What Happened to the GMod Tower?

good evening in the world of Gary's Mod few places are remembered as fondly and missed as dearly as the gmod tower it's a name that older players probably haven't heard in a while and that some younger ones may have never even heard at all once one of gmod's biggest online attractions gmod tower was a game mode enjoyed by countless players during the game's Golden Age the premise was simple but Innovative it was the power that acted as a hub where players could hang out play mini-games with each other during in-game coins visit shops to customize their character decorate their own personal condo and generally have a good time with their friends it quickly became a social hotspot for players all around the world cultivating one of the strongest online communities that Gary's Mod has ever seen and becoming a permanent fixture of the game's culture and Legacy not only did it earn a permanent mansion on gmod's official Wikipedia page but its massive popularity was actually even the reason face punch upped the game server player count limit from 64 to 128 back in 2009 hundreds even thousands of players from all around the world would log on to gmod tower every single day to socialize Goof Off game and generally unwind in fact I guarantee if you scroll down to the comments right now you'll see countless posts from people recollecting their own Unforgettable experiences they had on gmod tower there was just so much to do so many people to talk to so many memories and friends to be made and so much fun to be had with regular updates bringing new game modes player models and even changes to the tower Lobby itself it was truly a living breathing experience that you could never get bored in additionally if you were a fan of the community and culture surrounding Gmod there was no better place to take it all in the copyrighted characters in music The Eccentric people you'd run into the goofy tone juxtaposed with the genuinely impressive technical Fates the server accomplished within the limits of the source engine it truly embodied the heart and spirit of Gary's Mod simply put Jim was easily easily impactful things to ever happen to the game it brought people together in a trueful way and played a big part in helping shape the game's identity and Legacy but unfortunately Gmod Tower's story ends in a rather unfortunate way one that has led to a decade-long conflict and controversy see the people behind gmod tower pixeltale announced in 2016 that they were shutting it down to focus on hosting and developing a new Standalone game they were working on called Tower unite Tower unite was basically the same exact premise as gmod tower but instead of being built from Gmod it was going to be built on the Unreal Engine using all new original assets and Designs simply put pixel tail had gotten tired of working within and around the confines of GMod and figured they could make more money for their hard work by turning the project into something more professional which is unfortunate of news as it was made a lot of sense a lot of time had clearly gone into gmod tower for over half a decade at this point and it's not at all unreasonable that its creators would want to take their ideas into a more profitable and original direction and frankly the idea of a better and more stable Standalone version of gmod tower was still pretty enticing to a lot of people pixel 2 even promised that the final game would have no microtransactions just a 20 price tag which really isn't that bad for how much content they were planning to dish out so after years of entertaining people and bringing them together to form lifelong friendships and even marriages gmod tower was officially shut down in 2016. and it was one hell of a Bittersweet moment the pictures from the night it closed down truly tell the story of how well-loved this project was and how much it meant to so many people so fast forward to 2023 what's going on now well it's been eight years since Tower unite was announced and at a glance it's been a pretty big success for Pixel tail games lots of successful YouTubers like pyrocynical xqc and the sidemen have all made videos playing on and promoting the game and its Steam Reviews are overwhelmingly positive the thing is though from what I can tell the people who play and enjoy Tower unite are largely not the same audience of people who play gmod tower in fact there are apparently a lot of people from the original gmod tower Community who found it to be quite a disappointment there's a lot of things these people take issue with in Tower unite be it its price tag it's art direction or the fact that it's been in Early Access for a decade now but frankly the real root of the matter is that what people fell in love with all those years ago was gmod tower in all its copyright violating old internet source engine glory and to a lot of people a sanitized spin-off made in the less interesting Unreal Engine was just never going to scratch the same itch with all of this in mind it shouldn't be that big of a surprise that some fan projects have sprung up in the last couple years with the goal of Reviving The original gmod tower but unfortunately Pixel tail hasn't taken very kindly to this and that is where things in this story get hairy pixel tail are at this point notorious for filing dmca complaints to get these fan projects shut down like whack-a-mole anytime a gmod tower re-host would pop up they'd get shut down in a matter of days in an attempt to preserve themselves some of them started including their own