Part I: Half-life - Hardman In The City
There comes a time in every gamer's lifetime where they will come across something that is so vile, so utterly terrible, it will make them want to murder their parents and then top themselves. Hardman In The City isn't that something, but it is well on it's way to being close. I came across this smelly turd whilst randomly browsing some sections of the much loved website *cough* Fileplanet. I noticed this one was one of the few single-player experiences that I hadn't yet attempted and with lots of new textures models and sounds, how could it possibly fail to be good? The answer is sadly 'on many levels. To describe the playing experience of this ever-so-slightly amateur mod, you could compare it to being ran over by a bus repeatedly, going down on a girl who has a minge as dirty as a waste dumping ground or the good ol' getting your fingers trapped in a door hinge so badly that they become infected and have to be amputated.
Those familiar with the utterly awesome game Kingpin will instantly recognise the setting, not only because it resembles the city of said game but also because it uses textures, sprites, model skins and sounds from the game abeit very badly. As you can see from the picture below the author (bless his cotton socks) doesn't really know how to skin for shit and as a result has crafted something that looks like a cross between Ann Robinson and a cat that just drowned in a tar pit. If you think that not all the skins can be as bad as this one, you can think again pal, there's plenty more where that came from.
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Hi, I'm Dave and I shop at Bondage-Gear-For-Weirdos.com
You begin the game in a very badly scaled house of sorts where you have to journey down towards the basement to press a button to open up access to another button to start a lift that emerges in the middle of the lawn, something that will no doubt have you question yourself.. why is their a lift underneath this lawn? why am I wasting my time with this crap? WHAT AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE?!! etc. Now the real 'action' begins. The core level design is a mixture of kingpin-esque city blocks and seemingly random corridors filled with some of the ugliest arcitecture ever concieved in a video game. The author obviously thought he was too cool for such unnecessary details like model props, instead he decided it would be best just to make a block and texture it with a photo of a vase/phone/bottle/random-object-he-can't-be-fucked-to-actually-make. Not only does this reek of laziness but it doesn't look right at all, especially when you have one of the worst looking phones ever seen but details such as a cord and plug-sockets, makes you wonder what the guy was smoking..
[Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/hard01.jpg]
Check out the curves (or lack of) on that vase huh? Hey buddy, it's 2005 not 1995, sort it out!
[Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/hard02.jpg]
Introducing 'The flatest phone in the world'
Carrying on, I ended up talking to barney (complete with super-terrible-makes-you-want-to-claw-your-eyes-out skin job), he said a few things like 'yeah no problem' 'yeah it's cool' 'yo' and stuff, kingpin sound files that the author has no real clue how to use. I broke a grate, ran through some sewers and emerged in another part of the city. Upon pressing a garage door and looking inside I found a few crates of stuff and then I couldn't work out where to, it took me about 20 minutes of pissing about to work out that there is a button in the garage that looks like an electric socket that opens up a door to a house down the road.. why it does this is beyond me. I then had to run about a house and jump out of a window to tackle some grunts and it was onto the next level.
From there on out there's not much to do but run down random corridors killing grunts until I reached what looked to be subway train, but in all honesty it could just as easily of been a static caravan or a bus or.. anything.
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"Today on CNN, San-Francisco's tram company begin to take the complete piss.."
After that, well it's more running round corridors pressing random buttons again. There's some really aggrevating design flaws in this conception, I'm talking maps that haven't been VIS'd properly, gaps in the floor where brushes should join, random invisible walls that block the player from moving for no real reason than the author couldn't be arsed to make a few planks of a wood or a gate or a door.. or something to actually properly block the way. Some walls even seemed to have random blocks sticking out, they looked as if they could be air-vents but..I..couldn't...quite...tell. The custom graffiti (I think it's meant to be that, but it could just as easily be something your mate threw up on the walls after eating too much beetroot) is terrible as the picture below demonstrates.
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Look at my graffiti ma, it's mighty pretty aint it? I made it all by myself with my berol marker pen and Microsoft paint..
A few levels (about 4 if I remember) blatently rip Kingpin off down to the level structure. They were all cut from various sections of the Skidrow chapter and look as if they were actually decompiled because the scale feels exactly the same (although less detail is there.. and utterly terrible texture choices).
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The Jesus? Not played it mate.. Kingpin? Nah never heard of it mate...
Once you reach the end, you get into a helicopter and then you're kicked out to the main menu and it's all over, your reward for enduring this terrible waste of Hard-drive space. I threw away a good 40 minutes of my lifetime playing this mess and I would very much like it back, don't make the same mistake I did.. for the love of all that is good and holy.
Design: 0.8
Graphics: 1
Gameplay: 0.4
Lighting: 0.3
Overall: 1.6/10
If maps were the plague, this would be edging towards ebola status, avoid like the... um.. plague.
