Archives for July 2010

• Please note that these are publication date on this site, NOT the actual release date of the maps and mods

Looks like a crate cemetery, with lots of containers lying around, full of ammo and health. Get ready to fight a Strider, Gunship, numerous choppers and plenty of soldiers.

Only the strong or crazy will survive!

A grey and orange textured arena where you must kill as many enemies as possible before you die.

There’s a kill counter to keep score. I reached 8473 before I died. Wait, sorry I meant 8.

Wow, this is going to be an interesting discussion. Firstly, I heard about this mod via the Podcast 17 Agenda and what specifically caught my eye was William’s comment…“This is the one and only time I will address this mod. It will not be covered on Podcast 17″. Mmm, I thought, what’s this about?

An orange room, with weapons, that leads to a couple of areas full of zombies and one or two other surprises.

Can you reach the exit?

Starting in an orange and grey dev textured area, you work your way outside, fighting a variety of enemies.

Your ultimate goal seems to be to reach the airboat.

The City 17 Times is a weekly newspaper produced for the citizens of City 17. It is written from the perspective of real people from within the game. The style will be a serious local newspaper, with a hint of “over-the-topness” and a touch of cliché, so don’t believe everything you read!

The idea has been shamelessly stolen from the First Person Observer, a site ” dedicated to providing you with non-stop, around-the-clock coverage of breaking news from inside the games you play and love.”

I have no idea if this idea has been proposed before but it came to me in a dream. It was between the “Trapped between two broken staircases” and “giant bees and giant cameras fighting”!

With the advent of Portal 2 people have been thinking about new gameplay mechanics for Portal, and that’s pretty cool, but has anybody suggested changing the way the portals work?

Hello and welcome to another community round up. Got some great videos this week and some other links. Please remember, I am not responsible for the content of other websites.

Don’t forget to send me you news by email and your URL if you want a credit link.

I’ll probably try and post every Wednesday from now on.

Things start quite easy but slowly get harder.

Can you reach the final elevator?

I’m pretty sure that PlanetPhillip.Com has a higher average age than most gaming sites. Regular readers will know that grey gaming is something that interests me, not just because I am a “going grey gamer” but because of the idea that gaming was only for youngsters.

So, last night I was watching my town’s annual parade, where people from the town dress up in themed costumes and walk, dance, roll, jump, “fly” and skip along the streets. The last “float” was full of wrinkles and it was very funny.

Celebrity Chef Jamie Oliver has chosen or been chosen to relocate to our very own City 17. So let’s give him a warm welcome.

Taking a break from his School Dinners campaign, especially since that there are no children around, Jamie has decided that he wants to focus on improving the quality of food distributed via the Food Dispensers found throughout the city.

Okay, you’ve done it before and you will do it again: make portals to reach the end – it’s that simple!

Hello and welcome to a new kind of post here on PlanetPhillip.Com. It’s a simple round up of all the interesting news items over the last week or so. I plan to post regularly but won’t commit to a definite schedule. I am guessing about twice a month.

Lots of other sites do it and I suppose it’s time I did it too. So, without further ado onto what I found this week…

You’ve got plenty of ammo, health, suit power and weapons.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that there are plenty of antlions, Combine soldiers and dropships.
How many enemies can you kill and how long can you stay alive?

July 2010: I have reposted this article in the hope of generating some interesting discussion. It was originally published in April 2006.

A long time ago I started a thread on a gaming forum about expert SP FPS gamers. I asked if anybody had beaten a modern (HL1 or Unreal 1 onwards) Single Player First Person Shooter on the hardest setting without playing sections twice. Let me explain that a little. You are allowed to save a game but only to provide a natural break (toilet, food or sleep!); you are not allowed to quick load when you are running low of health or ammo.

I’ve had a lot of hard drive failures over the years and lost plenty of stored images. I became jaded to their loss but I recently came across a few photographs that I think are mildly inspirational for mappers and I have decided to create this post to act as a holder for all the individual images I find that I like.

Obviously, each one may not astound you and they don’t deserve their own post but as the collection grows it may become useful. Please feel free to send me your images and I will add them if I like them.

I will not be sorting them in any way, they are posted in the order I find them. Enjoy.

The City 17 Times has received reports that Dr. Kleiner and a small group of resistance commanders have left the city on what has been described by one Resistance member as “A bold move”.

Apparently Dr. Kleiner and his team have gone to met Cesar Millan, a renowned Dog trainer. You may know him as the Dog Whisperer.

This week’s question is another that started as a forum thread called: The Power of Steam. MikeS noticed he had 94 games on his Steam account but thought of himself as a casual gamer.

I only have 30 games but I doubt I have even finished half of those. That’s not as bad as it sounds because a lot of those games came free when I bought something else; games like TF2, DOD: Source etc.

As with nearly all Portal maps, there’s no actual story.

Just go through, under, around, over the chambers and try and reach the cake

Another escape from the jail map, nothing more, nothing less.

I received an interesting email from Joe Albericci AKA ThePengu a few days ago and I thought I’d share the content with you.

He told me about a a desktop customization platform called Rainmeter, whilst I had never heard of that particular application, I was aware of these types of applications. The whole thing looks pretty cool and I am running it as I type, although I am yet to find the right skin for me.

I was recording Podcast17 yesterday and was speaking about a mod I added a few days ago called Minimicus.

There’s nothing remarkable about this mod, although it is good fun and well produced, but the interesting things is that it is 7 years old. In gaming, that’s a loooong time.

You probably are aware that a recent engine update by Valve caused a lot of mods to stop working. At the time of writing and to my knowledge Valve had neither acknowledged the issue nor apologized. Fine, that’s how they treat the people who put bread on their table, that’s their choice. I don’t like it but there’s nothing I can do about it.

However, the community, lead by gorpie, a PP and Steam Forum regular, have worked very hard to find fixes, patches, solutions and hacks to get the mods working again.

A short map that has a slightly different style to most Portal maps.

There’s plenty of turrets to pass and a nice balance beam section.

Don’t forget: The cake is a lie!