advertisements telling players to go by Tower unite to support the original devs but this didn't seem to slow the dmca hammer in the slightest from what I can tell pixel tail doesn't want people re-hosting their old gmod tower content on new servers because a they're making unauthorized use of the gmod tower name and even leaked code without permission and B their free servers are potentially stealing players who otherwise might purchase Tower unite obviously this has been met with its fair share of backlash many Die Hard gmod tower fans argue that pixel tail has no right to copyright strike these projects down because the original gmod tower built itself off unauthorized use of other copyrighted material like its player models and music I mean hell Gmod is in the name and pixel tail show don't own the rights to that additionally regardless of the legality of it all it's just generally not very good publicity to shut down fan projects of people who just want to play games you're not even really supporting anymore Nintendo is Infamous for this exact reason across the last seven years this conflict has led to an extremely wide and extremely saddening Rift growing between the pixel tail Dev team and their once adoring audience pixeltale eventually put up their own gmod tower reboot for its 10-year anniversary but from what I've heard it had an abundance of technical issues bugs and Tower unite ads placed absolutely everywhere through the game world and wound up dividing people even further with some claiming that the reboot was strictly performative to mitigate the controversy and capitalize on it to advertise Tower unite and while that's kind of hard to substantiate on its own today it seems the official gmod tower servers are all but completely inactive so who's in the ride well from the perspective of the people trying to play these reboots pixel Hotel comes off as though they're anti-historical tyrants abusing the copyright system to squash what little Joy people are getting from playing the old version of the game that people are volunteering their own time and money to host and play at no profit but on the other hand they do apparently own the trademark to GM Tower and it's also kind of hard for me to not sympathize with them it's probably seriously annoying to constantly deal with people wanting to play your old abandoned from 2009 instead of the new game you've put a budget and years of your life into building and supporting especially since a lot of these projects apparently run on Stolen code that was leaked just to spite you and frankly the way pixletail had macd guy got ripped apart on online forums for trying to speak out against people using his own Creation in ways he didn't approve of it's kind of messed up in my opinion I can actually uniquely relate to putting my heart into something new and interesting just to be disappointed by people still wanting the old slop I made years ago that I'm nowhere near as proud of anywho I tried to reach out to the tower unite devs to get more of their side of the story but it looks like they were too busy working on pushing an update to give me a word for this video which is fine and this goes without saying but but please don't give these guys any for this at the end of the day they're just a small Indie team trying to promote and protect their products ultimately I think the whole thing boils down to two main facts one the tower unite was never going to be an acceptable replacement for gmod tower for some people due to its intrinsically different direction and roots and two the pixel tail basically gets Sovereign rule over everything they've ever distributed unless someone tries to take them to court which will never happen and would probably be a very bad idea I can only hope that an agreement can eventually be reached between pixel tail and these other fan re hosts that allows them to continue existing in a way that keeps everybody happy because I talked to some of the people behind these rehosts and they genuinely seem to be motivated by love not Spite and that brings me to the real point of this video last month I was tipped off by a friend that yet another fan team has come together and got the good old gmod tower up and running again they're paying money out of pocket to re-host these servers at no profit and they seem genuinely passionate about preserving the game and its culture there's no telling how long it'll stay up so I figured now is a better time than ever to have a gander at this classic ma that people have been fighting for over half a decade now to keep up and running and show you all just what's so special about it afterward I'm gonna have a look at the official gmod tower reunion server and Tower unite for the first time and tell you how those experiences compare now I don't want to step on any toes here so I'm not going to tell you guys where to find these servers and I'm also going to say that if you're gonna go out of your way to find them and play on them yourself it's probably only morally and ethically right that you purchase a copy of tower unite as well which I did but with that out of the way today I want to dig into this historic relic of my childhood and one of the most legendary Gmod game modes of all time foreign so getting into a gmod tower re-host was as simple as downloading their mod collection off the workshop and then connecting to the server using the console from there I was faced with an all too familiar loading screen and could immediately tell I was in for one hell of a Nostalgia trip once I connected I spawned