Mod Analysis: Thunders Leaves - Become A Living Tesla Coil

Jarek Gaming reviews a cool Halflife 2 mod - "Thunder's Leaves" that adds new weapons, NPC's, and gameplay elements.

CounterStrike:GO and TF2 source code leaked in retaliation to SJW!!

Link to the story.

Pretty good summary of the article:

At the same time, he was leaking the codebases, he was also airing Valve’s dirty laundry. 

 ...

Half-Life 3 and Source 2:
>Source 2 is literally Source 1 with Rubikon on top of it.
>The biggest feature of Rubikon is thermal physics which are not even present in Alyx.
>Thermal physics were to debut in Half-Life 3.
>Half-Life 3 was to take place 10 years after HL2 and be a completely separate story.

Left 4 Dead 3:
>Left 4 Dead 3 was 95% completed and made in Unity.
>Gaben is pissed about this because releasing an Unity game is an “image problem”.
>Old guard want to port the game to Source 2, but Source 2 is not ready.
>New people are most familiar with UE4 so they want to port L4D to UE4 instead.
>Gaben wants it to run on Source 2.
>Source 2 is not ready.
>Project put into the freezer forever.

Continued, other interesting shit.
>SteamVR was in reality basically developed by Oculus while Valve rather focused on the controllers.
>Oculus wanted to support SteamVR by default and they were all for selling Valve’s games on their platform and selling their games on Steam.
>Just ahead of release of CV1, Valve’s head of VR Alan Yates out of nowhere accused Oculus of industrial espionage and threatened them with lawsuit if they don’t remove SteamVR support from their games.
>Yates is very happy about this because people blame Oculus instead of him. 

Continued, more stuff from the leak:
Half-Life and Nintendo:
>Nintendo offered Valve $300k for a Half-Life game that would be exclusive to NX (Switch).
>Valve wanted to go with it and make an RTS game for Switch with touch controls.
>Father Grigori was supposed to be one of the “playable” heroes.
>Gordon Freeman was supposed to make a cameo and TALK because “he only doesn’t talk because he’s a protagonist”. Valve didn’t understand why this would raise a backlash.
>Valve was not aware that Lambda Wars exists.

"VALVe is not your friend..." Good article on Polygon

Valve is not your friend, and Steam is not healthy for gaming - The illusion behind the “Good Guy Valve” reputation.

If you were to ask the average PC gamer, they’d swear up and down that there’s no way they’d ever give their money to such a corporation [such as Google]. They’d not only be caught dead before helping a company like that come to power, they might even join the resistance to stop them. 

And yet, that sort of operation is exactly what the PC gaming community has been supporting, promoting and defending since 2004 when Valve more or less forced us to install Steam by bundling it with Half-Life 2.

 Basically gamers are dumb.  Who'd have thought?!?

HL2 - "Hunt Down The Freeman"

Really bad commercialized Halflife 2 mod: "Hunt Down the Freeman".  It costs $30 $17, but from what I read, it seems there are better Halflife 2 mods out there.  Why does VALVe and Steam allow their IP to be raped and humiliated like this?  Oh yeah, because money lol.  You can buy it here.  I will personally buy it when the price goes below $4, which I feel will happen in the next Christmas sale.

Also playthrough video which I have not bothered watching:

HL2 Mod Review: ICE Expansion - IT HAS PENGUINS!

Jarek4GamingDragon reviews HL2 mod "ICE Expansion."

Wolfenstein3d Source and Halflife 2 de-make

A remake and de-make...

ReWolfenstein 3d - A source mod

Halflife 2 - a "De-make" on GoldSource

Good info for getting back into mapping

Notes for getting Source SDK 2013 working.   Hmm... Basically it's three years old and to this day Faceposer still doesn't run properly without crashing, but at least mapping mostly works.

Been a year...

The mod scene has been pretty much dead since VALVe broke Source SDK.  Me and several friends have personally been working on our own project and things came to a halt earlier this year because the mod tools won't work. It kind of turned me off from mods altogether.  Right now I'm kind of just picking up the pieces. I'm hoping that this alternative to Hammer Editor, Sledge Editor, will let me at least edit some maps and wrap up my project, which so far, is a complete work of abortion.

