This takes place within a blink of an eye during the slow teleport from nova prospect to Dr. Kleiner’s lab.
You can’t remember if you succeeded or failed, it doesn’t really matter.
If you failed, the universe ceased to exist and this new one was recreated in its place, easy to explain if you have a million years free and can understand mind boggling complicated mathematics concerning time and the fabric of the universe.
Or you succeeded in which case the stitch in time sealed itself causing time to rewind to a point before you went on the strange trip the blink of an eye took you on. You can’t remember it cause it hasn’t happened yet, and as sealed it will always be in your future, not even a time machine could reach it.
In a blink of an eye…
…if you destroyed the machine as intended, then perhaps those who built it are going to be pissed…
…then again why did they abandon it..?
…maybe they went on a trip, and never returned…
…if so, why did they leave it partially on..?
…if the combine hadn’t found it then what..?
…would it have been found by something worse..?
…is there anything worse than the combine..?
…what actually is out there in the darkness of space..?
…is it hungry..?
…what’s that moving out there?
Basic Details
- Title: A Frayed Stitch in Time: Episode 1
- File Name: hl2-sp-a-frayed-stitch-in-time-ep-1.7z
- Size : 37.49MB
- Author: Belboz
- Date Released: 02 October 2007
Screenshots
Click on the thumbnails below to open a medium size image. WARNING: The screenshots may contain spoilers.
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Please note: These statistics are valid from December 2010
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I’m having trouble with this mod. The moment I get the crowbar I can’t use it. Normally I would have given up by now but bobdog on the Starfox forums gives it a 4 out of 5, so it seems like I should try reinstalling it of something.
I considered it was a feature of the mod but I discounted that pretty quickly.
Has anybody else had trouble?
Hmm.
This mod seems fairly uninspiring and quite uninteresting from the concept and screenshots. Still, that bobdog guy seems to have liked it and raises some intriguing points in his “mini-review”. (Not a bad collection he’s got there, actually.)
I might just fire this up and take a gander — I’ll see if I have any problems at all.
I mean, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover! 😉
[possible spoiler]
I’m in map 5a. There’s a puzzle. There are two hanging electricity wires which have to be connected. There are three green metal boxes which can be pushed. The wires are almost to the ground, so pushing a green box underneath connects them to the ground, and the yellow/black striping on the ground. I thought that’d be enough but it isn’t. The swithces in the office still don’t work. Anybody know?
The switches in the office are the only thing I used but you have to hold your use key down for a bit for the switch to actually activate.
No problem with crowbar for me.
After 20-30 minutes of gameplay, I decided to do exactly what Phillip would do — Stop. Then I promptly deleted the mod off my hard drive. Sorry, I’m a persistent person, but this is an exception.Honestly, I wasn’t entertained in the slightest. I was pretty damn bored. I’ll go through what I experienced during the first maps and tell you why:
To start off, I must talk about the intro. It literally goes on for minutes on end, but is very uninteresting and quite tedious. I will praise the fact that the author has nailed scene work, which is actually quite decent, but he needs to cut down the time AND provide us with some nice things to peek at along the way.
Now onto the gameplay. One thing stands out — There’s A LOT of tedious walking. The first two levels are huge and involve the player wading his way through nary a thing, except a bunch of barnacles and the odd headcrab, zombie or soldier. Not only that, but enemy placement was rather ” arcade-like” and uninspiring.
After that, we’re ” treated” to a dreaded spectacle that I wished I’d never see again — Cue long, uninspiring corridors with nothing but an absolute (And I do mean ABSOLUTE!) truckload of zombies. (Oh, and headcrabs. So many headcrabs.) With only a pistol, some grenades and a crowbar at my side, I pretty much ran past most of these buggers, occasionally killing the headcrabs as well as the odd zombie to whom was blocking my path.
After this ” fun” little ditty, I was faced with more zombies, a poison zombie and a couple of soldiers… And I still only had a pistol, grenades and a crowbar!
You see, for some reason, the soldiers weren’t dropping their weapons when I killed them. None of them did. (Except a Metrocop, to whom I got my pistol off of.) I assume it was a bug. If it’s an intentional gameplay tweak — Well, then I’m truly mystified as to why the author decided to make this little addition, especially when there’s no ” vaporizing” effect as witnessed in HL2’s citadel.
What else is there to gameplay? Not much. To sum up gameplay — An uninspiring, tedious corridor shooter.
Design is very much mediocre. While I’ll admit there is some interesting brushwork in parts, most of it comes off as blocky, uninspiring and very bland. The ” zombie area” stated above has some of the most repetitious design I’ve ever seen. Not only that, but it’s just so confusing with a layout that comes of as horribly misshapen.
