>>> ULN UNCODED MESSAGE
>>> SOURCE: UNITED LIBERATED NATIONS, COUNTER INFORMATION CENTER, EARTH
>>> DESTINATION: ALPHA RESEARCH BASE, PLANET ZUBBEN, LEPUS SYSTEM
>>> 00:34 07/12/2128
congratulations stop
your discovery is considered extremely important but also highly classified stop
all excavations on zubben must cease immediately stop
all personnel unnecessary for base operation must enter cryo chambers immediately stop
we have sent the research vessel the USS Arizona and it should reach you within 3 weeks time stop
once it arrives the crew on the USS Arizona will take care of everything stop
you have all done a great job stop good luck stop
>>> final stop
You probably have guessed it already, but the U.S.S. Arizona is not a research vessel and these are not scientists on-board. Whatever the research team on ZUBBEN discovered, the earth government is going to do everything in its power to keep anyone else from knowing about it, even if it means killing everyone.
You are Gordon Freeman Jr, A research assistant and a junior administrator on the ZUBBEN ground base. You give the orders to wake you up as soon as the U.S.S. Arizona enters ZUBBEN’s atmosphere and then you step into the cryo chamber, not knowing that this is going to be your last peaceful sleep for a very VERY long time.
Objective: After the Arizona lands and all hell breaks loose, try to get to the communication tower which is located outside of the base perimeter. The transmitters on top of the tower should give you enough juice to call for the science ship currently orbiting ZUBBEN.
- Title: Zubben
- File Name: hl1-sp-zubben.7z
- Original File Name: zubben.zip
- Size : 1.92Mb
- Author: Ronen Basch
- Date Released: 27 September 2000
- Copy the No Escape folder into your SourceMods folder.
- Restart or start Steam.
- No Escape should now be listed in your Library tab.
If you require more help, please visit the Help page.
- Copy zubben.bsp to zubben7.bspinto your Half-Life 1 Maps folder.
- Launch Half-Life 1
- Open the console and type map zubben.
- Press enter/return or click the Submit button.
- Play and Enjoy.
If you require more help, please visit the Help page.
Click on the thumbnails below to open a 1024 pixel wide image.
WARNING: The screenshots contain spoilers.
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2,428Overall
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1Today
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3Last 7 days
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9Last 30 days
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108365 days
Using Gauge: Users
Manually: 2 Users
Time Taken:
Average: 0 Hours, 45 Mins
Shortest: 0 Hours, 30 Mins by Dmitry
Longest: 1 Hours by Qwertyus
Total Time Played: 1 Hours, 30 Mins
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Setting/Style
This mod was an interesting experience. The setting is a mix between Star Wars and the Alien Trilogy. There are classical Alien-Corridors, the famous heavily armed APC from Alien2, a imperial tri-wing shuttle from StarWars and many marines which seems a waste of atmospheric potential. The use of custom textures and models/weapons would have made this a lot better. Thus, the lightning is very twisted. At the one hand, in some big gloomy rooms, the shadows are really scary and relatively sharp (for the HL-engine), but at the other hand some areas are just plain black or too bright. Some brushwork (like the APC or the imperial shuttle) is well done, much better than some levels which leads me to the conclusion that he maybe used prefabs.
Gameplay
The difficulty starts high. You and the crowbar against a marine. Later on, you and the Mp5 (25 patrons) against several shotgun marines who get you pumped full of bullets faster than you can say “head-crap!”. As you progress, there are several points where you’re facing a sealed door with no hint what to do. In a dark corner, you eventually find a small computer which you can activate. It don’t make a sound, so you don’t know if it triggered anything, but eventually the door will be open anyway when you come back. Confusing, isn’t it? Aside from difficulty, bad visibility of goals you will feel intense atmosphere in at least one or two spots. The ending is a bit confusing, but with no story to tell anyway, it isn’t that bad.
Conclusion
Potential to be a good mod, although some obvious inconsistencys are driving this mod below average ratings. But if the autor continued learning, some of his newer maps maybe really cool. 😉
Shortish, 7 map mod. This author is obviously into difficult set piece battles, and he does it well. Like Try, Try Again, original and challenging tasks make this an enjoyable mod to play. Good stuff, right up to the sudden inexplicable ending.
Thats a cool mood play it 😀 very cool dude
I liked this rather difficult mod, and everyone should give it a play. And rate it better, because despite the 4 image recommendations, there’s only 1 vote.
Maybe it’s just that use-chair-to-reach-vent old puzzle, but I felt almost exactly like several years ago when I didn’t know too much, but got the hang of it. It reminded me of the popular, quality maps back then. It has a solid story, the events flow nicely, at least in the beginning. After that, you get stuck and waste too much time in one place, whether it’s a puzzle, or a HARD fight.