I feel like I just need to finish the last few maps and at least have some closure to something that I've been working on in secret for two years of my life.

What's new in the gaming world, as far as I can tell?  The whole GamerGate is the only glaring thing that has really stuck out like a sore thumb, and reaffirms my belief that Gamers are, in fact, dumb.  Also Gamers Are Embarassing.  It's an old blog that's been abandoned but it's still a good resource on the "Gamer Lifestyle" culture that I think should be brought to light.

Silvermania's Exclusive Interview with Gabe Newell

I'll just leave this here...

Gabe opens his mouth and shit comes out.

Valve Boss Gabe Newell Says "Windows 8 is a Catastrophe"

You know what else is a catastrophe? Your fucking cholesterol.  How about lose some weight, you sweaty meat bag.

Residual Life

Another Black Mesa simulator, but this is actually fun.  Level design is true to the original Halflife and there was enough interesting things to see in the intro that made me keep playing through.  Fun mod, one new enemy type, no new weapons, and good, consistant level design.  There were a few memorable combat areas and clever puzzles. All in all, a good, solid Halflife mod.

A short review - Vengeance

I know I haven't updated in a while, but I've had this Halflife mod installed in my Steam folder for a while now, called Vengeance.  It's just another HL1 mod, set in Black Mesa, that is no different than any other mod of similar nature.

It starts out with text that fades in and out, along with camera cuts that fade in and out.  The text is in broken English, and the title states that this is 'Episode 2' or 'Part 2,' I don't remember.  My gameplay experience consisted of waking up in a dorm room or something, walking into a train car, then seeing a three minute cutscene of a train slowly making it's way across an underground lake, and finally I got out.  I walked my way into a series of rooms with bad design, came across a very narrow hallway with a scientist walking through it, and my adventure ended when said scientist plowed right through me, squashing me into chunks of meat.

So why am I bothering to showcase this?  I have no idea, but after months without playing a Halflife mod, I thought I might as well.  Maybe it gets good after that, but probably not.  I think what probably drew me in was the 62 mb filesize.  I expected maybe it would have some interesting music in it, or some new enemy models or weapons, but nope.  There's about 23 maps about 3 megabytes each.  I hate to judge a map based on a short playtime, but I think I just lost the will to play any mod that is set in Black Mesa or that doesn't contain new assets.

http://www.planetphillip.com/posts/vengeance-half-life/

Ruin Christmas for whiny gamers who don't matter

So it seems with the new Steam contest, you can complete objectives to earn prizes, coupons, or 'coals'.  Coals by themselves are worthless, but if you earn seven of them, you can craft them into a free game.  Additionally, the more coals you have in your inventory, the higher chance you have of winning the Steam ultimate prize: All the Steam games, plus hundreds of second prize winners.

Now here's where I take advantage of the situation.  I have about 10 dummy accounts.  I made them using different emails so they couldn't be traced to my primary email.  But the thing you need to remember is that you need to own a retail game in order for an account to be authentic (ie you can't add friends or trade certain goods if you're not authenticated.)  Additionally, in order to trade certain goods, your account has to be in good standing for 90 days (meaning it CAN'T have been banned).  It's a good thing I created these accounts a long time ago.

I would have recommended buying the Humble Indie Bundle 4 for a penny (and I still do), but they caught on to this scheme, so now you need a minimum of 1 dollar to get a Steam key.  Still, one dollar to authenticate is not that bad, that's ten dollars (well, for me it was ten cents American) to get 10 legitimate Steam accounts, which will pay off when you get coals to do with as you please.  In addition, the money goes to a good cause, AND you get some Steam games which can help you get even more coals, so everyone wins and no one loses.  So far I managed to complete about 7-8 objectives on each account, yielding six games, some coupons I probably won't use, and some coals to spare.

Really though, I don't know why people like to complain about this.  Do these gamers realize that there now exists, even if temporarily, a 'coal economy'?  With any economy there will always be farming of one sort or another.  Do complainers think VALVe doesn't know about this?  They wouldn't have made coals tradable if they knew it was a bad idea.  There is nothing in the Terms against creating dummy accounts, despite what the retards on the Steam forums say.