in the Metro where I enjoyed tinkering with my player settings to change my character model and enable view roll because I'm a sicko then afterward I walked up the stairs to the main lobby and that's when the memory started really pouring in welcome to the gmod tower this is the Hub world and Nexus of this game mode and from here there's a bunch of different directions and places you can go why don't we start out with this theater on our left now if you've played Gmod multiplayer before there's a pretty decent chance you already know what's going on here but just in case you don't basically there's certain Gmod add-ons that lets you spawn TVs and watch videos or listen to music with other players and in the gmod tower they've rigged one of these TVs up to a literal theater where you can sit down with friends and strangers to watch YouTube together now this is definitely not as novel as it was 10 years ago before the existence of Discord and such but you can probably still see how something like this helped build the game's sense of community back in the day it was always a fun sits in here and see what people were watching in fact the Gmod Tower Theater was actually popular enough that it got forked into its own game mode called Cinema back in 2013. come play with popcorn and some really Sleek looking levels for the time as much as people might want to give pixel tail there's no denying they've had their hands in a lot of Gmod history I even learned while making this video that they're apparently also the people who made elevator source if any of you guys remember that getting back to the theater itself though it actually has a couple of nifty Secrets if you head up to the back area and press e on this coffee mug you'll get teleported to a separate Cinema that's on the moon and get your player model set to the Fallout 3 astronaut you can also follow this busted open vent and climb all the way through these dingy backdoor areas to the top of the tower which you can then jump off of for an easy achievement [Music] to do over here though our first I personally never spent too much time in the GMT theater especially once Cinema came out so I unfortunately don't really have too many memories to share about it like I do some of the other parts of this mod and chicken sandwich next we're gonna have a look at the entertainment Plaza this is the place you get faced head on with when you first enter the lobby it's this little area that's kind of reminiscent of a mall or maybe an airport and basically serves as a shopping district where you can hang out and spend your in-game currency that you can see in the bottom left I always really liked how sunny and warm this place was people on YouTube love to talk about how creepy and gritty The Source engine is hell even I'm guilty of it but I think we tend to overlook how joyous and colorful it can be too gmod tower uses a lot of the same stock HO2 and CSS assets we associate with the grittiest and most desolate locations but uses them to instead create a comforting place you might actually want to spend time and watch the world go by in it's kind of pleasant to just take a seat at one of these tables and watch the other players run around as for what's in the plaza probably the first thing that'll catch your eye here is this appearance store if you've ever played the GTA games this is kind of like the clothing stores from that here you can pick up new unique player models like Master Chief Leon Kennedy Zelda postal dude Nico and Roman belick Walter White Carly like from the old Walking Dead games God man what throwback there's really something for everyone here but I'm partial to the Melo 7 in a suit model personally if that's not enough for you this place also lets you deck your guy out in hats and accessories all kinds of glasses head crabs Majora's masks Mario and Luigi cabs Etc and right outside you can also hit up one of these vending machines to take a potion and make yourself bigger smaller flatter or even whatever the hell this is to the appearance store Gmail Tower really gave the player a lot of options to personalize their character and express themselves and I think that was one of the most appealing things about it back in the day since it came out around the same time TF2 was booming there is plenty more to do in the plaza than just play dress-up though for example you can head over to this arcade to see some old school flash games on Arcade cabinets which you can actually play by the way Fancy Pants The Last Stand even portal flash Edition I can't stress how seriously awesome this is to make not awesome however are the controls on blockles which is the gmod tower arcade's version of Tetris it sucks you can't slow drop your blocks only instant drop them or let them slide down at a snail's pace and the game also seems to have been programmed by a monkey because just sometimes doesn't work how it's supposed to this version of Tetris is uniquely annoying to play even more so if you're a niche internet micro celebrity and a bunch of people are getting in your ear bothering you while you're trying to focus oh you're an bro you're such a for making me up you ruined all right God you can also duel other players in chess Checkers and tic-tac-toe or even compete against them in a little trivia game but that's about it for the arcade as we head back out there's something else I should probably tell you about the main lobby if you stick around there long enough you might eventually notice you've been suddenly handed a chainsaw or that the place has been flooded