half-life-2-mod posts

Yet another mod created originally for another game is making the leap to a commercial stand alone game release. Dear Esther, previously released as a free mod for Valve's Half-Life 2 back in 2007, will be released in a revamped stand alone title for release sometime in 2011.

The mod is an abstract first person story-adventure game about the experiences of the player exploring a lonely island. The new version will get a graphical revamp for its commercial Source Engine-based release, which will be developed by the mod's original designer Dan Pinchbeck in collaboration with Robert Briscoe, who worked as an environmental designer at Digital Illusions on Mirror's Edge.

The game's bare bones official web site states that the new Dear Esther will have a "completely new environment that pushes the Source engine into uncharted territory; a re-orchestrated soundtrack by composer Jessica Curry, new areas to explore and an expanded story."

[Via Rock Paper Shotgun]

It's perhaps one of the most anticipated mods for any PC game and we've been waiting a long, long time for its completion. It the Black Mesa mod that has been trying to do a full graphical remake of Valve's 1998 shooter Half-Life with the much improved Source Engine.

In late 2008, a truly spectacular trailer for Black Mesa was released that showed that the team was serious in its attempt to bring us a modern looking Half-Life. The trailer promised that the mod would be released in 2009 but that year came and went with no Black Mesa love. However in a forum post on the mod's message boards one of the mod's team members basically wants fans to go into a coma until the "end of 2010". Will this be yet another broken promise or will we finally get a chance to play the original Half-Life with some truly updated visuals? We are not holding our breath but we are still hopeful.

[Via Rock Paper Shotgun]

Download the Black Mesa HD gameplay trailer at Big Download (104 MB)

It looks like yet another dev team behind a popular game mod is making the move to a commercial game. In this case its with the team responsible for Zombie Panic Source, the popular Half-Life 2 based-mod. Two of the team members have founded Monochrome Games and have just announced their first stand alone commercial game, Contagion.

The team are calling Contagion a spiritual successor to Zombie Panic Source. While there's little info on the game, the development team is promising this will be different than your average zombie shooter title, saying Contagion will "pit you against unique and terrifying enemies, new features, a variety of new weapons to choose from" and more. No release date for the game was announced. You can check out a teaser trailer for the game after the jump:

Nazis. Dinosaurs. Without a doubt these are two of pop culture's biggest and most used groups of bad guys. But what if these two totally different groups suddenly joined forces? That's the uber-cool premise behind Dino D-Day. The upcoming Source Engine based game has the Nazis bringing in the big lizards to help them in their quest to take over the world in World War II. The game comes from new developer Digital Ranch Interactive which has just released a free Half-Life 2 mod that serves as a demo for what they have planned for the full game. You can download that mod right now at Big Download.

Big Download got a chance to ask some questions to Digital Ranch Interactive's co-founder Abe Scheuermann to find out more about their plans for the game, his reaction to how well the mod release has been received and more.