The Crowbar Returns - HL2 Aftermath

Kimi writes "1UP is running a week's worth of coverage on Valve; content includes Aftermath, Lost Coast, Day of Defeat, Sin Episodes, Garry's Mod, Half-Life 2 Xbox, and an exclusive interview with Gabe Newell. Be sure to check out the kickass cover image, which was designed using assistance of the Garry's Mod community." From the subsite frontpage: "It all started with a tram ride into unknown catastrophe. With the release of Half-Life in 1998, Valve put themselves on the map as the undisputed saviors of PC gaming. For 1UP's second-ever cover story, we team up with sister-magazine Computer Gaming World and go behind Valve's iron curtains to get an exclusive sneak peek at Half-Life 2: Aftermath, the latest chapter in their Half-Life saga. "

Comments

A story from 1up?

[BlackCobra43]

Surprise surprise, it's from Zonk. I never would have guessed!

Re:A story from 1up?

[Anonymous Coward]

I found the article entertaining and educational, what's your particular beef with it?

Re:A story from 1up?

[Anonymous Coward]

I found the article entertaining and educational, what's your particular beef with it?

Hi Zonk!

What about Mods

[superpulpsicle]

I have practically downloaded every free mod available for HL2. So far they all feel very beta-ish. Plan of Attack, Garry's physics mod, strider mod, you name it... it seems like the HL1 mods were much more fun.

Re:What about Mods

[Quill_28]

I think you will need to give them more time.

Re:What about Mods

[KrisW]

I've noticed this with mods for a lot of recent games. I think the culprit is that these newer, more advanced engines take a much larger team a much longer time to create content for.

While the engines of late allow for much more advanced architecture and physics, it's getting to the point that all the tools in the world aren't going to let you utilize the engine to it's fullest potential. Just take a look at how many mods released as of late have the same plain, boxy environments as mods based on games released 5-10 years ago.

Re:What about Mods

[Anonymous Coward]

This is all too true. Once upon a time all one had to do was a few lines of code, make a new boxy little map using world craft, add in some 8bit textures off the net, and maybe toss in a 400 polygon player or weapon model and call it a mod!

Now we have to deal with levels littered with prop models and physics objects created with traditional 3D packages, super high res textures that need "Color Maps, Secular Maps, Bump Maps, or Normal Maps," and your player and weapon models are now twice as detailed. For one character with normal maps you have two distinct models to create, one is the high model, with millions of polygons, and the other is the low model that you use in the game. (1800-2500 polys, still a lot more than HL1 days) You create a normal map based on the high poly detailed model and use that normal map data on the low poly model to make it look like the high poly model.

It almost makes it too much work to be fun anymore...

Re:What about Mods

[Ford Prefect]

I have practically downloaded every free mod available for HL2. So far they all feel very beta-ish. Plan of Attack, Garry's physics mod, strider mod, you name it... it seems like the HL1 mods were much more fun.

Well, if you look at the first year of single-player maps for the original Half-Life, for example, there wasn't a huge amount of quality content appearing. A couple of classics, such as USS Darkstar and ETC, but even they seem somewhat lightweight when played now.

Half-Life 2 is undoubtedly a great modding platform, but everyone's been very busy figuring out how it all goes together. Until recently, the documentation was a bit lacking (it ranged from a little being great to the majority being non-existent) but fortunately the Valve Developer Wiki has changed the situation tremendously.

I've been learning single-player Half-Life mapping since about late January - I assumed it would be easy (the software is superficially similar to the original Half-Life) but some months later I'm only now feeling proficient enough to consider releasing the map I've been working on (less cryptic version!)...

The best part of a year for around 45 minutes of gameplay? It's hard work!

Of course, the second map's going to be far easier, and I suspect Valve themselves are finding something similar now they've learned how to operate their Source engine...

Re:What about Mods

[tfinniga]

This is a bit unrelated, but I miss the old Quake 1 mods. It was really the first large-scale game that had separate and replacable game logic. It also had it's own easy little programming language, which wasn't too hard to get into. As a result, you had all kinds of different and wacky mods. Soccer, racing, pong, a platformer, 3d pacman, various weapons, tanks, runes, superheros, hoverboards, etc.

