Once again you are Gordon Freedman. You just made it out alive as the military was taking over the Black Mesa compound. They are now using the compound to engineer a hideous monster capable of mass destruction. As a member of a new organization, intent on thwarting the military’s evil plans for corruption, you have been assigned to sneak into the compound, find your way to the hideous monstrosity, and destroy it. Good luck!
This is my second level for Half-Life. My first one was called Sepulcher. It got a score of 31 on Radium’s website. It was fairly short and linear. Many people also complained that it was too difficult. I’m fairly certain that Aggregate Pain is much better than Sepulcher. It’s bigger, less linear, and has better gameplay. It still might seem a little bright on 3dfx cards since I’m running on a TNT which has a tendency to make everything seem darker. Aggregate Pain means Total Pain.
Simply copy the agpain folder into your Half_life folder under Steam, restart if it’s running and it should appear in your games list.
- Title: Aggregate pain
- Filename: hl1-sp-aggregate-pain-steam.rar
- Size : 912.38Kb
- Author: Michael Sisk
- Date Released: 07 April 1999
- PlanetPhillip.Com
- FileFront.Com
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Click on the thumbnails below to open a medium size image.
WARNING: The screenshots contain spoilers and should be considered a visual walkthrough..
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Please note: These statistics are valid from December 2010
Using Gauge: Users
Manually: 6 Users
Time Taken:
Average: 0 Hours, 22 Mins
Shortest: 0 Hours, 15 Mins by Dmitry
Longest: 0 Hours, 30 Mins by Qwertyus
Total Time Played: 2 Hours, 12 Mins
This release is currently not in a collection
If you believe this release is missing important tags, please suggest them in a comment?
Why make a mod available for download when you haven’t even gotten the weapon changes right? Please don’t waste our time with these kinds of unplayable mods.
I’ve updated this post with all the details and plenty of screenshots. More importantly the file is now Steam compatible.It’s the first time I played this small set of maps and I really enjoyed, nice variety of environments and some interesting routing.
For such a small file size it packs a nice punch!
I’ll be playing and updating it’s sequel tomorrrow.
My Recommendation
When I DL’d this one, I’d forgotten I already had it in my collection! But anyway, second time around it played very well, all ya had to do is get the H suit and everything worked fine and the music was well done! I like these older maps (99).
All in all,
another fun one. good for the lunch break.don’t for get the save button.
What is its sequel?
I found it – it’s Reconnaissance.
I started on Reconnaissance, but I wondered how this looks like…
And not to forget: Add this to your blog, Stef! (If you like it)
wow this was short (whole game is in the screenshots 🙂 ) but fun and enjoyable
lol 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
Holy Smokes! I can’t believe people are still playing these few maps that I made. Man, looking back now, some of the shots look really silly. What’s with the boxes hanging from poles, LOL!
I couldn’t play this mod cause it was impossible to see my health, ammo…Why????
Nice little map! Very good level design, quite challenging (save your explosives – you gonna need them!) and some nice ideas (I liked the beginning where you can do a little bit of stealth work to get past the guard). Very short – 15 to 30 minutes playtime, but worth the download!
Here’s my AMC review, which was published back in 2003…
Michael Sisk was one of the most productive authors of 1999. His first project; Sepulcher, which only consists of one level, was on the net just two months after the game’s initial release. Although it was clearly a learning map for him, it gave us a promise for his upcoming episode. With Aggregate Pain, he shows his real talent.
According to the author’s alternate storyline; you, as Gordon Freeman, has just made it out alive while military was taking over the Black Mesa compound. Now you’re a member of a newly founded organization and military is engineering a monster capable of mass destruction. Your mission is to sneak into the compund and destroy this monster – a gargantua to be exact.
For a start, level design is absolutely better than Sepulcher and generally well thought out. The author created good looking visuals including both indoor and outdoor areas, while sticking to a certain theme and keeping the r_speeds under control. There are nice touches here and there – such as off the path areas which contain extra weapons and ammunition. The design is not without its errors though. Michael used point-based lighting from time to time without including light sources around – obviously, they don’t look that good. He also used the env_glow entity way too many times. While this sprite gives a nice effect to the lights, using it all around just distracts the player. I also noticed a certain texture used as a liquid brush, although it’s not meant to be.