Overall, though — TEXTURING: For the most part chosen very inadequately, but at times is quite decent. There were a lot of misaligned or oversized textures, though. TRIMWORK: Nary a piece of good trimwork in sight. BRUSHWORK: Boring, bland, blocky for the most part, but in a few places it was decent or at least on the average side. LIGHTING: Decent, but nothing special…
I could go on. (But I’m not going to.)
Anything else I should state? Well, it’s a bit buggy. Although I didn’t suffer the crowbar issue, after the first map, I couldn’t sprint anymore. The game crashed, as well. Many slight lighting errors ensued among these “bugs”. (Not cubemaps, fortunately.)
So, in the end, I find myself on a little rant here. I’m sorry, but I just didn’t enjoy myself. I’m sure the author means well. He’s certainly got the scripting nailed quite well plus he’s got a basic understanding of hammer. But gameplay falters as the worse attribute of the mod. Belboz really needs to work on this.
Yes, I realise I’ve only played 20-30 minutes, but I decided that I’d seen enough. The mod gives a bad first impression that just grinds me with an awful aftertaste. Even if the later stages are an improvement over the first few, I can’t find myself going through them. (Yes, this contradicts with my ” Escape 2″ review, but at least the bad areas during that mod retained SOME quality.)
My Recommendation:
Anonymous,
You’re right, there was no puzzle after all.
Anyway I’ve finished it now. My opinion: Pretty average, but you can give it a try. Indeed very repetitious the area with the zombies. Whack-whack, stand-back, whack-whack, and the next one…Some areas were a bit confusing, like the reactor-room.
One good thing: It had a decent length.
After reading Manual_Monaro’s review I’m not even going to try it. That was a very specific and indepth review… If he’s willing to take the time and tell us why we don’t want to play it, then he’s probably right. It sounds like a mod that needs to be revised.
I played it thru and was not to impressed, I had a bad frame rate slowdown close to the ending, and the begining was too long and drawn out! No problems with the crowbar on this end. This mod could stand allot of improvement, I will try any of ’em and make my own descision (comes with age) so what can I say but:
I can’t download… I press the link but download wont open, I can’t press anything to make it download… I can’t do anything!
Awwww … can’t help with the buttons not working on your end. Seems okay to me but, here’s a text link:
Filecloud Link
If that doesn’t work for ya’, then I would suggest going to Filecloud and clicking the download from there.
http://planetphillip.filecloud.com/
Uhm, yeah … if you like being bored to tears.
I’ve sat here trying to think of something really good to say and only just now read Manual_Monaro’s rant. Pretty much summed up my whole experience except I was stupid enough to persist until the end.
Let’s just say that if you made it through probably the longest, most boring and uneventful opening sequence ever created for Half-Life 2, your journey just needs to end there.
We finally get to some gameplay and if you go one way .. oh boy! you’re first fight armed with … erm, nothing but a crowbar! – only to nearly get smashed before you can do any damage. Then when you need to go the other way and actually are in a fight armed with … erm, only a crowbar – omfg – a map change!
Lots and lots of corridors which made me feel almost claustrophobic. When it did open up, nothing fantastic happened!
Very boring architecture and enemy placement was very basic. There were some “interesting” choices in texture use, especially the inverted rooftops on the inside of a building.
When you are outside and able to look around, it almost seems like you’re in a model village set inside the Citadel.
No real challenges, puzzles or awesome fight sequences and no real story until the very end where you meet up with Alyx who, of course, comes to save your sorry arse for sticking around that long.
Framerates were simply horrendous in some areas but the author does state in the readme that it’s an issue.
There was so much that could have come out of this but I think the author is a bit artistically challenged and needs to work on it more.
Sorry for such a negative review which usually isn’t my style, but I really hated it!
I need a download which works! I try to go to http://planetphillip.filecloud.com but the download wont work! I didn’t want the damn page again I wanted to know how I can start the download! Now I also registered there but I still cant do a thing!
I agree with all these negative thoughts. So why did I give it such a generous review at the Foxhole? Because it surprised me. Yes, you do have to slog through all the housing corridors and scads of zombies and headcrabs. Then, when you get to the end and you see “Game Over”…. that’s what won me over.
I am probably looking at this with too rosy of sunglasses, but when you reach that point, I mentally chose to see these designs as merely a Combine torture tactic, in which case all the bad design flaws make a cracked sort of sense.
In any case, I applaud the author’s efforts and ask that he consider these great ideas/suggestions brought forth here while I ask you to
Look mate, don’t get pissy with me because you can’t get the downloads to work. You really don’t want to upset a Goddess on a bad day and there seems to be a rant fever going around as well.
