After seeing your friend, Jack, the security guard, die in a terrible accident, you must find a way to escape.

It seems as if the base is out to kill you though, as everywhere you turn is potential death.

Use you powers of observation and fast reactions to survive.

It’s rumoured there’s a ladder in part of this base that leads to the outside.

Find it and find it fast.

You are a scientist called Gordon Freeman, following a convey with some high-tech weapons to a secret base called “Black Mesa Research Facility”.

The convey got ambushed by a group of revolutionaries.

The way back is blocked.

Forward is the only possibility, as is fighting for your survival.

Half-Life 2 has a lot of props, from benches in the train station to Chinese take-out boxes. As a mapper, you become familiar with them over time and develop a mental index of the different models, names, sizes and your own practices for how and when you use them.

One thing I’ve noticed is that some of the textures on these props are based on real world brands. Sometimes Valve altered them, such as the detergent bottles of “606” (instead of Formula 409), but some escaped that treatment or may have been left intentionally. Because we can zoom so closely to the props in Hammer Editor, we can view some of these details that are difficult to see in-game.

Let’s take a look at some of them!

I want to remind registered members that in order to sue a recommendation image your review must be of proper length.

If the map lasted 15 minutes and you write a short paragraph and use a recommendation image, that’s fine.

However, if the mod last over two hours and you write a short paragraph and add a recommendation image, that image is removed.

I don’t expect everybody to write detailed, in-depth and insightful reviews but if the best you can say after playing something for a few hours is “great mod, loved it”, that’s not enough to warrant a recommendation image.

The image is supposed to be a visual representation of a proper review, not a replacement for it.

If all this seems a little harsh, it’s because I want to avoid situations like ModDB where people can come along and rate something a 10 or 1 with no justification. That makes my faith in their system zero.

I want people to really trust the system here. Yes, you might disagree with my “soft (I say passionate) reviews, but at least I try to justify that recommendation.

I have emailed a few people over the years, but haven’t received a reply.

If you have posted short reviews recently with recommendation images, you should check to see if I have removed it, because I probably have.

If anybody has a problem with that, it’s pistols at dawn!

Who didn’t enjoy the scene near the beginning of Half-Life 2 where you ran along the rooftops?

It was a great start and let you see the city from above. I enjoyed it so much I wnated to play more maps like it, so I ran a mapping competition with “Rooftops” as the theme. here are the 8 entries I received.

I hope you enjoy playing them as much as I did!

The mighty and dangerous Headcrab Boss awaits you in the next room.

Collect your weapons and steady your heart for a long and arduous fight.

Only the careful will survive.

One hit from it will kill you.

Project: Blue Room is a single player mod with an ulterior motive. It wants learn about how you play. Well, the mod itself doesn’t, but the authors do.

So, what better way to figure out what’s going on than to kidnap and interrogate them? Actually, there is a better way: call them on the Internet and chat with them, so that’s what I did.

Be warned, we talk for nearly 90 minutes, all of it fun and interesting.

If you have any questions, please post them here and you might get an answer.

As part of the Critical Jim event, Jim livestreamed his analysis of Spherical Nightmares by David Lundvall.

Below is David’s response to the video and analysis.

THE COMBINE ARE ATTACKING.

Hold you ground as long as you can.

How long can you survive?

This was originally released on TWHL.