it didn't.

I mean this in the most insulting way possible: this is a time capsule. Like The Impossible Quiz, but with all of its charm and character stripped in favor of kitchen-sink design that's so "lol so goofy xDDDD" that the developer couldn't have been fucked to add level exits. Not that it would matter, anyway. Strip away everything added to be annoying, and you have a series of maps that somehow manage to rival that time I made a map in TimeSplitters that locked the entire red team in their base because my brother always picked red, and I didn't know that keys only spawned in Story mode. Except worse, because at least the worst maps we made in TimeSplitters (See: single cubes that caused rounds of Virus to last less than thirty seconds) didn't require God mode to be playable. Good lord.

I'm starting to remember why we post-millennial Zoomers like to make self-deprecating quips about the montage parody era of internet culture, and I wholeheartedly agree with them. This is below the lowest rungs of trash-tier modding. And depending on who you ask, it's the exact kind of thing that makes the scene so awesome. I can't disagree with that notion, I've done it before.