I liked the hev panel that fell on grunt’s head and the grunts jumping out of windows ;)) haven’t seen the production line in such a long time 🙂
You have to choose your weapon carefully with this one and sometimes switch between them very fast. I just wished I had at least a Magnum, something tougher to fight the bad guys, cus health doesn’t come in large amounts with this one.
Hard puzzles, especially with the trip mines, and with the pipe, because it’s a hard jump so it makes you think that’s not the solution. But thank God there’s a help.txt.
The big map with the trains and the water was way too dark and a little confusing.
As for the bugs.. I got stuck in a pipe corner, game crashed after picking up a trip mine, stuck after map 7 loaded. And there are no autosaves, which is always bad.
You can feel the ending coming and when it does, it disappoints you. You feel you’ve gone through so much and then Stop. The end, with no credits or congrats or explanation.
Still, it’s well put together, the maps were quite polished, or there wasn’t enough light to notice any mistakes. Play it later!
A classic map pack – quite short (about 1hr playtime maybe), but a lot of action. But beware – this is not for total beginners or people that get frustrated fast. Damn difficult in the beginning, later it’s sill challenging but not unfair. What I liked about it – there are many places where you have to think what do to next. Kept the balance between action and puzzles very well. Plus there are some nice new models. However: some of the maps are build without any logic, why would anyone build a room that can only be reached by crawling on a pipe? Well, I recommend this for Hardcore oldschool Half Life fans!
Good designed mappack, somwhere on an asteroid. Short.
Cool episode, interesting to play. Do not leave it unattended!
It’s clear the author has tried to give the player a reason for the situation and the actions required, that’s nice but it doesn’t really make much difference.
We start and we keep going until the mod ends!
Anyway, I quite enjoyed this and it’s nice to see some areas that require a tactical approach. My biggest problem is with the lighting – it’s just too dark in many places and the atmosphere is lost. It would have been nice to have been a little brighter, if if only to see the work that went into the areas.
Like the author’s previous release, I found this one very hard and I play on EASY!
I was a little frustrated by the inconsistencies – some glass breaks others don’t. Some small crates break, others don’t and you can see which one do. Conveyor belts that lead nowhere, large yellow vehicles with no where to go. Stuff like that.
Overall, it’s a good mod and will keep you busy for about an hour. If it was brighter and a little easier I would have enjoyed it more.
Well, here we have standard HL situation – stupid government decided to destroy the labs. The difference is that the labs are far in the space, on the planet Zubben, the action takes place in the future, and our hero is Gordon Freeman Junior.
We wake up in the cryogenic chamber, get out of it and go to work, taking the conveniently placed HEV suit on the way. In the observation room we see a ship with the soldiers, so we take the crowbar and fight.
The author managed to create good original sci-fi atmosphere – despite that all used textures are standard.
But this atmosphere scatters when we fall through the hole in the floor to the room with pipes and conveyors. It is dark. I had to turn monitor’s brightness on maximum. The only thing I can praise this room for is that is a good puzzle which requires attention. And the presence of places where it’s possible to get stuck is also not good.
After it there are dull industrial rooms with abundance of soldiers and shortage of medkits and batteries. Even more, some of them are very dark. This surprised me when I was playing this mod long time ago, and surprised now. How could the author of the nice Try, Try Again make this?! If I remember correctly, I stopped playing it somewhere in there, because with the monitor that I had back then, It was too hard to see even on the full brightness.
Then there are some not bad, but monotonous outdoor areas, where we find the comm tower, call for the help, and we are rescued.
I though about giving this a 2 star rating due to the awful lighting effects, i.e. barely any of it, but the last few levels made up for it.
This map pack is definitely designed for the more veteran players due to the challenging to almost unfair combat. You’ll fight both Xen aliens and marines but the majority of your troubles will be the marines. Many of these firefights takes place in excruciatingly dark areas which makes fighting these marines very difficult; they can see you perfectly but you have to use your flashlight here almost exclusively.
You might also have issues finding where to go due to these dark almost pitch black areas and as such it might make your experience annoying and frustrating. Thankfully, the author was good enough to include a .txt in case you’d ever get stuck at a certain part.
It’s hard to really recommend this because of these issues but there were parts that were good and fun to play. An inconsistent and sometimes frustrating experience but overall it’s good.
I remember Zubben being a lot better than Try, Try Again, but it’s not as solid as I remember when I first played it oh-so-many years ago.
