Last friday I decided to haul my computer up at Taiko's. The idea was to game Synergy and Insurgency all weekend. After just half an hour on Synergy we gave up; the many long loading periods were too much. I convinced Taiko to play Insurgency with me. I have always been pretty good at the game and loved it, whereas Taiko has been very poor at it, and thus hated it. I told him to stick close to me and not just run off in any direction and soon he started enjoying the game for how much teamplay-focused it was. In order to not grow tired of the game, I altered between playing that and Age of Chivalry. Taiko wasn't interested in Age of Chivalry, so whenever I loaded that up, he started Ceaser IV.

I believe that Insurgency will make an awesome game, should the team behind the mod decide to follow up.
While I do find Age of Chivalry pretty fun to play, I know that I will also grow tired of it very fast. I mostly play the game as a "warm up" for the release of Darkfall Online later this year. Synergy has added something that HL2 SHOULD have had from the start, nothing else. Although it is interesting to play HL2 in co-op mode, the long loading times ruins the mod.

As the weekend drew to an end, I decided to also check up on the other mods that had recently been promoted to steam.
D.I.P.R.I.P. might appeal to some people, I just found it to be a cheap ripoff off an old playstation game, which I don't remember the name of, but if I say "Grinning clown car", you should know which game I'm thinking of.
I found Zombie Panic to have very poor level design, although the gameplay was.... interesting. It will probably be a mod that dies fast though, with the upcoming release of Left 4 Dead!