with cardboard cutouts of Obama that the game is telling you to break with a crowbar these are random events that you can participate in to earn bonus money and I always thought they were a pretty fun way of keeping the Hub World interesting and chaotic they're definitely a bit puzzling to encounter with no forewarning though now here's a question are you a chronic Gambler I'm not but sometimes it feels like gmod tower is trying its best to turn me into one because on the second floor of the plaza is the tower Casino offering all kinds of ways to gamble your hard-earned cash down the toilet how about spending 100 coins to spin a Wheel of Fortune there's a microscopic chance you might win a crazy rare item but you can resell for tens of thousands of coins but more likely you'll get a hula girl worth almost nothing or even literally absolutely nothing at all are you interested yet I've played the wheel in here way longer than I ever want to admit and the best thing I ever got out of it was a backpack that I resold for like a thousand coins I'm honestly convinced some of this on here isn't even possible to get this son of Boozer Shrine apparently resells for like 80k coins or something but I've never seen a single soul ever get it heading away from the spinner you can also play poker and video poker or even sit down at a slot machine and try to hit a big jackpot which I highly recommend against you will just lose all your money I have never gambled or been to a casino in real life and honestly have no real interest in doing so but even I have spent thousands of my hard-earned coins at the gmod tower casino because it is just that addictive and apparently that appeal is survived onto Tower unite since one of the most popular reviews for that game dubs it VR chat for gambling addicts Oh and before I forget the casino also lets you outright challenge anyone under the server to a duel to the death you both have to agree on how much money is on the line and what weapons you'll use and then the game will teleport both of you to a walled off part of the map called Narnia where the last man standing wins it's quite a thrill I'm gonna kill you you are gonna get destroyed what the are you talking about [Music] there's a few other areas and shops around the lobby you can explore like this outdoor area you can access from the Metro leading to a cabin and a public pool as well as this bar if you want to get drunk and vomit all over other players but for the most part we've now covered pretty much everything there is to the main lobby thankfully however the main lobby is nowhere near all gmod tower has to offer because if you hitch this right and hit up these teleporters you'll get a choice to go to two other lobbies Suites and game modes let's start out with the sweets once you arrive in this Lobby you'll be faced with a front desk reception area where you can talk to the sweet lady and rent your own personal room from her for free it's basically a little apartment just for you it comes with a living room a kitchen a bathroom a yard a fish tank a bedroom and even a closet where you can store all your hats it also serves as your own little SIMS house that you can rearrange and decorate however you want if you head back to the entertainment Plaza you can hit up electronic stores poster stores and furniture stores to pick up stuff that you can freely place around your Suite wherever you want you can also win more eccentric decorations as prizes back back at the casino there's a lot of room for expression want a nicer couch sure want to build a whole new room in the empty space above the living room why not how about a rave ball anything you want pal I've personally turned my sweet bedroom into a bar run by the 44th president he's serving up Hope on the Rocks I recently learned the layout of these Suites is actually based on the real world iron Blossom Lodge in Snowbird Utah I can only assume one of the devs stayed there and chose to copy it because they found it to be really cozy anyway decorating is great and all but what's the point if you don't have any guests to admire your pad well luckily Suites are one of the most social elements of gmod tower you can invite anyone you want over or even host House parties and invite the whole Lobby to come watch Pokemon I probably won't ever have an opportunity to tell this story again so forgive my crassness here but one of my earliest memories online was seeing someone in Gmod Towers chat advertised that they had porn playing in their suite and then Meandering over just to be met with a weird close-up video of a woman shaving her coochie it was super well shot and well lit and honestly kind of looked like a clip out of a commercial or something that's still honestly one of my most bewildering memories anyway if that story didn't make it clear basically anything goes in the sweets for better and for worse and it can be great fun to look around and see what other people have managed to make out of the same Little House template from one random corner of Utah or What God awful music they're listening to jerking off in the dog walked in I'm like damn you just killed a Vibe heading back to the teleporters though we've now got to have a look at the last Lobby in the gmod tower Nexus which also happens to be the real meat of the game mode the mini game Lobby you know how I've been periodically mentioning the gmod tower coins that you can earn and spend well this is the best place to get them see the genius of the tower is that it wasn't just a single server running a second life-esque