In December 2009 I ran a mapping competition and this mod contains all the entries. They are packaged as a mod to make it easy to play.

The maps can be played in any order from the New Game menu and are listed in alphabetically.

To see who won and who got honourable mentions please read on.

In case you missed it, and what Headcrab have you been hiding under?, Valve and HTC have announced a Virtual headset (sources: LG1, LG2, VT, Eg1 and EG2) and it seems most people are pretty excited about it.

Me? MEH! Why? Because I am poor. No matter how cool this thing is and I am sure it’s freaking awesome, I am not going to be able to go out and buy it. Therefore, I am doing my best to ignore it.

You, on the other hand, might be wetting you pants in excitement.

Far be it from me to tell the future (although I did predict the Steambox over 8 years ago), I can’t believe that HL3 won’t come with some features or elements that take advantage of the VR headset.

I’m not saying that it will be an exclusive release for VR or that it won’t be fun without it, just that those with it might get an even better experience.

What are your thoughts?

DOH! I forgot about the chat post and I am 4 days late. Sorry about that.

So far this month, we have had the Source 2 announcement and even the BBC had coverage of Half-Life on its site – YAY!

I’m off on a long weekend trip this weekend to recharge my batteries, fingers crossed it’s sunny.

What have you seen in the news recently?

Starting this Saturday, Darren Weekes AKA DaZ/Custom Gamer will be running a monthly event called The Ville Retrospective, where he will be livestreaming his play or replay of a Ville mod.

They will be replayed in chronological order, starting with SniperVille.

Like all the other events, we hope you will participate in the discussions and playthroughs.

There will also be regular podcasts discussing 4 Villes, but the first one will only be for 2 because we started late.

The event has its own page, see above, where all the details will be kept.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please let us know.

Hi All,

I am hoping to start a new monthly podcast, like Podcast 17 and All Things Lambda but with my special twist on it.

I have a very specific content focus that I don’t want to talk about yet, but I believe it will be entertaining enough to keep it fresh.

I might steal All Things Lambda ideas for running it live (sorry guys!) or it might just be a pre-recorded show.

Therefore, I am looking for hosts and regular guests. I want to appear on most of the podcasts but not all, therefore I hope to find another host, who is confident enough to run the show.

If you are interested and have a Skype account, with a fairly good mic and have a bold personality, please contact me for an audition.

Myself, Don, Darren and Joseph discuss the CityStreetsVille mod.

We talk about each map in detail and praise and complain in almost equal measure.

In general, we agreed about most maps but not all.

Listen to find out which ones we disagreed on.

I’m sure you’ve seen the recent rumours about Half-Life 3. Some may have even seen my silly prank on Steam, where I changed the name of a mod to something like “HL3 – Dev Test” – sorry about that. You would be surprised at how many people messaged me and asked..”IS THAT F*%KING REAL?!“.

Anyway, I am a fan of Stanisław Lem, a Polish science fiction writer. He wrote some great SF but he has also written fictitious criticism of non-existing books, which is an idea that fascinates me. So much so, that I decided to steal it for a writing competition.

As some may have seen from my Video Playthrough of the CityStreetsVille mod, I switched to GOD mode at the end of one of the maps. I mainly did it because I was livestreaming and it seemed unfair to force people to watch my attempts to beat the final Combine Gunship.

That said, at some point I might have switched but it would have been much longer. It’s a fine line between dying a lot of feeling that it is still possible. It got me thinking about how long readers wait until cheating.

I have asked a similar question before: Poll Question 120: How long do you spend on a puzzle before cheating?, but as you can see, it was just about puzzles.

I’m torn between feeling it should never happen, especially on EASY but I also know that some players (me included) just aren’t very good and that’s hard to design for.

What are your thoughts?

It’s 13 months after the incidents at Black Mesa. The Black Mesa Research Facility has been shut down. The nation never got to know anything about the experiments there. The less you know, the less you worry. The government founded a new organisation to handle “alien related topics”. They hired the best scientists, technicians and military forces worldwide, its name is Poke646.

Some days ago the Poke646 scientists spotted alarming signals from the Xen homeworld. It looks as if the aliens plan to invade Nation City by opening a massive amount of portals. But the Poke646 Tech Labs are already prepared: some months ago the technicians developed a huge generator which is able to close hundreds of portals at once with a bundled energy beam. Four generators are about to be installed at the edges of Nation City. With all four activated they will form a giant beam and hopefully destroy the alien portal technology forever.