War of the Servers

War of the Servers is a full-length Machinima Film made using Half-Life 2 and the Garry's Mod add-in to HL2. It is a parody retelling of H. G. Wells War of the Worlds done within the computer environment of these two programs.

The film opens with the narrator and protagonist describing the Garry's Mod environment in Half-Life, used to play with the physics engine or to build constructions inside it. The trouble begins when a strange fog envelops the world - one that the administrator of that particular server neither enabled nor is able to stop - and a new contraption appears, which eventually starts vaporizing every player in the game, except for a few fortunate to escape.

Administrators of various servers ("admins") begin a concerted effort to mount a war against the invading hordes of new users, called "mingebags." As the movie progresses, the admins are unable to stop the mingebags, and various efforts are made to try to attack their contraptions, by air and by any attempt the admin military forces can devise.

For a film constructed using machinima, it is very well done, and does a fairly good translation of the Wells story, even to the ending where the mingebags are defeated, basically they're a bunch of kids, and quit when they have to go back to school on Monday.

You can see the film, broken into 2 45-minute segments, at the following URL: http://litfusefilms.com/movies/waroftheservers/

This film gives examples of

  • Inside a Computer System - the whole point of the film
  • Soundtrack Dissonance - Lemon Jelly's upbeat "Nice Weather For Ducks" plays during the credits, while the rest of the soundtrack is much more serious in nature.
  • Disintegrator Ray- The Mingepods' Remover guns
  • Not So Invincible After All - The Mingepods could easily be taken out with Lua coded bricks which undoes the welds holding them together (The Artileery guns use them, Two Admin planes use them as bombs, And one could believe that the Thunder Child uses them for her ammunition.)
  • Cool Boat - Renamed "The Admin Boat: Thunder Child"
  • Hopeless War - The war with the mingebags; everybody who fights back just ends up getting killed (crashed)
  • Badass Normal - Steinman, the protagonist, is one of the few players to survive the invasion, even after a face-to-face battle with the invaders themselves.
  • Affectionate Parody - of Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds
  • (Un)Reality Ensues - When Steinmann regroups with some survivors, one of the players suggests they hide underground, following the Wot W script....Except an admin points out they're on a map, so it wouldn't work, and then promptly uses Table Fu on him
  • Serious Business - Stienmann seems to take the game rather seriously (presumably being crashed by the remover gun somehow makes you totally unable to log in again, but he stays up all night playing the game just running away...). Fridge Brilliance, in that Stienmann comes from R.J's Serious Build Server.
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