Posts tagged half life
Jul 19th
Half Life 2 has long been the modder’s choice game to work with. Adam Foster, creator of the very popular singleplayer mod Minerva: Metastatis, finally gets to live out his dream of working alongside the creators of Half Life 2 themselves. Valve hired Adam, to begin working in October, because of his work on Minerva. Here’s a bit of what Adam had to say about the whole thing:
What does this mean for MINERVA? Right now, I don’t know – I’ll initially be working on Valve’s own Episode Three, but after that, who knows? I seriously suspect this isn’t the end for this particular chain of experiments in designing single-player Half-Life 2 maps, all conducted for fun in my spare time.
If you are looking to get into Half Life 2 modding yourself, there are some great tutorials over at Moddb that teach beginners how to mod HL2.
Jun 20th
To celebrate their latest patch to the amazing game Team Fortress 2, Valve is allowing anybody with a Steam account to download the game for free and use it for the weekend. After the weekend (June 20-22, 2008) you can no longer play the game for free unfortunately. The new patch adds 3 new unlockable weapons for the Pyro class. There’s a shotgun replacement called the Flare Gun, which is basically just what it sounds like. It shoots off a flare to allow you to ignite your enemies at long range, but takes a very careful aim to get it right. It also adds a new flamethrower into the mix, called The Backburner. It removes the Compression Blast ability, but the Backburner always has critical hits when burning an enemy from behind, as well as adding 50 points of health to the Pyro wielding it. The final unlockable is a new axe, called the Axtinguisher. This weapon critical hits any enemy who is on fire, but does considerably less damage to those who remain in a state of not on fire.
The patch also adds 35 achievements for aspiring Pyros to unlock. One of my personal favorites, is called BarbeQueQ. You obtain it by causing a dominated player to leave the server. Other fun achievements such as Freezer Burn (provide enemies with freezecam shots of each of your taunts), make it worth your while to try for the achievements. There are also two new maps added, A capture point map called “Fastlane”, and a Capture the flag map called “Turbine”. All of these factors make it an excellent weekend to play TF2, and if you aren’t already a player, to join the phenomenon.
May 31st
Steam, the service that Valve uses to distribute games online, is known for its excellent copy protection, easy game downloading, and large base of players. Valve announced that they will be adding two more features to help gamers in the near future, namely keeping save games and key bindings on the user’s account, so that players that play their games on multiple computers can keep their data with them. I, who use two computers to play Steam games, find this news a godsend from Valve. This news is also great for people on a single computer, because if a freak accident like a hard drive wipe or fire wipes out the data on your computer, then you still have it when you get a new one! The games that will first see the effects of this update are Half Life, Half Life 2, Counter Strike: Source, and the upcoming Left 4 Dead. I can only hope that they add it to Team Fortress 2 soon after. For those of you that don’t have Steam, you can take advantage of the download button below to get it.
