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Natural Selection For Half-Life Overhauled
Entropius writes "Natural Selection, a free Half-Life mod that contains elements of both traditional first-person shooters and real-time strategy games, has just gotten a complete overhaul with the release of version 2.0. In a nutshell, it combines the best elements of StarCraft and Counter-Strike. NS 2.0 adds new alien abilities, commander interface changes, changes to the resource model, four new maps, and more flexibility in alien evolutions. It's a whole new game now, and a blast to play... one of the most innovative new mods in a long time. The mirrors are straining to keep up, but here's a list of download links via readyroom.org." Update: 08/01 14:43 GMT by S : Here's a very necessary BitTorrent link, thanks to commenters.
You mean this one?
... *sigh*
http://nonoobs.com/ns_install_v20.exe.torrent
Just can't wait to get home and play it after work
I played Counter-Strike for a few years and then gave it up. I un-installed Half-Life and decided to give up the FPS genre at least for a while, after also having played alot of Unreal and Unreal Mods. Then I ran into Natural Selection and I have to say it's a great game. The only real problem I see with it is that the learning curve is really steep; in the sense that, at first you get killed repeatedly by more experience players, regardless if you are playing Marines or Aliens. Also people will rarely let you play the commander, unless you are skilled and, well, it's hard to become skilled without practice. I think both sides are fun to play, but I prefer the Marines. I've developed a fair amount of skill in the game now, all I can say is I can't wait to check out this new version.
My question is, why do people seem to prefer creating excellent mods for a game like Half-Life and not so much for a game like Quake 3.
Quake3 while yes a good engine, has a few problems, the texture maps make it look dark and cartoonish. HL textures look better compared to Q3.
I would love to be playing these mods natively under Linux
WineX from transgaming, works great for HL.
Also, does anyone know how the Doom 3 engine will compare with the Half-Life 2 engine with regards to the mods.
HL2 engine is going to be the hot game engine for the next 5 years. After seeing the 600meg mpeg of HL2, the demo they gave at E3, its an engine that you can do anything with.
What I havnt heard anyone talk about it, how HL2 engine will be compared to the CS2 engine, since they are not based on the same engine. So will people just port CS to HL2 and be done with it? Or will the CS be locked into a weaker engine? That would be quite disappointing.
In competitive play in NS 1.04, a solid (but un-fun) strategy was to spawn-camp the aliens.
That doesn't work in NS 2.0, thankfully.
The biggest change of all is actually the different resource model:
* resources nodes take a while to activate
* alien gorges get an equal share of resources compared with other aliens
* both sides get resources for kills (even the commander, he gets resources for turret kills)