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We Are The Lambda Generation. LambdaGeneration is a website dedicated to the video game Half-Life. ( We're basically really passionate about crowbars, headcrabs and anyone who has goatee with a PhD in theoretical physics… )

Tagged:

'Black Mesa Research Facility'

Articles tagged with 'Black Mesa Research Facility'

14 Wackiest Half-Life Mods

Half-Life

The Half-Life series can be quite glum at times, especially with no resolution in sight for the series. Good thing we have the modding community to deliver us some light-heartedness. Here are fourteen off-the-wall mods hand-picked to help relieve those Episode 2 cliffhanger blues.

XboxAhoy’s Excellent Half-Life Retrospective

Half-Life

The popular “XboxAhoy” YouTube channel, which is a member of the Machinima.com gaming network, just uploaded an excellent retrospective video analysis that explores Valve’s success with the original Half-Life.

Written by Stuart Brown, the video analysis highlights the early influences of Half-Life, such as Quake as well as the affect that Half-Life’s release had upon the FPS in genre, including the modding scene as well as Valve’s later developments with Team Fortress, Steam and the Source engine.

If you have a spare 20 minuets, it’s well worth a watch!

Peeling Back the Layers – Looking at Maps Differently

Source

Many of us will have played through most of Valve’s titles and enjoyed them. When we’re wrapped up in the action or the story however, the rules of the game we’re playing are almost invisible to us.

As a level designer it often pays to take a step back and look at the purpose of the content of a level. Why things are placed where they are, what do they add to the gameplay and what can we learn from them.

Community Spotlight: Focalpoint

Half-Life

It has been over 15 years since Valve developed the GoldSrc engine. As a result of this, and the subsequent release of the Source Engine in 2004, there is an insane amount of community-created maps and mods out there, each showcasing amazing talent, ability and creativity.

We haven’t featured many modding projects yet on our weekly ‘Community Spotlight’ feature, so when it came to choosing a single project to feature, it was a difficult decision. However, even after completing so many different maps and mods over the years, there are always certain projects that stand out and Focalpoint by Dimitri Vujicic is certainly one of those.

Watch Gordon zoom through Black Mesa and Xen in almost 21 minutes!

Half-Life

Despite the age, Half-Life is a game that many set their sights on, mainly for the challenge that is speedrunning. You know, the thing where people try to beat a game as fast as humanly possible, with or without scripts. And loads of bunny hops and grenade jumps. Loads of ’em.

Using a mod that restores Half-Life to its original 2001 version, a group of people has after 4 years of preparation and practice managed to beat the world record speedrun of 27 minutes, with a whopping 20 minutes and 41 seconds clear time.

Community Spotlight: Half-Life Mobile

Half-Life

Welcome to the first Community Spotlight on LambdaGeneration!

To start off, we have chosen a small project from the community known as “Half-Life Mobile”. As the name may suggest, the project is an attempt to bring Half-Life to the mobile platform.

It’s an amazing effort which combines the experience of Half-Life with the technical potential of the modern smartphone.

An Entire Map Of Half-Life 1… Drawn From Memory; And More Half-Life Cartography

Half-Life

Black Mesa. The place where the world went to hell. In the original Half-Life, we only see a relatively small part of it, but even so, what we do see amounts to an underground complex the size of a small city. Even though HL1 was never really known for its logical level design, many fans have tried to put together a cohesive map of the complex (such as this top-down overview by “Sterd”; this composite model by “Ripa”; and this realistic 3D map by David Dryburgh). But no one has ever tried to put a map together completely by memory, and by hand! What’s that? They have? Christ, is there anything the community hasn’t done in the time it took Valve to make HL3?

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