What are your favorite custom games?

StarCraft Brood War

• Fastest Possible Map: Your base spawns right next to (touching) a bunch of minerals stacked on top of eachother, and a bunch of vespene geysers semi-stacked closeby. Lets you mine crazy fast off 1 base as the workers don't have to spend any time moving.
• Penguin Warz: You spawn zealots in your base, get currency for killing enemies. You can spend currency on "hero" units (no XP or special abilities really just buffed HP and attack). The zergling can really quickly mow through zealots, the hero zealot can beat the zergling and kind of camouflages in with the free spawn ones. Then there are a bunch more.
• Cannon Defense: typical tower defense game but used some weird glitch to add fog of war over your own stuff and let you build cannons on top of each other.

WarCraft 3

• Footmen Frenzy: pretty similar idea to Penuin Warz except with custom WC3 heroes. Could upgrade the spawning units.

Halo 3

• Rocket Race: Teams of two (a driver and a passenger with a rocket launcher and unlimited ammo) drive a mongoose (atv) around with invincibility and try to get to the checkpoint before the other teams do.

Halo Reach

• Infection: One player spawns as a "zombie" with fast movement, no shields, and an energy sword and has to kill the human players (who have pistols and shotguns), who will then respawn on the zombie team...until all the humans are gone.

Celeste

• Loopy Lagoon: One of the maps from the Strawberry Jam mod. It adds these "cereal blocks" that are really fun to interact with, flinging you far.
• Strawberry Orchard: you have to carry a jar of jam with you through the level similar to carrying Theo. You can throw it into glass tubes and bounce along with springs and catch it as it comes out the other side.
• Square the Circle: Cool neon aesthetic, cool use of red bubbles spinning against moving kevin blocks

One time I bought a 3D pinball game, and it came with an OS. The pinball game was just so-so, but I customized the heck out of the operating system. I used that thing every day for years.

Prop Hunt, in various FPS games over the years. There's just something about trying to find the least conspicuous place to exist as a bucket or wall that tickles my brain.

I’m on mobile and can’t find the link to my old comment at the moment, but I’ve posted on Tildes before about the world of DOOM WADs, aka downloading free user-created maps and levels for a lot of the old id2 engine games from the early-mid 90s. It requires a healthy bit of tinkering to get everything playing nicely, but there is a TON of content out there for free (if you own the original game files that are needed to run the mods). Some play just like old DOOM games, some might as well be entirely new games in and of themselves, like Ashes 2063 and Castlevania: Simon’s Destiny. If anyone is interested in learning more about how to do this, I’d be happy to help get them set up!

Ninja edit: Selaco is a modern (paid) DOOM WAD taken to the extreme - an entirely new game built off the same engine. The devs just chose to charge for this one (and I don’t blame them) vs. many other free offerings.

We had a custom mode for Halo 3 lan parties called TTT: Take the Tower. It was only playable on the Ascension map. You could add a turret to the tower on one side and I think it used modified juggernaut rules so 1 player spawned in the tower and the rest of the players all had to assault the tower but they had no shields and were easily picked off by the turret. It was great fun.

For Warcraft 3 I enjoyed all the previously mentioned maps as well as some of my favorites like
-Hero Line Wars
-X Hero Siege
-Uther Party
-Enfos
-Autumn TD (my personal favorite tower defense)

Warcraft 3 is in my top three all time games and it's an atrocity what blizzard did to it with that piece of garbage they call "reforged".

The Age of Empires 2 custom maps. The only one I can clearly remember is "Castle Blood", but there were many others that were also tremendous fun.

I also spent a fair amount of time in the various arcade modes on StarCraft 2, once upon a time.

Kind of a stretch, but I've been kind of jaded by most style of maps from Trackmania (the 2020 one).
The die and retry kind of play-style still works, but I don't have the appeal of launching a Track of the Day or Weekly Short anymore, as either the style of blocks or decoration still feels kinda stuck to a certain style.

But I've found a particular creator: Aries__90, and I feel they captured a special appeal of having tracks that are either targeting a somewhat realistic setting, or just unexpected decorations that serves as weird playgrounds that are not already optimized and known from 20 years of trackmania experience.
In no particular order, some recent tracks that I particularly liked:

• Nevada Dirt Trail - StadiumCar
• His whole Utah series of tracks, I don't remember the one I've raced the most, but it probably was Utah 05 - Tech
• Swampland - CE
• Mediterranean Mountains
• Volcanic Temple this one was as a Track of the Day
• Jungle Coast
• His whole Downhill series is quite the pleasure to hone my non-existent ice skills Downhill 14
• The justifiably long Paris-Dakar Rally
• His 3 weird Space Adventure tracks Space Adventure 2 where the track is inclined so much as to be near the free-fall zone, rendering the racing behavior very weird.