virtual hangout Zone it was actually servers that each branch draw from the central tower through this Mini-Game Port where you could go up and queue for any game you wanted at any time so in a way gmod tower was actually a dozen or so game modes wrapped into one that you could pick from to earn coins I remember each of these having a ton of soul and passion poured into them and I was very excited to check them all out again after all these years on this server it looks like they've got seven mini games online and working so let's have a look see why don't we [Music] when I came back to gmod tower virus was the first game mode I rushed to because it was always my favorite it's basically a zombie survival kind of mode where everyone starts out as survivors but then one player at random gets turned into a Fallout 3 Ghoul who then has to infect more players by getting close to them the humans have to try to survive until the time limit runs out and it gets pretty damn fun and hectic from what I can tell it's based on the game mode of the same name from time Splitters which I haven't played since I was a very young child but I do remember it looking really cool anyway Gmod Tower's take on virus is seriously great fun the weapons are awesome as hell the music is great and there are plenty of wonderfully crafted levels to play on my personal favorite is the hospital it's just always stuck with me for some reason I actually highly recommend checking this mode out sometime if you've never played it it's a great hectic take on the zombie genre and forever has a special place in my heart moving on though next up is PVP battle foreign this mini game is as it sounds Gmod Tower's rendition of a free-for-all deathmatch mode just like virus there's a bunch of really cool maps to explore and play on and a lot of cool guns to pick from as well like the akimbos and the shotgun unfortunately I find that the easiest way to win PVP battle is actually to forego guns entirely because the melee weapons are very powerful especially on close range maps and everyone moves so fast that it's kind of hard to land precise shots anyway my favorite levels in PvP battle were this big open snowy one where melee attacks are a bit easier to dodge and therefore the Gunplay shines more as well as the subway which is just really cool looking and fun one thing that does kind of suck about this mode is that there's only one song that plays every time the match starts and it gets really repetitive and annoying the longer you play Oh and I almost forgot to mention this but PVP battle is actually Loosely based on Jake and bacon Source an old mod for Half-Life 1 that was really popular before my time it was also the groundwork for jabroni Brawl episode 3. an actual Source game that came out not too long ago and is unfortunately completely dead funnily enough I personally find gmod Tower's PVP battle to be more fun than either of these games but that might just be me next up we've got to have a look at source carts okay this one is exactly what it sounds like it's Mario Kart it's Mario Kart except you can trunk drive and vomit everywhere and play as Nico Bellic which is awesome Source cards has a bit of a reputation as gmod's worst or jankiest mini game but I actually find it to be really fun basically everyone competes for a couple laps around a regular racecourse then the match closes out with two rounds of a battle mode whoever did the best overall collects the most money sometimes when I'm cruising through these levels I honestly forget I'm even playing Gmod with how colorful they are then I get to a ramp or a curve in the chorus where my camera completely breaks and I quickly remember this is still just an elaborate mutation of Half-Life 2. source cards is kind of a stupid idea but I honestly find it to be one of the most enjoyable game modes gmod tower has to offer what can I say Mario Kart is a great party game and Gmod cart is a fun Twist on it I'm speaking of just putting stuff in Gmod next up is [Music] it's mini golf that's it there's there's not even a Twist this time I'm definitely not very good at this mode but I still kind of find it fun to play when shooting this with friends and once again some of the maps have really cool Vibes if you somehow never played mini golf basically you got to get your ball into the hole with as few putts as possible sometimes working around ramps or in this version moving platforms to try and outperform the other players there's really not a lot to say about this other than much like Source cards it's kind of Novel to see something like this built in the source engine and from what I can tell it's one of the more popular modes in this game so I guess I'm the odd one out for not particularly caring for it but enough little kid okay cause next up it's time for a Zombie Massacre [Music] Zombie Massacre is a high octane top-down PVE zombie survival mode wow what a mouthful and to me it feels a lot like an old Flash game I've heard some people say it's based off the Dead Ops Arcade Mode in Call of Duty Black Ops but I've never played that so I don't know how true it is anyway you pick one of these loadouts that come with different perks and special abilities I'm partial to the father Gregory propeller trap and then try to hold out with your butt until a rescue chopper comes to get you it definitely feels a little strange to play a top-down shooter in the source engine which is probably why I never got into alien Swarm but you know what this game mode is actually pretty fun the gameplay of just spamming