It’s only at the last level, 15, that you permanently lose the HEV.

I don’t know what Leon had in mind when he first compiled these levels, and I guess from his reaction from subsequent criticism his not too sure either. I still think he was right to experiment and include them, any author only has so much time to give, and as we see Leon is close to finishing with Half Life.

the author was right to include them even if he has since said, that he now has doubts about their inclusion due to the mixed feedback.
My view is that if authors with the talent of Leon do not try different and new ideas then gaming will not progress, and in any case he was right to include them

I think Leon was right to do them but not to include them with this mod.
I would have preferred the mod to end at the end of the power plant map (more spawning but there’s no time to bother with them as you need to get your bum in gear).
After that the maps detracted from the mod for me and I was left deflated and disappointed.
The following maps would have been better as a separate mod which we could have judged for what they are.

Gameplay: Unorthodox Content
In some ways the author pushes the boundaries of normal game play and includes what may be termed by some, as experimental, levels that advance the playing experience and player’s willpower to greater limits. Without giving too much away, you will experience some unorthodox scenarios in the later stages. So if you lose something like suit power don’t think it’s a bug, this and other scenarios are meant to vary the gameplay. Reading the posted comments here on PlanetPhillip, many players have been confused with these levels and expressed a dislike for the step away from the norm. Having played through these sections of the game I believe that they add to the experience, and the author was right to include them even if he has since said, that he now has doubts about their inclusion due to the mixed feedback.

My view is that if authors with the talent of Leon do not try different and new ideas then gaming will not progress, and in any case he was right to include them.

it’s a total mistery to me why people have crash problems with that one gate;
http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/8526/leonhl22da0000.jpg
this ALWAYS worked fine, but it seems that some people now have problems with it, why this is i really wouldn’t know. maybe some new updates in steam that makes this happen/

about loosing the HEV suit, and not being able to change weapons. this is not a bug, but simply the way Hl2 works. when the player doesn’t have his suit on he isn’t able to speedrun, change weapons or see his HUD. this is programmed in to Hl2, and we didn’t had any programmer. it does happen because just before you loose the suit you stand on a glass floor, and when you look below you you see you’re weapons laying ona floor below. when i made it i thought it would be extra challeging, but i know by now that most people only hated it, so should you have made CtoA now then i would have left that out.

about the inviseble walls, i fully agree with that it’s not done anymore to place them. in older games it was commen, but not anymore. still, i did place them so players wouldn’t be able to get to other places we’re they would only cause troubles.

Pictish1, should you still have that problem then please update you’re videodrivers. the crash that you have is caused by having not the latest videodrivers, or DX9. in those hallucination sequences i used overlays that do need them, otherwise you have indeed a crash. because this is a really old project of mine i don’t look to much anymore here. not that i don’t want to, but i am many projects furtheron so to speak. so please do mail me so i can help,
(leonbrinmann AT emailaccount.com )
or viset sp-mods.com.

should you have liked this mod, and still not have played our latest big project with 17 large sp-maps called Strider Mountain, then please do look here for it on PP;
http://www.planetphillip.com/posts/strider-mountain-half-life-2/

thank you all for commenting

I actually played through Strider Mountain before this one. Both are excellent pieces of inventive story telling.

I did what amounts to a full review for this mod when I was telling someone else about my impressions of it. I only just now realized that I should probably edit it a bit for context and put it up here where others can see it:

The impression I get from Leon’s work so far is that he creates his maps with the intent of forcing you to play a specific way. In forming this conclusion, I’m looking at where invisible walls are, the fact that the buggy acts as a passkey for no conceivable reason, various spawn triggers that wait until you get almost right next to them to fire, items that disappear (even if you’re carrying them) during a map transition, and also the one area (where the gunship shows up) that if you fall into the valley under the house, it instakills you, only to do nothing if you go to that same area through the tunnels.
If anything, I’m feeling like I’m enjoying CtA simply because Leon hadn’t yet learned to enforce his expectations effectively, which has been leaving me more room to work around and find other ways to play than what he specifically expects. (Hint: That’s a GOOD thing)
If it weren’t for needing the buggy to get through various doors, then he could have probably gone through the entire mod without using those stupid mission hint subtitle things. The only thing he would have needed to do is have the various keycard readers bleep at you and say “keycard required” Heck, he could have even had the various doors that require you to use the buggy and had them painted with a big sign that reads “vehicles only!” or “No pedestrians!” (or both) It’s not gamebreaking, but it just feels cheap.

