ForestVille is the fourth in the 6×10 Mapping Competition.

As the name suggests, the theme was to create a map within a forest.

There were 6 entries, ranging from “okay” to “GREAT!”

Back in April of this year, I wrote an article called 7 Things I wish Steam would allow me to do. Well, number 7, or part of number 7 is now available and since I only recently found out about it, I thought you might have missed it too.

It’s a feature called Custom Steam Gridview Icons and it allows you to add or replace the images you see for ANY game or application you have added to your library.

The Half-Life: Opposing Force soundtrack was composed by Chris Jensen. It was reused for the Half-Life: Blue Shift soundtrack. The Half-Life soundtrack by Kelly Bailey replaces the original one in the Steam releases of Opposing Force and Blue Shift.

However, it’s easy to get the original back. Below is a file that contains all the music, along with isntructions of how to use it.

Here is part of the text from the readme_opfor.txt.

As part of the The Replay Experience Experiment, here is the first of a number of podcasts, discussing one of the game we have played.

In this case, it’s Half-life. Joining me for this one is Don and Emo. Don is a modder with tremendous experience and has released a number of mods/maps including, Radix. Emo is from Russia and has made Typical Disaster.

We discuss Half-Life from a number of different aspects. There are a couple of videos mentioned in the podcast and they can be found on the Resources & Curiosities.

Both Don and Emo have agreed to respond to any comments you may make, and of course I will too.

Uplink, released February 12, 1999, is one of two demos released by Valve for the original Half-Life video game. The first was Half-Life: Day One and contained the first fifth of the full game, and was only included with certain video cards of the time. Half-Life: Uplink, on the other hand, was a standalone demo set in the Half-Life universe, and contained levels and a storyline not found in the full title.

Ryan Finnie has created a wonderful website called HalfLifeUplink.Com, which contains everything you could ever want to know about the demo.

I saw this question on Reddit, which by the way has some very interesting discussions about Half-Life, and thought I would repeat it here.

The question is whether it is important to play the Half-Life games in order.

Explore again the Black Mesa Research Facility from the point of view of Jorge Barrett, a maintenance employee of the facility. Today should be one day just like all the other, but what lies ahead?

There’s a new codebase which allows new graphical features. However the changes, fixes and additions are enormous, so you will discover them slowly as more updates are released.

In a vast cave, Gordon finally confronts the powerful and mysterious being that is holding the portal open. Gordon destroys the Nihilanth’s shield, allowing him to destroy its vulnerable brain. As the creature dies, it floats toward the ceiling, and explodes in a giant green blast that overpowers Gordon’s senses.

“It’s time to choose!”
– The G-Man

With the recent release of Mission Improbable and let’s not forget Whoopservatory, Magnar has cemented his position amongst the great SP Source modders.

In this second audio interview (the first is here), we mainly discuss the changes and new additions to Mission Improbable

Magnar has agreed to follow this post, so if you have questions that I didn’t ask, he may be able to answer them for you.

Rick Underhill’s site is called EditPoly.Net

This podcast was live-streamed to the Podcast17 YouTube channel and is available as a video on there.

Enjoy!