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.

"Bisounours Party" HL2 mod on RTSL

Saw this map called Bisounours Party on RTSL.

Colorful map with rainbows and carebears.  Visually interesting and eye-catching; have not played yet.

Pretty colours.

HalfLife 1 mod - Echoes"

Halflife 1 mod - "Mod of the Year" according to Jared from Subway Dragon.  See his review here.  Another Black Mesa/Halflife 1 mod but with the added bonus of assets from Halflife 2.

ModDB - Official ModDB with latest version
RTSL - Alternative download link with mostly positive reviews
ModCorner overview

….and full playthrough below.

"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?!?

Way to the Woods

This game looks interesting.


Official website.

TODO LIST: HL2 maps and an L4d2 campaign

I used to be obsessed with playing every single HL2 map, but now I realize a lot of them are garbage.  The ones that I do plan on downloading to be at least 50mb and have high ratings *OR* have some kind of unique look about them before I even consider downloading them.  These few have caught my eye on PlanetPhillip recently and have been taking space on my browser tabs, so I might as well put them here.

HellSound Dreams
Size : 829MB
Horror type map.  Recommended for fans of "Cry of Fear" and "Afraid of Monsters."

DoomED
Size : 91.60MB
I only put this here because I remember playing this a long time ago and it recently appeared again on PlanetPhillip.  It's a non-action map that starts out in a London train station during WW2.  There's walking, exploring, and puzzles.

HuntDownTheFreeman - 24 Hour Remake
Size : 13.80MB
It's a parody mod and only 13mb, but it's just for a laugh.  The author that made this loved "Hunt Down The Freeman" so much he remade the campaign in less than 24 hours.  From the description: "To sum up, play this if you want a laugh and a wry smile, but don’t go looking for fun gameplay or cool situations."

The Transformation
Size : 10.3MB
Low file size but PlanetPhillip got 25 minutes of playtime out of it and I like "Rats"-style shrinking maps.

L4D2 - Crash Bandicoot Return of DR Cortex
Size : 160MB
This looks so goofy but interesting.  I never played the Crash games, so I can only comment that if you like weird, funny, low poly maps that gets straight to the point then play this.  And maybe if you're feeling nostalgic.  Video playthrough here.