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/

Ignatius J. Reilly is alive and has a blog!

Is that Gabe Newell guy a fat fuck or what? I can't believe he finds time between stuffing his chubby face with KFC and swallowing the pieces of chicken whole -- without chewing, just like a snake -- to shoot his smacking mouth off about how the PS3 is a disaster. You know what is a disaster? The fat fucks cholesterol levels. How about he takes some time off from enhancing his whale like physique and howling about the PS3 like a sea lion in heat, as pieces of chicken fly into the collective faces of the internet and instead squeeze out more that 1 game every decade, huh how about that? Then at least what he says would have a semblance of relevance instead of being the annoying ramblings of the man-child leader of a game company with almost no games released in 15 years for a now defunct platform.
-Kamiboy, "Last Man", Friday, October 12, 2007

If Ignatius J. Reilly were alive today and was writing angry posts about videogames on the internet, then I think I just found him (and I mean that in a positive way, honest!).  Read this blog and this blog, too.  It's a blog about how much the industry has changed for the worst, the death of PC gaming, the golden years of what gaming used to be, and why Gabe Newell is an asshole.  It's very well written and articulated and I couldn't put my thoughts into into words better than this man.