The list could continue for so long, I think I've played all of their maps. And it has been my sole reason to boot the game now

Special mention to the_random_one with his series of port of old Need For Speed tracks, my favorite would be NFSIII - ROCKY PASS - Stadium, but all are just so fun.

Worms: Armageddon was maintained and improved by community developers for many years. Mods, some of which were later folded back into the main game, improved the already highly versatile built in scheme system, allowing for the creation of all kinds of goofy game modes.

My community played this game for many years. One of my friends made a repository software for installing additional content across our group, which we loaded with additional sound banks, maps, etc. Some of us made many custom schemes. We ran tournaments. It has been around a decade now since we stopped playing, but some of us played a few matches last weekend for old times' sake and it was a lot of fun (though we're not roping nearly as well as we used to...)

We might play again one of these days. Would anyone like to join in? This game supports up to 6 teams per match and 7 connected players (those not playing can watch). It costs €3 on Steam this week.

Team Fortress 2 and Counterstrike: Source Surf servers and maps. I spent countless hours playing custom maps. Servers tinker with the setting so when you're on an angle, you slide forward. Map makers make courses using these angles surfaces, propelling you to faster and faster speeds.

Some maps are built for time trials, some for skill, some for combat, many a combination of all three. My favorite was a combat map, surf_japan, but I spent hundreds of hours on surf servers doing random map rotations.

Back in the early '00s, I played a ton of Unreal Tournament 99, 2k3, and 2k4. I ended up as co-leader of an Instagib Capture the Flag (iCTF) clan for a while.

I loved the purity of the instagib mode. No pickups (weapons, armor, power ups, health, etc.) to worry about. If you got killed and respawned you immediately had just as much of a chance to return the favor. Since everyone was using the same weapon, it was all about your skills at aiming and dodging vs. theirs, combined with how well you know the map.

And occasionally if I felt like something really crazy, I'd go on a server running 150% LG iCTF - 150% speed, low gravity, instagib capture the flag. Everyone would be zooming around like crazy, jumping like fleas, and blasting each other out of the air. Good times.

For me, Halo 3 had some of the best custom games ive ever experienced. I remember the wide variety of interesting and unique modes that were made with forge, using interesting maps and ruleset to keep each one unique and fresh.

Best notable mode I can think of was FAT KID. It was essentially infection, a mode where 1 player spawns as a zombie with a sword and gravity hammer and has to "infect" all the other players by killing them and turning them into zombies. Except with fat kid, there was a specific map to play it on with specific modifications to the player stats.

The map was a big open courtyard leading to what looked like a firing range. There was also an enclosed ramp/hallway on the right that spiraled up and and around the outside of the courtyard until it got to the top level, which opened back on to the courtyard.

The fat kid would spawn on the far end of the courtyard, away from the firing range and below the opening at the top of the ramps. There was all the most powerful weapons spawning at the other side for the player to shot them with. The fat kid would move extremely slow, but had the maximum amount of shield and the maximum amount of shield regen, making them functionally Invincible unless everyone focused them for awhile OR someone assassinated them. Any players the fat kid killed, would spawn as super fast zombies with no shields.

It made for a lot of fun to have everyone hanging out focusing their attacks on them, until someone eventually got bored/greedy and decided they were gonna try to assassinate them. This almost always resulted in people dying to them and more zombies joining the fat kids ranks, making it harder for the human players to win by time out. So much fun with the bigger the lobby, the more fun it became.

I think it was last week that it would be cool to recreate the WC3 classic Footman Frenzy into a modern version. If I could code, which I can't, I think it'd be something I'd like to create.

There were so many memorable WC3 custom maps that I'd like to play again:

Water Wars.
Tides of Blood (both WW and ToB predated DotA).
Escape from Gay Heaven.
Orc Gladiators.
Wintermaul Wars.
Hero Line Wars.

And too many others to count, some with sped up Linkin Park background music, others without.

I see others have mentioned the same maps and it just goes to show that they were really good games in their own right.

Stalker COP with the atmosfear mod (and i think absolute nature?) was the most immersed I've ever felt in a video game. Aomething about running for it when a blowout started to slowly blow in on the wind and hiding in a small shack until it passed was insane

In Arma 3 I've spent an unbelievable amount of time playing solo antistasi. Mostly because i never had a group tonplay with, but that and the old man campaign were incredible.

I don't kkow where we draw the dividing line between custom games and mods that have their own campaigns, and those two are definitely the second on that list, but they would be my choice :)