It does have an interesting setting and it is clearly an improvement over Try, Try Again. You’ll mainly face grunts here, until you get onto the surface of Zubben and then there will be some aliens to hunt. There were some good mini set pieces here. Although I liked the idea of the conveyor fight, I found it frustrating since it was so dark, and a couple of grunts were stationed in illogical places. I found the suspended moving platform sequence to be much more clever and better executed (although just as dark!).
What ultimately dooms this mod to middle-of-the-pack is the (lack of) lighting. I try to keep my monitor set to the right brightness and gamma but damn, this was one ridiculously dark set of maps. I kept running out of battery power from keeping the flashlight on all the time, and in the high ledge area it made combat really difficult because of the way the engine lights up things like railings sometimes instead of enemies. Combine that with hunting in the dark for the way out and it adds up to player frustration, not to mention that some crates break while some identical ones don’t (ditto for windows). Also many of the buttons you are supposed to hit don’t really look like buttons and are more like generic computer panels.
Overall Zubben is a combination of interesting setting, some tough but fun combat, and some really frustrating sections. It gets a lukewarm recommendation at best.
Auto map loading is not working any Ideas?
What happens at the end of a map? Does it freeze or crash etc?
Comes up with Half-Life Launch error.
Good design and combination of enemies. I found it a bit short on health kits in areas but well worth playing
This was sitting in my comp for a while and I wasn’t able to complete it for some reason… but now I guess we’ll find out why.
Mappack takes place in a planet with no sun. Yeah, everyone already found out, there’s barely any lighting, added to the fact that the soldiers appeared to have turned off the planetary power generator or something in an attempt to facilitate their attack on your little labs. Be prepared to depend on your flashlight exclusively in the second half of the map.
The brushwork looked pretty good and convincing enough. There’s distinct dorm, lab, and planet surface/outdoor areas. But some of the maps weren’t very interesting, though, you won’t see it in the total darkness. Speaking of which, the “pipe” room was quite annoying not only because it was dark, but there were some areas where the player can get himself stuck, which means that the mapper didn’t take all player navigation possibilities into consideration. And the second dark room took me years to figure out largely due to a misleading button and how the real button, as mentioned above, looked like some generic decor. I actually had to r_fullbright because the little suit flashlight was about as useful as the one in Afraid of monsters.
For gameplay, we have some tricky puzzles that were tricky only because of the darkness. They would be plenty hard even if the area had been lit, but without lighting it’s just annoying. I’d like to mention that the confrontations with the soldiers are designed to be as difficult as possible. I swear, at one part there were soldiers lobbing grenades at me while I had to jump from ledge to ledge not unlike mario, with a toxic pool waiting below. It’s a level of challenge I’ve not seen from most other maps. The challenging aspect of the pack was certainly fun, but I will have to limit my enjoyability to the lighted areas. Let’s not mention how the soldiers can see you in total darkness and spam grenades from who knows where.
I think the annoying lack of lighting was meant to make the mappack more challenging in all aspects (fighting and puzzles) but in the end seems to have hurt the enjoyment rather than help it. This could be a lesson to future mappers: unless you’re going for a horror feel, you have to light up your maps appropriately.
For some reason I was enjoying outdoor areas much more than indoors. I didnt feel that I was in any base, for me those were just plain boring hallways and boring rooms. There wasn’t too much little details in those maps.
Where did that Barney disappeared in the beginning, there was just Grunt after you got your crowbar. Grunt + HEV charger was funny little joke though.
Well, play this because is medium lenght and have a story at is appeard, I mean, u have to read that after playing, which is a comon kind of previous introduction in some HL mods, they centered too much in the literature in order to make their mod make sense, I preffer they tell the story into the mod, I liked this because we have some good maps in here, but the pain in the ass part was the darky levels, and having the feeling the dam flashlight didn’t light well enough!!, I lost myself in the part of the moving transporters, and find the way out from there was too difficult because of the poor lighting!, despite of that all the mod have an ok feling and that was good.
Some frustrations and multiple replays due to lighting design errors, otherwise an engrossing map that gets you “involved’. It also looks very good in comparison with some of the other efforts…..
Another tough map pack, but still fun.
Due to the lack of health in this map pack it is a tough one. Apart from a few exceptions, mainly outside, it is a grunt map. Some fights are just complete action, while some are more thought out. It is very fun.
There are flaws, mainly the lack of health and HEV but it’s overall pretty tidy and so is worth a play. Unlike a few other reviews I thought the lighting was fine. Can’t really think of much more to say, I think I’ve covered the main points. “Play it Now”.
