Two quick HL2 mod reviews

I just played two HL2 mods that I think are worth mentioning despite my rants about them.

The first was was called "Final Project Diary", by Leon.  The mappack is long, contains new weapons, sound and music, and a fresh storyline.  The plot is interesting, in that there really isn't one, except you're an addicted HL2 fan making a map pack play-testing the maps you built, with levels ranging from haunted houses, to zombie infestations, to wierd hallucination scenarios, to skyscrapers.  Some maps look good, a few look awful, but overall, a good mappack.

It suffers from the usual disease "Leon-itus," that is, a bunch of obvious invisible walls, cutscenes that freeze the player and make you die, and annoying 'stealth' section.  You'll lose count how many times you have your weapons taken away only to have to re-acquire them.

One thing I liked was the option to choose an 'easy' or 'hard' path at the beginning of each section. The ending was funny and nonsensical, and I'm glad the author chose not to take the mod seriously, because I was starting to get really irritated towards the end due the faults mentioned above.

The next is a mod called "1187".  It's a total conversion that's made like a sequel to Halflife 1 with seemingly little reguard to HL2 (which is a nice, fresh idea, in my opinion).  You start out in an apartment (seriously people, apartments and jail cells are the two most cliched map starts in mod history) and meet a new friend named John.  He is more annoying than Alyx, complains alot, has an annoying voice, and is really worthless.  He isn't Urkle-annoying, but I hope in 1187: Episode 2 they tone down his chatter.

Be sure to find the pistol early in the game (if there is one.  I had to cheat halfway through to get the pistol and it really made life easier).  I assume there was a pistol somewhere earlier that I missed (there was a ton of pistol ammo everywhere).  It would have saved me the trouble of fighting zombies with a crowbar.  Not only was zombie combat, your sidekick, and backtracking through the apartment a pain in the arse, but half the maps are pitch-black.  You have a light but it's attached to the shotgun and the pistol (which I never had).  If you run out of shotgun ammo, you can't equip it and use the only source of light.

Another negative - the first person controls like a drunk simulator.  If you run, sidestep, or reload, your view start flailing wildly like you're supposed to be a drunk lunatic.  The only good thing about this is the level design, architechure, and most importantly, the combat.  You have ironsights and it's really alot of fun to shoot at enemy soldiers with the wide variety of new weapons.  I think it makes up for the few major bugs in the game.  I had to quit halfway through when my partner stopped following me and I couldn't trigger certain events to continue.  It's a shame, because the authors really put alot of effort into this and the few bugs made this game un-beatable for me.