The game starts very good indeed: you’ll see a grunt patrolling around your truck as the screen fades in – a cd track is also used here to set the mood. Even though you have to beat up this grunt with your crowbar, he’s not looking straight at you (a la Ground Zero), so he won’t be much of a problem. Parallel to the storyline, most of the combats are against grunts – though it seems that the situation is not under control yet, cause there are also some aliens roaming the corridors of Black Mesa. However, Aggregate Pain lacks some of the elements which make Half-Life levels differ from the others, namely – scripted sequences and puzzles. The combats could be much more enjoyable if only the author had included some interesting setups. Fortunately, it’s still challenging thanks to the balanced item placement. As for the puzzles… Well, if you see pushing some buttons as puzzles to be solved, then there is a few included.
Conclusion: Although it’s already four years old and lacks some of the features most of the recent releases offer, it’s still enjoyable with decent visuals and a few highlights. Recommended for a short but sweet experience, but not hope to find something fantastic. – 62%
Poorly designed minimod with no real story, specials or anything exciting than hard combats, sorry..
Pro’s:
-Combat scenes
-Lot of weapons but quite less ammo (except from dead soldiers)
Con’s:
-No hev at start
-Hard beginning, less health available during whole map
-No story just blind fighting sequences
-Partly unfair placed enemies
-No puzzles
-Bad level design, but this map is also very old
-Hard difficulty
-Bugs (Apache blowed itself up, lol? I even wasn’t about to fight it with only 1 rocket and suddenly BOOM!!! WTF?)
A somewhat basic experience; but it’s true to the original Half-LIfe style gameplay, of course, only very abbreviated.
Aggregate Pain starts off very questionably; as in Michael’s first level Sepulcher, which was horrible. You must crowbar the first enemy to get his gun. Also, finding the HEV suit might take awhile as two paths are given to you right from the start. Only one of the paths will lead you to the direction of the items necessary to beat this map. Unfortunately, I think getting started will be quite uncomfortable for those who like a sense of security while playing. But very fortunate is the fact that Aggregate Pain as a whole is infinitely better than Michael’s previous attempt.
Make no mistake about it, Aggregate Pain is tough, but not this-is-impossible tough as was Sepulcher. Aggregate Pain, a three level addon, must’ve contained less than fifty health to find, and I only found one HEV battery which became my savior when fighting an annoying flock of controller’s near the end. The fights, overall, are probably just on par. While the great pieces of action are emphasized with the appearence of moody music, the mundane or unfair battles bring the overall fighting score down. For example, the last enemy – gargantua – was impossible for me to confront without getting toasted. The only way I beat it was camping at a nice spot where I could dink away at its health without it being able to spot me.
While Aggregate Pain is undeniably fun, it can also get quite boring. There’s no jaw-dropping or even half-amazing moments to talk about in Aggregate Pain. The gameplay is very much like that of the original Half-Life, but a lot less dramatic and epic. It maybe unfair to compair Michael’s works to a gaming company’s but there were some notable similarities. Such as a crate-jumping puzzle, good item placement (big compliment), open airfied battle, Xen ending. Michael does very little to add some truly original setpieces in this one and that’s Aggregate Pain’s greatest setback.
But, if you don’t care for much originality in SP Half-Life – and the quality of levels these days has not allowed us players to be picky – then I think you’ll really enjoy Aggregate Pain for what is: A fiendishly hard, action-filled, and very balanced experience. Oh yeah, the visuals are fairly nice too. Recommended.
Notes
This review is republished here by permission and was originally published Sunday, 12th September, 1999 by Jiang.
This review was originally posted on the Ten Four Website, which is now offline. Permission has been granted to republish the full review and more details can be found on the About page.
Good blast from past, one of the first HL episodes that I’ve played
Manually
Hard
30 Minutes
Aggregate Pain is tedious and boring, there’s little here of value.
