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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The End of a Decade

This year was a curious one, and I don’t mean to refer to the VG industry alone: 2009 was, after all, the first full year of The Slowdown for us three, and boy, it sure went past real fast. For various reasons, this year has also been a very trying one for each of us, yet we were still able to find the time and enthusiasm to write and post together. Taking up writing, I’m certain, has only worked to enhance our enthusiasm and interest in the medium. As if to commemorate the very end of the decade, though, my relatively recent motherboard had to be shipped over to Germany for replacement recently.

You’ve probably also noted how we’ve yet not engaged ourselves in the “best of” discourse, at all; we enjoy making lists just as much as the other guy, sure, but perhaps unsurprisingly also tend to get over-analytical and –intellectual with the concept.

Slowdown Boys

Therefore, as our final post of the year, the three of us have jotted down our personal lists of the decade. The simple rule was not to make it too difficult for ourselves. Therefore, I have sought to paint an impression of the zeitgeist, warts and all. Very subjective. Nabeel wanted to paint a portrait of himself as gamer, and Richard hoped to be accurate and inclusive. The games listed below have not been included based on their perceived merits or qualities; instead, we selected them with the aforementioned focuses in mind.

All three free-form lists after the jump. Here’s to a new gaming decade, everyone!

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Dark Void Zero

(Stop press! PC and mobile versions of Dark Void Zero will be made available in February!)

Dark Void Zero BoxWhen I first saw the Dark Zero Void “cover art” on the left, I thought it for fan art, I really did. After all, versioning (or “demaking”… Gang Garrison, anyone?) current-gen games has been very popular as of late. Even in seeing the above teaser trailer I went through several stages of minor befuddlement, though: In context of the very real PlayChoice-10, fact and fiction blend very conveniently.

The PlayChoice-10, brilliantly suitable for a Nintendo DS precursor, was a NES housed inside an arcade cabinet that often had an extra video screen reserved for instructions (not exactly “two interactive screens” like the video suggests 1)http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showpost.php?s=06a2783777cb157dbeb1b031b1faf86b&p=1009999&postcount=10, but fair enough!). It’s also perfectly natural that Dark Void Zero should be another Capcom project, “buried deep in its vault,” in the vein of Mega Man 9 and 10. In this sense, they are bringing their flavour of 8-bit degradation to its logical culmination.

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