There were lots of crappy ones, but they sure were a whole lot of fun. I still miss the hoverboard mod (I think it was called Slide), and I haven't seen anything similar on more recent FPS's.

Re:What about Mods

[GTownBeast]

Awww, can't I have just one more justice? I love MST3K

Re:Zonk posts a 1-up story??

[Anonymous Coward]

For even more fun, check the submitter's URL. "kimi.1up.com."

Stop submitting your own articles, doucheface!

$29.86

[602]

I finally bought HL2 on Friday (even though my Windows machine is dead at the moment). I had been waiting for the price to come down. Friday, it was "on sale" for $50 at FredMeyer; it was $45 at Target. Then I went to WalMart, where it was $29.86. "Gotta be a mistake", I thought to myself, "but I'm definitely getting it now." Remind me to go back to WM and check the price later this week.

Re:$29.86

[Anonymous Coward]

$49.82 at walmart.com - looks like you got yourself a bargain

enough with the 1up stuff...

[Malor]

It would have been more interesting to link to this page AFTER the week has passed, so that we could read everything all at once. As is, the coverage is incomplete, so many of us will miss the later entries.

If the purpose in all these links is to drive traffic to 1up, rather than to link Slashdot readers to complete and interesting coverage, then by all means, continue what you're doing. I, however, would feel better-served if the link was posted after all the content was actually there to read.

Re:enough with the 1up stuff...

[Winterblink]

I always describe 1UP as the CNet of gaming news. It strikes me as being nothing but shallow, one-sided coverage of the industry rather than anything informative or useful.

Re:enough with the 1up stuff...

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be obvious to most by now that Zonk obviously has a back-end deal with 1up.com to drive /. traffic there.

Speaking of which, I think we're due another Zonk review of a game that came out over nine months ago.

Re:enough with the 1up stuff...

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be obvious to most by now that Zonk obviously has a back-end deal with 1up.com to drive /. traffic there.

hehe. You said "back-end deal."

Saviors of PC Gaming?

[Godai]

undisputed saviors of PC gaming

Hyperbole much? I really enjoyed Half-life, but it hardly saved the platform. FPS can be done quite satisfactorily with a little work on a console. If anything, RTS games like C&C or War/Starcraft, or MMORPGs like City of Heroes & World of Warcraft have kept PC gaming healthy, you know, things that can't be done on a console? (Yes, I know, the odd MMORPG makes it to a console but really, how good is it compared to it's PC cousin?) Valve seems like a decent bunch of game makers, but let's not cannonize them quite yet.

Re:Saviors of PC Gaming?

[Joehonkie]

I also picked up on that. Just a prime example of how little quality there is in gaming journalism.

Re:Saviors of PC Gaming?

[jasonmicron]

You stopped me from making my own thread on that subject.

Half-Life was a good game but it hardly "saved" anything. In 1998 I was still playing Duke Nukem 3D, System Shock and a host of others. I wasn't aware that PC Gaming needed to be "saved" at the time and upon reflection I would still argue that it needed to be saved.

Undisputed? I very much dispute that claim. Ugh, with the way that most people these days prattle on about Half-Life you would think that Valve created the damn FPS in the first place! I had much more fun playing Duke Nukem 3D than I ever did with Half-Life, especially in Multiplayer.

Re:Saviors of PC Gaming?

[Torgo's Pizza]

I think the problem is that PC gamers are too quick to latch on to one particular company to the detriment of others. To be honest, Half Life 2 wasn't all that great. It was good, but it had plenty of design flaws and the "pod design" strategy left segments of the game feeling stitched together.

Quite seriously, Valve doesn't have all that much to show in their years of existence. Do they really deserve a week's worth of coverage?

Re:Saviors of PC Gaming?

[jasonmicron]

Aww, come on! Doesn't the GRAVITY GUN OMFGGTFOBBQWTF!!eleven!!!one!!11! deserve some credit?

Forget the fact that Quake invented it first! :p

The mod community yet again gets no respect. :)

Team Fortress 2?? I'm still waiting!

[spineboy]

For those earlier on in the first person shooters, TF was the game to play - there were no others even close to it. It had any kind of multi play scenaro you wanted, but most played it for the fearsome Capture the flag.

