This years awards will try a new format. It will be split into 3 one-week voting stages. I’ don’t like the idea of complicating things but I want to make sure it’s fair and open.

This year there will be FOUR awards: Best Source Release, Best GoldSource Release, Best Ville Entry and Best Moment in a Release. Last year there was best overall release, but that didn’t seem fair as the engines for Source and GoldSource are so different.

Voting will be like the standard Poll Questions systems. I like the idea of limiting it to members who have used at least 25 recommendations during the year, but for now it will be public.

In additions, there are new icons for each award, courtesy of Jeff Muñoz (Homepage, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr & LG). HUGE thanks to him for his hard work.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, now is the time to make them as once the voting starts it is highly unlikely I will change anything.

You find yourself caught between two Combine snipers and some Combine soldiers.

Can you work around them and if you can, what’s next?

Only one way to find out

Here we are, getting close to Christmas, which is either really great for you or you’d rather just go to bed and wake up in the first week of January depending on your life.

But just because Father Christmas is preparing his present, doesn’t mean that the Half-Life community just sits back and relaxes, OH NO, we/they have been hard at work and we are now going to look at exactly what they have been doing.

If you don’t know what this podcast is about, please read the What The Headcrab: Introduction.

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As I was preparing an image for the RTSL Tumblr account, I realized that for so many mods, just a screenshot is enough to see how good the mod is or was.

Now, this could be because I associate the screenshot from a particular mod I have played and I wondered whether just from looking at a screenshot if it was possible to judge the quality.

My thinking goes like this…If a modder spends time making the mod look great, then the chances are the gameplay is good too. Yes, I know that’s a stretch, but attention to detail is not always skill specific. There are definitely some mods that are fun to play but don’t look very good and vice versa, but not very often.

What do you think?

Hi Everybody.

This weekend, Darren will probably be streaming Chaseville on Saturday at 1pm GMT.

Phillip will be starting his Strider Mountain adventure. He will be streaming on Saturday Morning, Sunday morning and maybe in the afternoons too. You will need to check the RTSL Twitter feed for announcements.

On both streams we will be giving away a few copies of Decent: Underground as well as at least one copy of Circuits, all courtesy of SteamContests.com AKA Aaron’s Giveaways, so a HUGE thanks to Aaron.

December is here and it’s time for Olentzero, he is like the local Father Christmas over here. The real legend is quite dark but has been cleaned up for kids.

Anyway, done your shopping yet? I’m going tomorrow. That said, I just bought a new webcam and my mother is supposed to be bringing it over with her when she visits, but it might arrive after she has left, so fingers crossed. If it does arrive, you’ll be able to see all my beauty spots in the livestreams. In fact, I might have to start wearing makeup!

But seriously, are you hoping to get a lot of gaming in over the Christmas and New Year period? I am.

A couple of weeks ago Scott Warner, Game Director for the Star Wars Project at Visceral posted a tweet and a image saying “Don’t do this in level design: prize behind counter is gated by locked door but counter could be scaled by anyone.”.

You can follow the thread if you click the link above but as with many Twitter threads it gets mixed up in other tweets.

Essentially, he said that it was an immersion issue and I disagreed.

I tried to organize a podcast with him about it but it never happened.

The military has hindered your progress by shutting down a communications array on the far side of the facility.

You need to power up the communications tower in order to re-establish a communication link with the scientists held up in the Lambda Complex.

Recently, Steve has been reviewing some older mods (and I thank him for that). Often times, he hasn’t liked them (It’s on the list of code tasks, to make it easy to find comments and reviews by users – for now, you will have to check the 100 Most Recent Comments).

When he hasn’t liked something, he has been apologetic because his review often goes against the general feeling. Please don’t think I am criticizing him for this, because I am not. Everybody has a right to their opinion.

What is interesting is that fact that like a lot of other reviewers before him, when you review something from a few years ago, it never seems to live up to the original reviews and by “original reviews” I mean the ones made when the mod was released.

Clearly, this isn’t the case for every mod as some are absolute classics, but the ones that received good reviews don’t seem to stand the test of time, which is where this week’s poll questions comes in.

Is a review a product of its time?

What do you think?