No One Lives Forever fixed up a bit in new fan patch
Fixo!
You may not be able to buy No One Lives Forever outside the second-hand market these days, but if you do have it you'll now find it a lot friendlier to revisit. Modman Jacob Breen has made a "modernisation patch" fixing up performance, UI, and resolution issues to make the much-beloved spy-fi stealth FPS feel less like, well, a game released 19 years ago. It is still one of the best PC FPSs so I hear. The 39th best, I'm told. Some highly scientific method applied there, no doubt.
The Modernizer patch fixes some performance issues, adds an option to scale the HUD for higher resolution, replaces the mouse input code to make controls snappier, adds an option for a 60fps cap, and fixes a few other things. You can grab it, and find instructions, from Itch.io.
"It's important that you don't run this mod with any other mods that may have modified the game code," Breen notes, so perhaps not one for megamodders fiddling with all the bits and bytes. Breen also released the NOLF Modernizer's source code on GitHub for those who fancy tinkering further. Other fanfixes for NOLF exist but this has some new tricks.
This isn't Breen's first fanfix. He's also made a patch for widescreen in Warlords Battlecry 3. God bless people working to keep old games going in the ever-changing landscape of PC gaming.
Night Dive Studios have tried to arrange a re-release or remaster or resomething of No One Lives Forever. Turns out, the rights are splintered between several companies and some aren't even sure how much of it they might own. Night Dive have untangled some messy rights issues before, which is why we're finally seeing System Shock 3, but this one seems to have stalled. With NOLF's issues apparently unsolvable and the game seemingly never returning to sale, our former John (RPS in peace) recommended just pirating it. If you go to prison, tell 'em John Walker sent you.