your mouse button does get a little repetitive and it's definitely not anywhere near as exciting as virus in my opinion but there's still an opportunity for a lot of variety and teamwork with the different classes and also sometimes there's a giant T-Rex that comes out and insta kills you so all in all it's a pretty good Zombie Massacre but maybe put more dinosaurs next time I really like that part [Music] have you ever played Super Monkey Ball well the creatively titled ball race game mode is basically just Super Monkey Ball Co-op and I suck at it it's not all my fault though some of the maps are just you basically just gotta make your way to the end of these tricky rotating spinny obstacle courses without falling into the void or getting a game over if you've got better balance than me or you're a big fan of Super Monkey Ball you might really enjoy it though because even despite how bad I was at it I actually still had a bit of fun rolling my character around and whatever this place is you know I've never even played the source material before but even as a kid I knew as soon as I looked at this mode that it had to be based on some weird Japanese anyway to finally round us off I gotta look at what might be the most iconic gmod tower game mode of all time ultimate Chimera hunt uch is a game mode everyone seems to really love and remember fondly I feel like if you ask people if they remember gmod tower this is probably the first thing you'll hear brought up I also seem to remember playing on it a lot back in the day though coming back to it in this I struggled to remember how it worked or even how to play from what I can tell it's actually one of Gmod Tower's only original game modes though it's built using characters from The Mother series or Earthbound and the premise is that there's two teams one team being the pig masks and the other being a single guy playing as the Chimera monster the chimera's goal is to eat everybody else by stunning them with his Roar and owning them while the pig people's goal is to disable the Chimera by sneaking up behind him and hitting a button on his back that instantly wins the round for them it's pretty simple I actually remember the maps for this game better than I did the game itself a lot of them are cartoony and kind of TF2 infused and coming back to them after all these years was very interesting as for the gameplay I feel like I remember it being better when I was younger there's a few factors that I think might play into this one being that I was 10 years old back then the other being that in the 10 years since then everyone has gotten a lot better at juking the Chimera so now he dies is instantly like every single round and also According to some of the other players I talked to this version of uch is apparently slightly out of date putting all this all that aside though ultimate Chimera Hunt is still a Nifty little game mode and an undeniable classic I do wish this server had the new park city map though that one was always my favorite but with that we've now unfortunately covered all the game modes available on this fan re-host of gmod tower in my opinion they're all still pretty fun to play with friends or even just the other randos you can find huddling around in the lobby coming back to them all these years later was definitely a really cool experience and reminded me of a happier more innocent time in my life but now that I've shown you with the gmod tower experience looks like on a fan made server it's only fair that I next show you what things are like on the official gmod tower server the pixel tail put up in 2019 for its 10-year anniversary let's have a look the first thing I noticed is that to join not only do I have to download a workshop collection I also have to manually download a zip file off their website which is a bit odd it's whatever though I'm an epic Grizzle Gmod veteran so the act of drag and dropping files doesn't even phase me I did notice this weirdly intimidating terms of service I had to agree to and the fact that even enlisting Gmod Tower's game Mount requirements pixel Taylor basic already telling you to off and go play Tower unite instead setting my reservations about that to the side once I had everything sorted out and installed I booted up GMod and joined the IP provided immediately I noticed that the loading screen seemed to be failing to format images and was kind of broken also that despite having downloaded a full Workshop collection and manually installing files off their website I still somehow had thousands of Lua files I had to wait to download from the server which kind of put a bad taste in my mouth once I got in I was immediately faced with a giant Tower unite advertisement that I had to close but then I actually got really excited when I realized I still had my old items and player data from way back in the day this excitement was very quickly interrupted however when I hit Tab and saw that there were zero other players online at 2PM I tried to set my player model to the one I had equipped in my inventory but no matter how I tried it just wouldn't work I spotted another Tower unite advertisement on the Metro wall then had a deeper into the tower and it was actually kind of unnerving how empty this main lobby fell going towards the shops my intrusive thoughts wanted me to go gamble but I realized I was kind of broke so I sold my skin since it wasn't working anyway and headed up to the casino just to find that all the Spinners were missing for some reason I then headed over to the arcade but none of the flash