First impressions are not good, you start in the back of a truck with a crowbar and no suit, you then have to kill a grunt and a couple of zombies to get the suit, this path leads to a bunch of goodies which will come in handy later. I actually liked having two separate paths, a main one and one with extra stuff, and this is repeated a little later with a crossbow secret, and this is the only reason I’m giving this a Think Twice. I’m probably making it sound greater than it actually is, but I like little ideas like that even if the rest of the mod is not so good.
There’s an absurd shortage of health in this mod, I only remember picking up a single medkit and using one health dispenser and this makes the mod extremely hard. This becomes an even bigger problem due to the crowbar fight against the grunt at the start, I lost over half my health because of this and had to play extremely cautiously on just the medium difficulty.
As for the rest of the mod, there’s not much to see here: the mapping is underwhelming, enemies are placed in areas allowing them to attack you without giving much time to react, combat in general isn’t much fun. At one point you fight an apache, and another a gargantua.
If you decide to play this, I suggest you do so on easy.
Manually
Medium
19 Minutes
at least include like 10 boxes with health and not 3?
why do you spawn almost in front of a grunt with only a crowbar?
i had to play with cheats because of no health packs!
would probably be better than what i would do because i dont know how to map.
Manually
Hard
30 Minutes
Aggregate Pain is a very well made, classic style mapset. The start is rough, you have to crowbar a grunt. Things don’t get too much easier after that but the balancing is on point (on Medium).
There is just enough ammo to kill the bosses – a heli and a garg. I had almost exactly enough ammunition to kill each. The garg, fight in particular, was down to the wire. I had to use 2 trip mines and a satchel to start the fight off. Then I pumped him with 2 RPG rounds and finished him off with 20 gluon gun ammo. I actually had to do the fight in god mode after a few tries, just to make sure I had enough ammo to complete it.
The maps are well crafted, both in layout and architecture + detailing. There’s an optional loop near the start which nets you a shotgun. Having this loop back around to the start so you can continue on with the main progression path is fantastic. It’s great to see mappers in 1999 outside of professional game studios understand this concept.
AG is a classic mapset and is well worth playing, even in 2023.
Manually
Medium
18 Minutes
Think twice before playing on Hard. For Hard you need both rockets for Apache Helicopter. Be lucky with the first soldier and save 1 trip mine, satchel and special gun for the gargantua final boss, if not you won’t be able to defeat it since it’s only vulnerable to explosive and special weapon. Place trip mine and throw satchel before he sees you, you can actually eliminate Gargantua while hidden 100%. Anyway, if playing on hard if you screw with grunts, you will never make it. So recommended difficulty to play and enjoy is EASY.
Manually
Hard
15 Minutes
So the first thing that comes into my mind is that you have no suit. You only have a crowbar and a grunt walks past you. Well if you wanna go stealth mode on him, go ahead but you still don’t have a suit. You’ll find one later in the a room with tripmines but seriously. Why were you sent without a suit? If you’re going to assign Freeman a mission, at least provide him a gear rather than nothing. Some parts of the level design is pretty bad. It’s hard to jump on boxes, you might fall to your death. Don’t get me started on autosaves because there is none. If you die, you go right BACK TO THE BEGINNING. What were they thinking? The combat is pretty much unbalanced, only a few health items and armor, scarce ammo, but the gruntfest is quite easy if you’re good at sniping down soldiers with a handgun. The huge pain in the a** is the boss battle where you get to fight a gargantua. You need enough explosives to kill it and 40 ammo of gluon gun to kill it. With less ammo, you’re gonna have to start over again. So there you go, think twice because this mod is poorly designed, so many inconsistencies. Although it is possible to go through this whole mod without dying but goodluck with that. It’s gonna take some trial and error to go through all of it.
Playing this was a fun experience, the level design is really good, It’s worth nothing that this is a very old mod, made with the tools of It’s time.
The gameplay has a balanced difficulty, but it isn’t easy at all, if the player dies, it’s probably his fault. A thing that isn’t too balanced is the part that you need to kill the Gargantua, I couldn’t kill him entering the space where he is, even with full health, so I had to stay in the tunnel, throwing grenades, fortunately I had a good ammount of them.
It’s a nice short mod, I liked it.
Manually
Medium
20 Minutes