Firstly, WAY TOO DARK in places with the torch being next to useless. However a surprisingly fun offering with some variations in location that seemed to work for me. When I first loaded this up and started to play it I almost gave up, as despite giving the electrical box under the lift a damn good thrashing it refused to break. I looked for an alternative route but could find none so how was I to continue? So I gave up for a few days. Looking at the Zubben zip folder I saw a cheat sheet, which advised me to do exactly what I had already tried so I ran it again and this time it worked WTF? That wasn’t the first time in the game that happened either. At the yellow tank I saw the panel at the back and tried to use it guess what? Nothing happened so I exited the game, looked at the cheat sheet to find I was right all along, started a saved game and it worked first time!! I don’t know if it’s a bug but it was very off-putting.
Overall and in-spite of the above problems I enjoyed this quite a lot, except for the dark sections where it was almost guesswork to play by shooting at the grunts muzzle flash. A couple of things I’d like to have seen would be the tank being drivable when it was outside and some flares for the dark parts, but hey you can’t have everything.
Futuristic (altho old, get it?) space mod, even better than author’s 1st “Try, try again”
Pro’s:
-Interresting setup, mars-like scenery very cool
-Tough combats
-Quite good level design but…
Con’s:
-Very dark in the 2nd half
-Unfair/illogical placed enemies
-Thrown away potential of map design imho
-Getting-stuck bugs
I said ages ago (longer than I can remember) in my review of Try, Try Again that I’d be looking foward to Ronen Basch’s next level. Well, it has finally come! When I first opened Zubben I thought I entered USS Darkstar Part 2, but it turned out to be a few notches down from that kind of quality; nonetheless, this is a decent addon.
There is definitely a USS Darkstar feel to this map at the beginning as you awake from your cryo-sleep (very creative start, by the way) in a space station setting. All is normal at first in the small, but very well designed interiors of the station, but the text file promises hell will break loose, and of course, it does. But the enemies come too quick, and there isn’t much time to take in your wonderfully refreshing settings. Also, you must crowbar your first grunt to death, a process that will most likely halve your health – if you’re lucky. These facts soured a potentially memorable beginning.
Zubben has a lot going for it in terms of creativity. There is a flawless mix of indoor/outdoor areas and the setting reminded me of the movie Total Recall; there’s the futuristic base indoors and the red planet outdoors. The puzzles are fantastic, but the layout in general needs more work.
The main problem with Zubben is that it is still very linear, despite all the well thoughtout, but fair, hindrances along your path. I simply would’ve loved to explore Zubben like I did with USS Darkstar, but I couldn’t. Practically all of the doors that aren’t essential to you finding the exit are locked; a few more deviations from the main path would’ve done wonders for this addon. This mixed in with the rushed beginning ruined the “epic-ness” of a potentially epic idea.
I would’ve really gushed over the design in Zubben had it not been so dark. Sure, the atmosphere is great, but the darkness does get a bit frustrating and even disorientating in some places – I recommend turning your gamma up if you do choose to play this level. The architecture is fantastic, but in a simple fashion; there is nothing spectacular in terms of visuals, but the setting is very aesthetic (when it’s not too dark) and enthralling. The details thrown in here really paid off and they are really what seperated this addon from your everyday.
The action in Zubben is unfortunately flawed. One would have to know this map extremely well to have a fighting chance in hard. Needless to say, I had to tone down to the medium skill setting. While the enemy placement is very creative, the surprises are devastating. Much of the fighting has not as much to do with your skill as to whether you know how and when the grunts will pop up. Also, fighting in the dark with flashlight could’ve been creepy with with a couple of grunts that couldn’t launch grenades… but with three or four that could launch grenades, things become annoying. Thankfully, the fun end fight turns out to be the best one.
Zubben could’ve been real good had it been a little more playable. I beg Ronen to make his next release more bright in general and have the enemy surprises not so overwhelming. Zubben is still a nice addon, that would be a shame to miss. Once again, Ronen’s next release is something I’ll be waiting for.
Notes
This review is republished here by permission and was originally published Sunday, 8th October, 2000 by Jiang.
This review was originally posted on the Ten Four Website, which is now offline. Permission has been granted to republish the full review and more details can be found on the About page.
Not bad episode, but there is dark almost everywhere, and lot of enemies in this darkness. So it was very annoying to fight against them. Level design with some good touches, but in overall it’s low detailed.
Manually
Hard
1 Hour
Welcome to Mars and Mars mine vehicles. Still, I don’t understand why Gordon lives and scientist dies just like that to the external environment. He forgot to include the oxigen for the hero, the suit by itself is without oxigen tanks, so how he could even breath out there. Anyway, if you are on Mars, I think your bullets would be ineffective because there’s no oxigen, so bullets simply are not fired. He, he, what a mess of developer.
Manually
Medium
30 Minutes