games there seem to be working either as I headed back to the main land started popping up in the empty chat which at this point was kind of starting to get annoying I decided to move on to the teleporters and check out the Suites since this server still had all my old player data I was excited to see what my old place looked like I hadn't seen it since I was a kid and had no idea what to expect I held my breath as I checked in with the desk lady and made my way in it was almost completely empty and decorated like absolute though that's really not anybody's fault of my own when I went upstairs though a great sadness began to wash over me this little room I had made as a child in the midst of one of the most vibrant times in gmod's history and what surrounds it now a completely abandoned empty server that no one uses damn once I taken that in I left for the game mode Lobby I heard from a friend that some of these didn't work and were unplayable so I wanted to see that for myself but once I made my way up there I realized that with zero other players online that simply wasn't going to happen all of g-monthower's game modes require at least two or three people to play now it might sound like I'm being dramatic or something but this moment in the suite where I was faced with a distant shadow of my childhood followed by me entering a game mode Port just to realize I won't be able to play any of them made me so viscerally disappointed that I legitimately quit the game on the spot it just made me so upset to see that What Remain ing mod Tower's official Legacy is a buggy unsupported empty Lobby that basically just serves as a giant billboard telling people to off and go play Tower unite it'd honestly be better if the server didn't exist at all than to exist in this state and it's not even particularly believe that they want to advertise Tower Unite Here they got to get their bag and everything but if they're gonna make a big spectacle out of bringing the server back for a reunion couldn't they at least make sure it functions properly and if they're gonna make it so Tower unite ads show up on every inch of the game world can they at least make them go away if you're someone who's actually bought the damn game After experiencing this to me it's no wonder why people are up in arms and want to take things into their own hands but listen alright I don't want to end this on a sad note and I don't want to be unfair to the talented people at pixletail so to close this off I want to give Tower unite a fair shake the reviews are really good and a lot of people have clearly poured years of their life into it so I figured it wouldn't be right not to let's have a look all right booting up Tower unite the first thing I met with is a giant disclaimer that it's still in Early Access so if anything is bad I can leave a bug report which is good to know it's easy to knock still being in Early Access all these years later but to be fair it is a very small team so play nice people second thing I got was a notification that they've added Steam Workshop support which is kind of a relief when the game came out there was very little meat to its character customization you could be generic guy generic girl or skeleton and I think that was about the full list now you can be anything you can find on the workshop which does actually Encompass a pretty sizable amount of content if you're trying to follow up on the infinite expression offered by Gary's Mod Workshop support is honestly kind of a bare minimum but it's still definitely a step in the right direction so kudos for that I went to the server browser and for all the big names who blessed this game it was really not as popular as I was expecting I only spotted give or take 100 people across all the cumulative servers which surprised me because steam chart says this game averages between 300 to 400 users a day neither of these are bad for a low budget indie game mind you I just figured there'd be more anyway I joined the most popular server and the first thing I noticed is how different the feels from gmod tower this Dev definitely feels like the Unreal Engine I tried walking into a train and glitched through it head on and got stuck for a second which made me laugh once again the game is in Early Access so I don't want to knock it too hard for something harmless like this I walked out to a very intricately well-crafted world that almost looked like GTA online or something and didn't even know where to start I wandered over to some random structure that I quickly figured out was Tower unites version of the game mode Hub and started browsing I noticed there were a few single player games which I guess is good future proofing given the state of GMT reunion no one else seemed to be around the game mode Hub so I called out and chat to ask if anyone wanted to play virus which I was genuinely excited to try I eventually ran into this guy who looks like Sonic which was pretty cool and after waiting around a while and trying to Wrangle enough people together we finally got a virus Lobby going I of course voted for my favorite map the hospital because I wanted to see what the new rendition of it looked like in this game here's how that went okay finally we're gonna be able to are you kidding me what the what do you mean yep the first game I tried to join spit me back to the main menu now chances are this is rare and I just got unlucky but in the moment it was kind of infuriating I tried not to let it spoil my experience though so from the main menu I got booted to I decided to take the