“This map consists of a flat desert which covers the maximum 2 dimensional area possible in a Half-Life map. The interesting thing about the map are the small armies of human grunts and Xen aliens facing each other. Join in the fight or sit back and watch the fun! Run around a bit, letting some enemies chase you, so that they see the other army and the action starts. You will also probably want to use the cheats described below, if only to give yourself some weapons! This map may run choppily, due to the large number of monsters. If you see the framerates start to drop, remember you can always turn down the resolution.”
- Title: The Desert of Doom
- File Name: hl1-sp-the-desert-of-doom.7z
- Original Filename: doomdesert.zip
- Size : 35Kb
- Author: Francois Barnes AKA Venomus
- Date Released: 06 September 2001
- Copy the doomdesert folder into your Half-Life folder.
- Restart or start Steam.
- Doom Desert should now be listed in your Library tab.
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WARNING: The screenshots contain spoilers.
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Using Gauge: Users
Manually: 2 Users
Time Taken:
Average: 0 Hours, 3 Mins
Shortest: 0 Hours, 1 Mins by PsyWarVeteran
Longest: 0 Hours, 5 Mins by Dmitry
Total Time Played: 0 Hours, 9 Mins
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Sorry, but this is one of those maps that are really just experiments and should never be released to the public. If this were made 2 days after the release of Half-life we might be saying something else, but it wasn’t. It was released 3 years later, at least that is how it seems.
One large area with quite a few grunts and a Garg is not enough to keep your interest. You stand no chance against the Garg, so there doesn’t seem much fun fighting it.
All in all, it’s not worth your time.
Wow, I remember this from long time ago, but in the spirit of the 100 days I downloaded it and ran it again and it’s still how remember it, EXCREMENT!!!!!
As I said in a previous post I’ve never been able to get cheats to work in HL1, so with this I had two choices, stay where I was and wait to die or run around and wait to die!! on the upside it was at least a chance to get outdoors for a while. As its probably a test piece I’m sure it achieved what the author wanted BUT it should never ever ever have been released.
As Phillip said:
This sounds almost identical to one of my very first HL1 levels. It crashed the compiler so I took that as a sign and gave up!
I think I played this one long time ago. If I remember correctly, I didn’t understand it and didn’t like.
But today I’m giving it a “think twice” because I found the concept behind it quite enjoyable. The player is defenceless at first, but defeats most enemies without firing a single shot. It would be very cool to see this idea properly realised as a part of the gameplay of some great mod.
Finding the right time and place to run past soldiers is a nice puzzle.
In the end I was circling the Alien Grunts and shooting at them with SMG. Wow, I didn’t know that circling them is 100% evasion from homing projectiles.
Good gameplay but absolutely nothing more.
Sometimes I will download something even though other people have said “Avoid It” because there isn’t a lot else to play these days. After playing this I may re-think that strategy. Not the worst ever but it is very close.
Speaking of excrement, this author also made a mod where poo comes out of a cupboard and attacks you.
But, about this map, it’s pretty much a stranglehold on your system due to the large flat area spiking up r_speeds. What we have here is basically the Earth version of Rogat. Go figure.
Haha this was a funny one!!! Kicked it up to “hard” turned on “notarget” and watched ’em
kill each other!! Keep up with the good ones Phillip, I play anything, I needed a break from
“Amnesia”.
Here on PP we are meant to be polite, constructive and balanced in our opinions, unfortunately if Phillip keeps posting mod like this, these conventions may go out the window.
it’s difficult to say much about something this bad, so having waste my time playing the mod, I am not about to waste any time writing about it.
Weeell this is bad as long u don’t have cheats to use them there, so is a big waste of time and please don’t do it, I think rogat mod is even better than this one, so u know, avoid it….
Again I’ll echo EmoLevelDesigner’s thoughts here: on the surface it’s terrible but there is a bit more than meets the eye in this map, although I think it’s by complete accident.
Of course, in your first attempt at the map you see just a huge flat boring arena, you’re unarmed, you have no HEV, and you’re hurt since your spawn appears to be 50 feet in the air. However, there is a way to complete this map, and yes in fact you do stand a decent chance against the garg!
The trick is to move fast and get the marines to engage the aliens, all of them if possible, including the gargantua. If you’re lucky, the marines will also pump a couple of grenades into him as well. Then carefully pick up the dropped guns and grenades as the marines are killed, keeping your distance from the garg. After a bit you should have a handful of contact grenades, use them all on the garg. I played on medium and he took about 8 before he died. Then, finish off all the leftover aliens or grunts as best you can. It isn’t easy but it can be done.