All in all, there are some hardcore farmers out there who have a hundred accounts, I mean just look at this shit, this PEDXS guy has over 200 dummy accounts.  Though they may have thousands of coals, they still could lose as the drawing is random.  The chances of you actually winning are slim to none, so if you have fifty coals, you may as well craft them into something useful before they disappear in January.

"The Evil Thing," by Nathan Ruck

Following PlanetPhillip's 100 Day's of Halflife Maps, an old Halflife map pack titled "The Evil Thing" appeared.  I remember this map pack very vaguely, but I remember that it was funny and the unique ending.  I remember it was one of the first custom maps I played for Halflife and I thought it was original and fun at the time.

I guess I must have played hundreds of Halflife maps that are basically set in the same setting (IE: desert, lab, etc...) and I just grew tired of the same thing because I found this mapset hasn't aged well.  The humor seems very "Beavis and Butthead"-like, the environment is pretty bland (lacks ambient sound effects; lots of silence), and even on easy mode I found myself with very little health left and having to fight rooms full of grunts that kill you with three bullets.

I just wanna post this here because it is one of the first Halflife maps I've played and it inspired me, at the time, to start learning VALVe Hammer editor.  Oddly enough, after mapping for years, I haven't released a single map to date.  On a related note, you should check out "Little Skyscraper of Horrors," and "Heart of Evil," two very good map packs, the latter being really long, and both by the author of "The Evil Thing."

Blackmesa Fallback

This is a pretty neat mod.  It takes place in Black Mesa and puts you in the role of the soldiers sent to kill some scientists.  There's a mixture of new content along with textures from Halflife and models from Counterstrike Source.

A friendly chopper attacking hostiles.

The first third of the game has you entering various areas with your fellow squadmates.  There are no puzzles in this section of the game.  It mostly consists of 'missions' that have you opening a door to a building, clearing out an area of enemies, and heading back to your vehicle to proceed to the next area.  There are about five of these missions and I thought they were quite boring, and I was about to quit.  Then the real fun part of the game begins.  It plays quite a bit like Opposing Force, with exploration, puzzles, and fighting new enemies.

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.

Bloody Good Time (PC)

This is a pretty fun game if you play with people you know.  I wasn't able to to play for more than an hour of deathmatch.  I played about fifteen minutes with bots, which was pretty underwhelming, and another round with some friends.  It's very different from other deathmatch games.  The object is to kill other players without being seen by the police, so I guess there's some stealth element there.  It feels weird without a run or crouch button, so it's very slow paced.  A few negative points - there's only three maps, but the price was five dollars American, so I suppose you get what you pay for.  Another thing is that the Director's voiceover repeats the same things over and over again.  Real annoying.

For the modders out there, you should know that there is no SDK available (and probably never will be with Ubisoft's history).  Additionally, this is not Garry's Mod compatable, nor does it come with Source SDK Base (which comes with all VALVe Source games and is required to play source mods)

All in all, a fun little diversion.  I guess I can't complain since I was gifted this game through Steam friends.

E.Y.E - A new Source game coming soon?

Check this out.  A source engine first-person RPG.  Watch the video on the main page, it looks pretty awesome.

School Shooter North American Tour 2012

How about a school shooting mod?  Seems lame they'd do something like this for the sole purpose of getting attention, but I guess any publicity is good publicity in the world of videogame mods.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/school-shooter-north-american-tour-2012

It's been done before, anyways.  Anyone remember Pupils of Cyberdemon's School Doom 2?  It was a pretty enjoyable Doom 2 total conversion, and it was made a few years before Columine.

Another MustPlay map for HalfLife, Episode 2

http://www.planetphillip.com/posts/research-and-development-half-life-2-ep2/

Research and Development is a puzzle-centric mod for Half-Life 2: Episode Two featuring an unarmed player but plenty of violent mayhem.

 

The player has NO weapons and there is no shooting at all. However that doesn’t mean you can’t kill things, but 95% of the mod is about solving the puzzles that are presented to you in a very natural way.

Level design is Valve-style quality, clever puzzles, and interesting combat with no guns.  Very good use of scripting and a fun blend of humor to top it off.  This could be map of the year.