CtA remained incredibly good up until the point where you lose your HEV suit and weapons. Once they did that, even when I got a weapon, I couldn’t SWITCH weapons. The only way I could switch to a weapon I wanted was either by picking it up new or by burning through my ammo in all the other weapons I happened to have. It feels like it HAS to be a bug, but I couldn’t tell if Leon might have thrown it in there just to be a bitch. If it is a bug, it NEEDS TO BE FIXED. If it’s not a bug, it STILL NEEDS TO BE FIXED. I was still able to beat it (mainly by doing whatever I needed to do to get switched to the pulse rifle and then NEVER allowing myself to run out of ammo until I got the HEV suit back) but that’s definitely going to keep me from playing again.

The Hallucinogenic gas felt utterly contrived, but the scenes themselves were handled pretty well. There was one part where I couldn’t see because there was an effect that only works properly in DX9, but I have to run in DX8.1 in order to get decent framerate. It was only one scene though, so that part wasn’t a deal breaker. I still feel devs should take the time to consider how a game looks and runs at the lowest settings as well as the highest settings.

The one section, where you need to get the gravity gun back to activate the blue laser to follow, annoyed me. Actually that part was fun, but the part that pissed me off was the instant kill if you dropped to the floor below.(AGAIN!) I realize Leon wants you to play the way he wants, but that just comes across to me as a severe lack of creativity. I could have thought of at least 3 different ways that could have been better handled. Instakill shouldn’t be used anywhere except for either where there is specifically a reason for you dying (soul sucking monster, pit of acid, hit by lightning, etc), or where there is an area that you aren’t EVER supposed to be AND can’t get back to where you need to be from.
The worst part is that I found another SORTA instakill section that was actually somewhat warranted, but it didn’t work properly. It’s when you’re up at the broken combine bridge right after you escape from the huge mass of headcrabs that are dropped into a sealed room with you. If you jump off the ledge down into the water, you can’t get back up to the bridge, and the drop is high enough that you SHOULD die, so having the instakill spot here is reasonable. Instead you only take half HP damage from the instakill section and the water breaks your fall the rest of the way.

The section at the nuclear reactor with the endlessly spawning combine was annoying until I verified that they were indeed endlessly spawning and just raced past them. Shooting the final badguys was kinda satisfying, but it also felt rather cheesy/anticlimactic to just gun them down as you caught up with them. Oh, and when the room FELL I actually ended up through the ceiling and stuck outside the map. I had to reload and try a couple times to get it to work right.

I felt the “after credits” section was actually a bit of a letdown, since it wasn’t terribly challenging, didn’t really resolve anything, and it put me through that same damn “can’t switch weapons” issue since it apparently didn’t give you your HEV suit.(I had it when I left, so why didn’t I keep it?) I mean, just setting the suit power to zero and disabling flashlight, zoom, and sprint would have worked fine. It’s not like there was any suit power laying around during the sections where you weren’t wearing the HEV suit.

This COULD have EASILY been a Play It Now if not for the majorly game-enjoyment-breaking issues. For now, the most I can give it is a Play It Later. I would happily change that to a Play It Now if Leon fixed the unswitchable weapons without the HEV suit issue, and took out every instakill spot that is in a section where you will eventually be going to. If he addressed all the other specific issues I brought up, it would probably be a Personal Favorite of mine.

“Hi everybody, it seems I’m stuck here, when I attempt to open this gate ( http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/8526/leonhl22da0000.jpg ), using this ( http://img133.imageshack.us/img133/8195/leonhl22da0001.jpg ).

The gate opens without a problem, but then an ingame voice starts telling that I incurred in some violations and the game crashes when it reaches 148, 243, 24…

Exited steam, removed & reloaded the mod, started again, still the same problem. Any ideas anybody? Great stuff up till this problem.

“Hi everybody, it seems I’m stuck here, when I attempt to open this gate ( http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/8526/leonhl22da0000.jpg ), using this ( http://img133.imageshack.us/img133/8195/leonhl22da0001.jpg ).

The gate opens without a problem, but then an ingame voice starts telling that I incurred in some violations and the game crashes when it reaches 148, 243, 24…

What should I do? I’d like to go no with this mod which I think it’s really entertaining.”

