Fletch

Power Stone (1 is awesome, 2 has some problems but adds 4 player) Sonic Adventure (2 kinda sucks for the addition of the stupid fishing levels) Guantlet Legends for lengthy co-op party fun Super Monkey Ball Virtua Tennis (still my favorite tennis game of all time) Marvel vs Capom 2 or Street Fighter Alpha 3 for some old skoolin Skies of Arcadia (the best RPG on the console)

$0 because there really isn't much that you can't find on the internet for free. Engine technology changse so fast that it seems like any specific technical data is going to be out of date before long. Plus, articles about level design theory are already out there, and many of them are well written. There are some Q1 and Q2 editing websites that have great sections on gameplay and theory.

IGN of course being reputable and not at all swayed by the advertisements splashed all over their sites.

hey look, the pot is calling us kettles black.

Yeah.... I was being sarcastic.

He hasn't been in any movies recently. What's he up to?

That's kinda starfoxy.

I hope Zidane's statement is just quoting NWA

That game really needed some more repetitive turkey spawning.

Went to visit my friends last weekend and came away with these.

Timesplitter's duel flareguns in DM with one hit kills on. That is some fun shit. Oh, and Mikey.... HAAAAAAALLELUJAH!!!

You don't appreciate the genius of Zidanne. All those great players before him who bowed out gracefully in their final game with a wve to the crowd, we never see those clips of them leaving. This thing is going to be played forever. He just went viral on the internet. A footballer for the internet generation! Plus, if you're going to leave the game, you might as well get in one last fuck you.

OMG mirrored at Lanmaniax! The Cold War really is over. Sorry I didn't comment on this for a few days. I was out of town. My next major edit will hopefully be to find a cleaner way of doing the exterior walls in a different texture (the church will still be predominantly the same texture but will be re-trimmed). It will also give me a chance to redo some visblocking.

Well the CS:S hostages use the bot navigation mesh, which has special commands to say when to jump down things and when the climb things, so there is hope (I'll just have to figure out if I can get them to shoot out grates correctly, which will probably be the bigger headache). The bots can climb the ladders in cobble, so that is a good sign.

Some people don't like CS_ maps.... doesn't stop me from making them. as I've said, the playable areas will be bright enough to play in. The non-playable areas will be shadowy to help trick the eye into thinking things are darker than they are. Plus, I've been fairly vigilant about going back to the original Docks and keeping the overall gamma level similar. In many areas, this is actually brighter. As for the ramps, they'd have to be less than 40 degrees for players to run up them at a good speed, so they would end up being pretty long. I'm somewhat confident that the CS:S hostages are smart enough to get up ladders now, so we might be in business here. And the current wy I have it plotted leaves for 3 manholes (near CT spawn, main combat corridor, near one group of hostages) similar to the 3 entrances that were in the original docks. Plus it would be fun to play with volumetric fog down there (i love killing frames). I just need to look into what props/textures I have available.

Ronaldo had more fake falls than Benny Hill. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHH. I went there.

New shots! See how smart I am, I post shots of Kerk, then distract you with Docks, then distract you with Kerk again. I am like some sort of PR ninja. Just like Reggie. New view down one of the main paths. The little alcove is now where there once was a connecting route between the two bomb points. Now, CT's can still get up there and snipe this route, but have to come down to ground level if they want to protect the bomb point quickly from the Ts. One of the outside plazas. Now with new lighting color and shadows. Bomb A, the pathway on the far right now leads to a path around the back of the church to the other bomb site. The new CT spawn in the back of the church instead of the side. New overview of the church. The new lighting color and direction helps bring out a lot more shadow depth. Thanks guys! Just showing up the new lighting color/direction/shadows a bit more. (Ignore the texturing error). Also, if you'll notice in all of these shots, those clouds move (thanks to Port for the cloud model). Hopefully that should help with the "lifeless" problem a bit. And, just because I'm a kind soul: http://www.mapcore.net/fletch/portfolio/files/de_kerk_b3.zip Keep in mind that the CT spawn is new, and thus the 3d skybox around that area doesn't line up. I've had to rebuild that thing 4 times now and it's a pain in the arse to work in 1/16th scale because barely moving terrain litterally makes mountains out of mole hills. So I want to make sure these spawns are locked down before I go and rebuild that thing again. On the bright side, it has a pretty lake... and a visible skybox texture that I find amusing.