That said, there is nothing indicating that you’ve finished the map. No text, no music, no nothing. As I said, it’s completely by accident that this map holds anything worth taking more than a 5 second look.
Pros:
Set-up as it’s own mod
Interesting idea(The idea is that you can’t really fight back, while two factions that want to kill you beat the shit out of each other and you)
Cons:
Just a flat map
No details
Overall: Don’t play it.
Terrible, just terrible.
Gameplay wise this is the worst map in the 100SDoN so far and offered no enjoyment to me because it required no fighting or puzzle solving, it was nothing. You just sit back and watch grunts vs Xen creatures fight each other and you. That is all there is to say. Not as bad as tDtACttO solely because this map doesn’t crash if you lobs grenades, because quite frankly you don’t have any.
Avoid it and save yourself the trouble of downloading and playing it.
I meant to say WtACttO, my bad.
Yet another test map from a beginning mapper, that probably shouldn’t have been released to the public.
It’s a very basic flat map with two opposing armies of Marines and Alien Grunts with a Gargantua, while you are left defenceless with no weapons or HEV suit.
Luckily for you, your enemies seem content fighting amongst themselves. If you are quick enough you can lure some of the idle enemies into the larger fight and both sides basically kill each other off, leaving you to mop up and that’s it. I was fortunate enough in my play through, in that the marines killed the Garg before I needed to.
This is alright if you are interested in seeing how the AI in Half-Life works. Other than that, I would say that this is not fit for public consumption.
Let me try and put this one in perspective for you. One large, flat desert area, so large that the enemies glitch when you try to look at them from a distance, in fact. An army of alien grunts and human grunts. One gargantua. No weapons, apart from the MP5s dropped by the grunts. There is nothing else to say.
In summary? Don’t play this.
As the readme already said, this is no storyline map or something similar. It’s just an empty desert with some human grunts on one side and alien grunts on the other side, also one Garg can be found here. The “purpose” of this map is to lead one fraction to the other, so the fighting starts and they kill each other while you can watch until you maybe want to grab (or cheat) a gun from the fallen soldiers to intervene the fight.
To my surprise at first I thought I won’t survive this as either soldiers or alien grunts where following me (once it was 3 alien grunts and I had no weapon AHHH!) but then they were distracted by human grunts and started killing each other. After a few minutes the map was very empty as many of the grunts were dead as I finally grabbed some weapons and ammo, starting to kill what’s left.
Then I approached the Garg and confronted him with the AR grenades and bullets until he was dead.
Checking around, everything was dead and I was the sole survivor! (with about 10 health I suppose)
Not much fun or variety but sort of interesting, however it’s very simple and therefore not worth playing (or just playing once) so avoid it, unless you like such sort of gameplay described above.
Trivia: It takes less than 30 seconds to get from one end of the map to the other end.
Pro’s:
-Interesting combat situations – watch or interfere
Con’s:
-Very short
-Very simple, ultra-basic leveldesign with no details.. just an empty desert and a background bitmap
-No HEV suit, nor weapons at start (you have to loot or cheat items)
-No atmosphere
I’ll go with Unq and EmoLevelDesigner thoughts here, I like the, mostly accidental, core idea behind it, you start defenseless and you have to try to get the enemies to kill each other, until you have the chance to grab a gun from the fallen grunts and start to finish up any enemy still standing, I was even able to defeat the Garg using this strategy! But the problem lies with the map itself, and that’s why I’m giving it an “Avoid it”, aside from the enemies, there’s absolutely nothing else on the map, no HEV, no weapons, no items, no events, not even some kind of decoration, this is as barebones as you can get. Overall, I would love to see the concept done with a more polished and refined approach, but for now, avoid it
Using Gauge
Medium
3 Minutes
One huge desert, very low view distance and some enemies sprinkled throughout. Nothing to do, no reason to play.
Manually
Medium
1 Minute
Do you want to make aliens and humans fight each other? Play this, make them fight each other. I hope to have a control button to order where to place units to see the Alien-Human battleground. Sadly this button is missing and you will need drive your enemies so they battle to see who goes to hell in thirst place. Gargantua is so strong, it destroys all human grunts entirely himself. It gives a sensation to be indestructable.
Manually
Hard
5 Minutes