Anyone know a solution to it? The error message Winblows generates in the error log says something about datacache.dll being the wrong module? The mod is really good and I like to be able to play it through without having to resort to using the console to noclip through buggy areas etc.

Anyone else got this problem or maybe a sollution?

The cut scene in the same episode, relating to the discovery of the car, was poorly implemented, as I continued taking health damage while I was flown around over the scene with no control of my character.

**SPOILER**

I found a bug? I get to the end of lvl 9 which is: SPOILER** after the hallucinations where your flying over streets and looking at combines below etc and you get to the end where it turns black after the walls rotate and are black…. (if this makes sense) but on a walkthrough (to check what went wrong(i dont use walkthroughs)) it said I have a battle with some mroe combine but for me the screen just went black, I was given ammo and health and music played and I heard distant noises of manhack.. and maybe combine isk, but everything was black… i loaded back quite far and replayed it and the same happened.. so i waited longer than 5 minutes and the music finished nd it stayed black…. grrr I wanna playyy!!

ps: GREAT GAME.

The gate opens without a problem, but then an ingame voice starts telling that I incurred in some violations and the game crashes when it reaches 148, 243, 24…

What should I do? I’d like to go no with this mod which I think it’s really entertaining.

let me start with helping out Naughtymonkeyboy, to be honest did i have to read the walkthrough myself to see which place you exactly ment, after reading that one comment from 25 october.
its quit easy to get through there, but i think you just did miss the trigger.
thing is, you drive your jeep in front of that large wooden gate, then get out of the jeep and walks a few meters backwards were you fidn a ladder atached to the wall. climb on the catwalk and walk on, its just one path/way, so it can’t miss. when you walk on you will get on a catwalk behind the gate were a small stairs goes down again. somewere there is a trigger, that opens the gate. it just when you walk past the gate at the other end, it opens and combines on the catwalk at the other end will shoot at you, can’t really miss.
or, did you walk up to there, and not bring the jeep along with you, becauyse then it could be that the trigger for the gate isn’t activated.

let me know if you succeed, and should you not be familiar with the 2 walkthroughs for CtoA, then please look here;

WALKTHROUGHS;

http://www.sp-mods.com/C_to_A_manual/
http://www.sp-mods.com/C_to_A_manual_short/

and its true Sniperjike that you can get stuck by the brooken heli parts, had this problem ones myself years ago. then i didn’t knew all possibilities of the hammer/hl2 editor and gameengine. now i know i can give such parts a setting that makes that they are not solid to the player and or jeep, and other options that do simular things.

and although i am not a fan of the gravgun you are right there Robspace1, it can help clean up places, lol.

leon

Oh and careful when playing the part in the jungle, where the helicopter attacks you! Make sure, the parts don’t fall on your car, as it is pretty difficult, to get it out of the mess!

let me start with saying that CtoA is indeed insane difficult, and should i make it now again then i wouldn’t make it that hard. but, thats after talking. still, CtoA is ment to be played on EASY !!!! (we even added a small text in the beginning as far as i can remember, that it needs easy instead of normal or even hard.). still, some people did write to me that they compleated ctoA on Difficult !!!! an unbelieveble good achiement!!! don’t think i could do so.

that said, i hope you don’t mind me pointing out to our next project Strider Mountain. i say this specialy to Brett because you asked to keep you updated on any new projects.
glad to say SM (Strider Mountain) is almost done. it took about 2 years and 5 months or so to make it, and it has 17 large sp-maps !!! so, when you liked CtoA, then you will like SM to.
and, its not that hard as CtoA, i listened very well to all comments and suggestions on CtoA, and really tried to learn from them and implemented them in SM.

SM is very soon compleatly finished, but in the mean time you could allready play SM pre release. this is the first 5 maps of SM, you could allready start with that, and ones your done you probebly can go on right away with the other 12 maps, because by then we will be done with the full mod.

you can find it here on PP;

/posts/strider-mountain-prerelease-half-life-2/

and we have our own site with much more info and movies/screens, etc, and… a walkthrough, (now for the pre release, and as soon as SM is full released we place the full walktough);

http://www.stridermountain.com/

thanks,

leon

(before we made CtoA Baltic and i made a smaller HL2 sp-mappack with 4 maps, should you be interested in that then please check here ; i can’t find it PP because the HL2 maps/mods are not anymore in alfabetical order, therefore i will give for now the filfefront link to it);

http://halflife2.filefront.com/file/HalfLife_2_Leons_SP_Map_Pack;39881