I got it off Deviantart.

Think of all those poor Italians in blue shirts that had to leave that stadium and find themsleves surrounded by 250,000 pissed off, drunk Germans.

Need's AT-ATs and Ewoks running around.

I tell you what, i'll do a test map tonight to see if CSS hostages like to play with ladders better than CS hostages did. If so, there might be a chance for a sewer path.

Apparently OS X limits the full power of the on baord graphics card to prevent heat issues, but Windows does no such thing, so people have been reporting getting amazing speed out of WoW on the XP partition and only decent speed on the OS X side. Yeah, my next computer is probably going to be a Mac.

I really should start turning net_graph off for these things. The warehouse interior is supposed to be much brighter. I've been having a really wierd issue where the lights in there work fine in my test map, but then fuck up when i compile the full map. it's flip flopped back and forth 2 or 3 times now and it's making me insane. The rest of the areas I've tried to divide into playable and nonplayable zones. The playable zones get nice overhead lighting while the others don't, hopefully ending up with the illusion of a dark night without makign people crank gamma. My overall feeling is that in this day and age if you're willing to put down $400 on a new graphics card, but can't pony up for a new monitor to replace those dim CRTs, you need to stop playing games. As for bluish tint lighting: no. I hate bluish tint lighting. It is not blue outside at night. I can prove this. Go outside at night. See, it's not blue. It's not that I want to piss on tradition, but blue "night" lighting is just on of those HL conventions I want to die.

Still working on Kerk, but I needed to play around with something completely different so I didn't go batty, and thought it was a good time to go back and play with Docks seeing as Brew was nice enough to entrust it to Mojo, Mike, and Me (and Joesmoe, but he isn't aruond and his named didn't match the alliteration I had going there). So I'm calling this Docks 2 because it's Docks but it isn't. I really wanted to stay as faithful as possible to the original level, but Docks had some flaws when it came to the realm of logic (I mean, come on, it was a river with no exit). Also, because of Half-Life/CS's persistent issues with water and gameplay, I had to make sure people weren't going to go muck around in the water, so that meant one of the main routes had to changed. Additionally, the sewer route has been scrapped and replaced with some modified layout bits that should help rebalance it. Overall, the main layout is left alone, but the surrounding architecture gets a major facelift. (the famous, how to make a vis blocking hallway is now a street). But since I changed some significant layout things, and because I'd feel like a prick calling this thing cs_docks, it's being called cs_docks2. These are shots from what I'm considering the first alpha. It's technically playable, but there are some lighting, clipping, and other rendering bugs that persist (including Source's pissy water). The new "back route" that used to be the water route. You now run behind some warehouses to get to the dock area. It leaves you vulnerable to sniper fire, but you can duck and avoid it to a degree. The CT spawn. I saw a picture of these building fronts in a magazine and liked them enough to put them in. Need to finish connecting the bridge in the background to the skybox. func_dustmotes is cool Standing between the two T buildings. Upstairs in one of the T buildings. Used to be crates and radios. T warehouse. Still tweaking those lights to get the ambient level correct. CT vantage point of the route from the first shot. skybox on that side needs to be redone. Valve made shitty skybox models. Still tweaking those env_lightglows since Valve seems incapable of allowing for settings to make it look correct. So if you've got suggestions, let me hear them. And if somebody want's to make an impassioned defense of why there needs to be a sewer route, feel free to make it. I'm not completely dismissive of the idea.