I offered help but I think the problem is on your end and has nothing to do with registering anywhere. I’d give it a good reboot to see if that works and make sure your internet settings are to enable downloads.
I’ll upload a copy to Filefront tomorrow for you. Please remember everybody is trying to help you.
^sigh… well, to the positive, the guy can do cartwheels around my own designing knowledge on Hammer. To the negative, from a players point of view, it sucks to wait so long in beteen for a decent sized mod to come out only to be disappointed. My own gaming time lasted about 2 minutes after the long intro before my pc froze up and crashed when I tried to do a quick save, which prompted it being deleted. I guess I can only suggest that the designer take heed of some of the constructive critisism offered to him in the comments and learn from his mistakes so that “episode 2” doesn’t just take up 7 months of his time for nothing either. Maybe a friend who writes scipts or an artist friend with some ideas can go a long way here because it’s a shame to waste Hammer skills like he obviously has.
I’ve added a link to the FileFront file.I have decided to give up on this mod. After trying a number of different things I still can’t use the crowbar. There are too many other good mods to play without worry about spending too long getting thgis working.
Therefore:
There was one bit I really liked and that was a rope bridge. Unfortunately that’s about 0.01% of this mod. Unless you absolutely have to play every mod ever released then I strongly suggest you
Five word review:
It’ll nothing you to death!
I guess we should keep in mind that this is only Episode 1 of something that may get better. As it stands the first episode is not very memorable, with little content in the way of action or puzzles. Apart from a lot of wandering through empty sets with little to do the mod does not hold ones interest. Whilst some of the design and texture are more then adequate there’s nothing special to see with a few sets designed somewhat oversize that just added to the empty feeling. What combat there was being fairly basic and no more then target practice.
On the bright side Aylx make an appearance to save the day and the mod takes a turn for the better with promise of more to came. I hope the author can build on this solid if uneventful start and gives more gameplay and content with further episodes.
Also a mixed filling according this one Design even if not without some decent things is way too repetitive through hallways and corridor texturing is poor, too boxy storyline seems to be missing till the gamer over message appears and it seems not to be finished…then a sort of a story grow up for probably whish will be the episode 2…For me everything was quite below to average but has some potential so if you could keep playing for arround 50 min with this one you may
but i’m pretty sure a lot will never reach the end and just give up…
When I played this map it was 4am so I didn’t have much tolerance at the time. I only played the first 5 minutes and most of that was the never ending start video-thing which was boring and didn’t explain what was going on. After that from what I remember I kept on dying and I gave up. Even though I should give it another chance the long start has put me off and if the whole mod is as bad as the start then it’s a waste of my Download limit.
I don’t know why I wasted so much time trying to find a combination of settings and launch option tweaks to stop this one crashing, time and again. Eventually I managed to get through a number of loading points without my PC freezing up, but then it did just once more and I gave up.All the reviews above are right. Credit to the author/mapper for trying, but really, avoid like the plague.
I actually really enjoyed this mod. Though in the “pretty-ness” department its rather uninspired, the scale and feel of the mod is amazing. Many of the areas are huge and grand in scale, and the whole time you’re playing you get the creepy feeling you are being watched. The story is very interesting too. I’ll be honest, its a little boring at first, but if you stick with it, you will get sucked in. I would suggest checking this out. I can’t wait for the next installment!
i cant get this mod to start. I click on new game and click the first chapter or click start new game in the new game menu but it just takes me back to a blank start menu. can anyone help? cheers
I loved this mod, thanks for posting it up, and I cant wait for the next part. I nearly gave up when the words “game over” came up as I really thought it was the end, I am glad I didnt, the music and architecture were well worth the play.
cheers
I just finished “a frayed stitch in time” that was on my PC for a few years. Does anybody know if the continuation of that game is underway or completed under a different name. Its got episode one in the credits. I enjoyed the game and have good expectations for Episode 2 if it ever comes to fruition.
FYI,
I just received the following info in response to an e-mail I sent Belboz the Mod creator:
“don’t know when the next part will be finished, part 2 covers a larger area
than part one and the first part took 7 months to make, in the next part it
nearly all outdoors, with access to the jeep which will be needed in map 3
and 4 cos a gunship chases you all over map 3 and into map 4 where there’s
something to kill the gunship”.
Not bad, not bad at all. Not a play it now for sure but you do need to play it.
The start is very tedious from a gamers point of view but it is worth persisting because the rest of the mod has some very good parts,
There are also long sections with no combat which could have been enlivened with enemy from time to time.
Given the age of this map asnd seen the authors site, there might not be an episode 2 – pity. The author has a great imagination and is to be congratulated.
Thank you Belboz for a glimpse into your world.
Very atmospheric, really enjoyed it.