It was a sure to be a winner release, but it never came out. Does anyone with ties to Valve know why they dropped the ball on this assured money-maker? Today there are several variants of tis game, so it doesn't make sense to release it. The last I had heard of it was that it sounded like a cross of Americas Army on-Line and a rel time strategy game like C&C , with a non-fighting "leader", who would be controling the team. I think they got hung up on trying to incorporate a team-speak like feature to use real time players voices for communication.

I know many games, don't make it out of the studio, but come on, this seemed like a winner.
Anyone with any ideas?

Re:Team Fortress 2?? I'm still waiting!

[Nos.]

I'd love to know as, though I'm more interested in DoD: Source, which I hear is coming soon. I can't see them being hung up on the voice stuff since they've had it for quite a while in the other mods. My guess, its not a top priority. The big hits these days are more realistic mods, like CSS, DoD, etc.

Re:Team Fortress 2?? I'm still waiting!

[KDR_11k]

Well, Battlefield 2 fills that niche quite nicely so I doubt there's much need for TF2 anymore.

Re:Team Fortress 2?? I'm still waiting!

[amarc]

Now VALVe are in bed with EA I think they might not release a direct competitor, as TF2 is alleged to be, to BF2 in the near future. It'd be awesome if they did, though, TFC is still an enjoyable romp.

Re:Team Fortress 2?? I'm still waiting!

[KDR_11k]

TFC is a direct clone of Team Fortress, TF2 was meant to be something completely different.

Re:Zonk posts a 1-up story??

[mconeone]

I don't see this as the real problem, every person has a right to submit whatever they want to Slashdot. The problem is the editors choosing articles submitted by the site. It definitely doesn't give a good message.

Re:Zonk posts a 1-up story??

[Ford Prefect]

The problem is the editors choosing articles submitted by the site. It definitely doesn't give a good message.

Would you prefer it if the stories were submitted by those same editors, but anonymously?

It sounds like there's going to be some interesting news revealed, anyway - subscribers to the offline, dead-tree CGW have learned a lot more already, it would appear. And for a change, I won't have to buy some crappy games magazine or look for dodgy scans for the information... ;-)

Re:Zonk posts a 1-up story??

[Ford Prefect]

By 'editors', I mean 'editors of 1UP', of course. Duh me!

Have a biggie:

Biggie no. 1: Valve want a new HL2 episode every 3 months and a seasonal box set of them for 56kers and philistines.

Don't worry about missing another 1update...

[DoctaWatson]

I'm sure Zonk will keep us posted if they add anything new this week!

I'm going to go out on a limb here and also predict that there will be some games.slashdot headlines from the pages of Escapist Magazine and Gamasutra. ;)

I've worked on a HL2 mod and wondered the..

[msimm]

same thing. I'd rake it up to at least one of three things: 1)not very proactive support from Valve 2) it *is* written is C, so you can't just get a scriptor to really do thing...you need a programmer 3) this is *my* personal pet-peeve so bear with me; HL2DM, as the model upon which all SDK based mods are built...sucks. And sucks badly.

I've done portions of my own mod based on the source engine and jumping in there was (is?) a nightmare because I don't have a programming background. I've seen the hordes of requests on moddb for programmers go (understandably) mostly ignored.

I think the final stinker for HL2 mods goes hand-in-hand with the lack of serious Valve support: every mod is essentially a TOTAL CONVERSION (most of them don't really feel that way, but hey) and require you to download and install the package, then update it, then figure out how to launch it and before you know it I'm playing Battlefield 2 and my code sits and lingers.

A mod I really do enjoy and have had some (small) involvement on the dev team is HL2CTF. The programmer happens to be a quite good coder (he works for a major gaming company) and the team is solid (even if I'm late on my scripts...:)).

But frankly I think Valve tanked their own game. At least put the mods on Steam.

Re:Zonk posts a 1-up story??

[Scudsucker]

So has anyone given you crap for "taking the name of that guy in that crappy movie" and then have to explain your moderatly low uid?

Re:Zonk posts a 1-up story??

[mink]

It is obvious he is just a car enthusiast from over the pond. If he was a car enthusiast from the USA he would have called himself Ford Escort. ;-)