Cry of Fear

From the makers of the horror crown jewel of Half-Life 1 comes a new single-player game, Cry of Fear. No, not from the industrious They Hunger developer Neil Manke of Black Widow Studios, who is unfortunately rumoured to be ill 1)http://www.moddb.com/games/they-hunger-lost-souls#948083, but the Afraid of Monsters developers “ruMpel” & co! The team very recently published a highly effective if off-beat Christmas-themed gameplay video and boy, color me impressed – the game is looking nothing short of phenomenal for a GoldSource game.

I cannot recall any such high-quality work exhibited on the Half-Life 1 engine since Paranoia, the suspenseful Russian shooter that went so far as to incorporate low-level enhancements to the very engine.

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Lights, Camera, Distr-Action!

For many FPS players, their first-ever contact with modifications came to be Counter-Strike. A great portion will have come through a game of Team Fortress; yet there also exists a group of players who were educated by Action Quake 2. “Action,” Counter-Strike author Minh Le’s second project, had considerable influence especially on the development side of the modification landscape, pushing many hopeful groups and teams to incorporate more “action film” gameplay into FPS games (Gooseman is now working on Tactical Intervention).

Half-Life 1, for instance, had an excellent breadth of the aforementioned – The Specialists, Action Half-Life and The Opera to name a few. The sequel, nevertheless, has seen far fewer successful applications of the topos: The Specialists swear never to do a Source update, The Opera is long since dead. Therefore, it’s more than topical to mention two fresh Half-Life 2 –based projects that could help alleviate the situation on the platform.

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