After 8 years of development, Black Mesa is now available for free

Black Mesa has won and broken our hearts on many occasions for the last 8 years. After all this time the free-to-play mod is finally available (albeit not entirely complete). Half-Life fan(atics)s may not find any number threes with this mod, but they may just find one more thing to tide them over while Valve continues to play with Steam enhancements and more TF2 add-ons.

Gamer draws his favorite game maps from memory

Pictured above is an astonishingly accurate depiction of the entire Half-Life game, Xen levels and all.  Josh Millard over at his blog Mapstalgia does an excellent job of recreating the maps of all sorts of video games new and old.  Its a fun way to remember some of the better games of yore.  If there were a map I think I could draw back from memory it’d likely be GTA3, but it helped that the world wasn’t particularly huge either.  Hit the jump for a few of Millard’s highlights!

Update: Millard informed me that not all of the drawings on his site are by him, half of them are actually user submission, so if you have your own stuff you should sent them on his way!

Natural Selection 2 is a labor of love

Natural Selection 2 is ramping up finally.  I remember following the sequel’s progress a long, long time ago, back when it seemed like just an updated version of the half-life mod original. Apparently creator Unknown Worlds decided that wasn’t enough and the results of an extended development time look like they will be paying large dividends.

Its time for another Jonathan Blow game

In 2008 Jonathan Blow’s Braid released to critical fanfare and shattered expectations of what video games could do with narrative.  Each part of the game represented a piece of the story and theme, from the way Tim controlled time, to the written snippets of story, to the music and artwork that permeated the landscape.  It was quite the spectacle and after the spectacular ending I was convinced that this would propel video games to the next level of narrative art-form.

Can a Half-Life “protest” get Valve’s attention?

Next question: Is “protest” just another way of saying “I need an excuse to play Half-Life 2 again?”  Because that’s what over 30,000 people are going to be doing on Feburary 4th.

Meme of the week

 

At this point it looks like Half-Life 2 Episode 3 is no more

Year after year Valve has been treating us to some quality entertainment that no doubt has greatly improved the FPS genre and generally impressed us all that Valve can actually handle yearly releases.  It doesn’t seem too long ago that we were all waiting with nearly monk-like patience for Half-Life 2 to release only to be crushed by more and more delays or hacking controversies.  But the greater question that keeps resurfacing at each and every Valve announcement has been unanimous – where the heck is that Episode 3 you guys promised us?

The Top 10 (Mostly) Do-able Video Game Costumes

Halloween is tonight and you don’t want to be called out when you stand on your tip-toes and go as “my slightly taller brother”.  These are not only some great gaming-themed costumes, but are also mostly do-able, as in they won’t take weeks and weeks of work to pull together.  You might not be able to pull it together before its time to steal candy from the neighbors, but at least you can admire the effort others put in.  Hit the jump for more!