Concerned Extras

If you’ve ever been in the Tower of Terror ride at Disney, this video may look very familiar. If you haven’t, now you can, in Half-Life 2. Another neat creation using HL2!

Totally forgot to mention this, but this week finally saw the new version of Garry’s Mod hit Steam. It’s got lots of new features and some heavily improved old ones, and it’s only $10 — not bad for something that’s gonna give you hours more entertainment than most games. Hell, I played with it for a year and a half, right?

Also, products on Steam can now be purchased with Paypal as well as credit cards, which should open the door for at least some of you credit cardless types.

Congrats to Garry Newman or getting his fantastic mod to Steam. I personally hope he makes a fortune, because it’s a brilliant mod, one that he constantly tweaked and fixed and added to, and one without which I never would have had a webcomic. Thanks, Garry.

Fantastic YouTube clip of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Falling Water” house that someone built in Half-Life 2. Neat stuff! I’d love to see more real-life locations recreated in the Half-Life engine.

So, not long after the trailer for Valve’s upcoming Portal is released, the Portal gun functions are duplicated for G-Mod. There are some 44 pages to the post and I’m not honestly sure where the latest download is, but it definitely looks like a lot of fun to play with. Those Garry’s Mod scientists have done it again.

Some incredibly neat in-game video of a player-controlled Dog from the upcoming Strider Mod IV (in which players drive around Striders. Man, it’d be fun to chuck cars around, wouldn’t it? Dog even picks up an APC that another player is sitting in.

Visit the offical site here for more news, videos, and screenshots. [via, of course, halflife2.net]

So, I played around with Shantytown last night, a Half-Life 2 point-and-click adventure mod that has you controlling a woman named Ellie and her pet Chinese-speaking robot, Ted.

The world has had a serious outbreak of fungus, and giant mushrooms loom over the landscape. The human population lives in a series of ramshackle vertical slums, with the lucky rich people living on levels high above and the common dregs living at ground level. As Ellie wakes up one day, she discovers that someone from an upper level is dumping a steady stream of trash onto her house, and sets off to do something about it.

You view the action from a series of fixed swivel cameras, clicking the screen where you’d like Ellie to walk. The cursor will turn into a hand if there’s an object you can pick up or use, into a word bubble if there’s someone you can talk to, and into a door if you can leave the area you’re in and exlpore elsewhere.

I didn’t play the whole game, but some of the puzzles I saw were of the “errands” variety: someone will ask you to find one object and bring it to them, and they’ll give you something in exchange for it. For other puzzles, you’ll have to call on your robot sidekick, who has a few special powers, such as the ability to heat objects, freeze them, or magnetically lift them. You also use items you’ve picked up and saved in your inventory to solve simple problems.

In addition to your inventory, you have a quest log, that keeps track of your progress, in case you forget what you’re supposed to be doing, and text-saver, that keeps all the dialogue saved for easy reference. These icons are on your screen at all times and can simply be clicked to use.

The models are all from Half-Life 2, though few are unchanged, and the voice acting, custom-made for the game, is incredibly enjoyable, somewhat silly, and a lot of fun to listen to. Talking to characters is probably the highlight of the mod, in fact, simply because of the voice work. Characters have a number of different accents and quirks, and there are some very odd and appealing characters in Shantytown.

The interface is a bit clunky, and twice I had to restart because my robot, Ted, apparently lost his brain and wouldn’t follow me or use his skills anymore. So, there are some bugs to work out. The maps are well designed and neat to look at, though despite dozens of promising objects in nearly every location, there are very few to actually click on.

Still, it’s a neat concept for a mod, and it’s another amazing example of how people are using HL2 to create their own games, especially games in completely different genres than the first person shooter. Even with the restarts and glitches, time in Shantytown is well spent, and if you’d like a change of pace, I’d recommend you download it and give it a try.

This perks up my ears — a point-and-click adventure game mod of Half-Life 2! Oh, yes, I will be giving this a try. Oh, my, yes.

It’s called Shantytown, and I have no idea how it plays but it certainly looks neat. Man, give me an arrow cursor that turns into a hand when waved over a usable object, and an inventory to collect junk to use with other junk, and a text selection screen, and I just get all excited in my pantaloons. While you don’t have a hyperkinetic rabbity thing as a sidekick, you do have a bobbing scanner bot, and that’ll do for now.

Full report tomorrow after I’ve tried it out. [via halflife2.net]

Half-Life 2: Capture the Flag, the exciting (and lately, somewhat dormant) mod is shaking the dust off. They’ve got their new forums up, and are planning a gold release in the coming weeks. A post in the announcments section invites gamers to drop them a line if they’d like to playtest the new version.

I love this mod: it’s remarkably well put-together, and sports some neat weapons, power-ups, and maps, and I hope the community continues to grow on the brink of their next release. If you enjoy HL2 Deathmatch but want to kick it up a notch, download the mod here, check out the player guide, and get some pals on a server with you.

For every last possible shred of information, strategy, game modes, mapping tips, weapon and rune info, and tons more, check out the Book of Revelations.

Fortress Forever, the upcoming Sourceified version of Team Fortress, has a new media release out. Check out new the rest of their media here. I gotta say, it’s looking pretty slick and I can’t wait to play.

Also, back in April, the map texture artist, MrBeefy, posted a sweet image of a familiar face in his developer journal.

Dang it! Looks like Frohman is getting to run around in Fortress Forever before the rest of us. That’s totally unfair. Also, the shovel is a nice touch.