opportunity to go check out the condos which are Tower United's take on GMT Suites and to their credit there's plenty of interesting layouts and designs to pick from there's a lot more opportunity for creativity and expression here with how much bigger these environments are than the old gmod tower Suites the only thing is these servers that you can invite friends to not a fluent part of the actual games Hub World basically instead of walking next door to your friend's apartment it's more like connecting to a Minecraft realm or something and in my opinion that takes half the fun out of it I loved running around The Sweet Lobby and GMT and just barging through random people's doors but it doesn't seem like that's even possible in tarry and I I went back again and successfully tried a few of the game mode remix and they're actually all pretty decent they're mostly just faithful reimaginings of the old GMT Classics and it's kind of cute to see how they try to skirt around copyright law by just barely changing the designs of the Chimera and such the game does have some charm to it that I can't deny I don't want to give anyone the impression that Tower unite is bad it's not really my thing but if the reviews are anything to go by they're still undeniably hours of fun to be had in this game and I even saw people Mike spamming Call on Me by Eric Prides by the fountain so as far as I'm concerned the people calling this game soulless are kind of just wrong yeah all that being said it is a different experience to gmod tower and seems to have a different audience too to some extent I went around the lobby asking people if they had ever played gmod tower before and most of them said no and if I'm being totally honest with you I probably won't ever play Tower unite again after I post this video because the main reason I like gmod tower in the first place was for the Gmod soul that it carried and I suspect a lot of other people feel the same way I do want to praise the fact that they never reneged on their pledge to no microtransactions though it would be so easy to monetize this game that way and they didn't which definitely deserves a salute in my opinion if I had to sum up my whole experience playing on a re-host of gmod tower years and years after I last played it and it shut down nearly made me cry tears of joy seeing the official state of the reunion server however filled me with an existential dread in Tower unite I mean it was cool but it was also kind of just a different experience altogether anyway to wrap things up in regards to the whole dmca controversy I mentioned at the start I think it's really obvious that the reason people play The Fan re-hosts instead of Gmod Tower's official reunion isn't out of any spite for Pixel tail or Tower unite it's because they're clearly run by people who care more about maintaining the game than they do and pixotel probably has the legal right to strike down these projects but I don't think that necessarily translates to it being morally correct gmod tower was once so popular and well supported within the Gary's Mod community that they were able to get the game's player account limit raised just to accommodate them but now they've kind of completely turned their back on that community that made them by failing to maintain their servers and shutting down anyone who tries to pick up the torch from where I sit pixel tail owes the existence of their company and product to making use of other people's copyrighted ideas through modding and yet they're shutting other people's mods of their work down which I think is kind of shitty and unfair then again there very well could be a part of this drama or some context that I'm missing out on that would change my mind that's why I'm kind of sad that macd guy declined to interview he seems like a guy who has a hell of a story to tell what's weird is pixeltail clearly doesn't hate gmod tower any anything in fact they seem genuinely proud of what they accomplish with it hell you can even apparently get the gmod tower lobby as a condo in Tower unite instead it seems like they see gmod tower as a stepping stone that led to Tower unite and is now completely obsolete which I think is a huge disservice to its Legacy I like to think maybe there's a world where the people managing the rehost could maybe be put in charge of the official reunion server so nobody feels the need to do any back alley dealings anymore but I honest that we'll see anything that diplomatic out of a story like this this is the internet after all regardless of all that though I'm not a hater so if anything I've talked about in this video seems at all interesting to you you should consider checking out Tower unite on Steam if nothing else just to support an indie Dev team trying to hustle their way out of the proverbial Source engine Hood hopefully if you're someone who is curious as to what gmod tower is or what happens to it in the year since it shut down or you last played it this video helped catch you up or at least entertained you and of course I look forward to reading everybody's essays in the comments thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed subscribe for more and have a good day here we are 10 years in the making but we're back out of me [Music] [Applause] [Music] good night a dream about cheese

Channel: Richter Overtime

Views: 392,247

Keywords: gaming, source, valve, tf2, gmod, hl2, half-life, team fortress 2, garry's mod, counter strike

Id: NNh2uqRI83Q

Length: 35min 36sec (2136 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 13 2023