Area 17

for Half-Life 2

18th July 2018

Fight your way through an unfinished and shockingly lit early map.

Remember, this is from 2004, so do not expect anything amazing.

Mappers were still getting to grips with how things worked and what was possible.

That said, this is still pretty basic and badly designed.

Basic Details
  • Title: Area 17
  • Filename: hl2-sp-area-17-beta.7z
  • Original Filename: area17beta.zip
  • Size: 775KB
  • Author: Mike01/Knicks0820
  • Date Released: 14 December 2004
Gauge Users

Download directly into Gauge [775KB]

You MUST have Gauge installed before using this link.

Download Options

Download to your HDD [775KB]
You can still use it with Gauge once you have downloaded it.

Manual Installation Instructions

If you require more help, please visit the Technical Help page.

  • Copy the area17.bsp file into your …\Steam\SteamApps\common\Half-Life 2\maps\ folder.
  • Launch Half-Life 2
  • Open the console and type map area17 and now press ENTER.
From the readme:

“Hope you enjoy….remember its not done, but being as I am new to this as I am would love your input, positive and negative. I recommend playing it on hard difficulty, medium seems too easy.”

  • Textures need work
  • Add proper ending
  • Add music

Videos

Nope, not going to be adding a video for this. Sorry.

Screenshots

WARNING: The screenshots contain spoilers.

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Reader Recommendations
Avoid It!
Think Twice
Maybe
Play It Later
Play It Now!

13 recommendations, average score: 1.54 (out of 5), standard deviation: 0.56 (what's that?)
Total Downloads
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Meta Review Data
Statistics based on 12 comment(s) with meta review data.

Installed:
Using Gauge: Users
Manually: 10 Users

Time Taken:
Average: 0 Hours, 9 Mins
Shortest: 0 Hours, 5 Mins by Hec
Longest: 0 Hours, 15 Mins by Roy
Total Time Played: 1 Hours, 53 Mins
If you believe this release is missing important tags, please suggest them in a comment?
Jump to a review
Maybe?Phillip says Avoid It!Avoid It!Think TwiceAvoid It!Avoid It!Avoid It!Avoid It!Avoid It!Think TwiceAvoid It!Maybe?Think Twice

15 Comments

  1. So for ten minutes of enjoable gameplay in a real bad design and texturing you can try it if you have nothing else to play…

  2. Mel
    Maybe?

    Very basic design typical of a first time map, However all mappers need to start somewhere.

  3. Phillip says Avoid It!

    No, just no.

    You have to put it into context and in 2004 this might have been quite fun but 1 year in gaming is the same as dog years!

    It’s a fun little shootfest but offers nothing particularly interesting. The final screenshot is one I took when I go out of the map.

    Play it at your own regret.

  4. AI

    Well Phillip, I still have it (among hundreds of others) in my archives!! Have to give it a try later after I hit the garage sales today!! You know us oldies like the old stuff (ha ha)

  5. Avoid It!

    2004. A very, very long time ago. Puts into perspective how long we’ve been playing this game.

    People were just bringing out their Hammers, chiseling and forming things that would eventually resemble maps.

    Later, we’d get good mods out of it. Coastline to Atmosphere, Riot Act, etc, etc.

    This is not a good mod. In fact, it is not a good map. It is a mess of textures, zombies in boxes, terrible lighting, and mat_specular going wild, causing robots to look like polished chrome.

    But everything has beginnings. Perhaps the author went on to make better maps. Maybe they fell into a ditch and were never seen again.

    Point is, everyone stars from dung when it comes to mapping. This is a good example of said dung.

    Don’t play this. Simply bask in those glorious images, remember ye’ olden days, and then forget it, because it’s garbage. Unfinished, poorly lit garbage.

  6. Roy
    Think Twice
    It was fun to look back to 2004.

    I’m glad we have come to where we are now.
    Play it just to be grateful for the newer maps.

    You can’t say the readme didn’t warn you.

  7. Unq
    Avoid It!

    Nope. It doesn’t matter if this was from 2004, it’s just poor all around.

    It’s basically another “let’s try everything in one map” thing – you get just about all the weapons (though I missed the grav gun till I backtracked to try to find the proper map ending, of which there is not one). But the combat is boring, all the enemies just stand there. The only challenge is the strider but unless you get caught out in the open, he’s also a sitting duck.

    Boring, not even worth my 6 minutes.

  8. Avoid It!

    Jesus, this reminds me how was my first days in Hammer. Huge rooms, same use of texture for everything, craziness and confusing. This really looks like a map made back when Half-Life 2 was a fresh thing to start mapping. A couple of inside rooms were fine as a look, but the rest, just boring and not much fun.

  9. Avoid It!

    I don’t have anything to say about this map other than this: [violent vomiting sound]

  10. Hec
    Avoid It!

    Gosh! This was absolutely terrible, almost feels like a prefab map in GMOD, and even in there in GMOD, you can still have some more fun than this one!

    I understand this was a very early mapping release. But is just freakin’ terrible.

    Avoid it.

  11. Avoid It!

    Listen to everyone else, avoid it. I thought I could play this and find something redeeming about this, but it is really bad. While the dedication is there, the map is just too poorly designed to even pity it. With in less than a minute or 2 of starting I got stuck in an area and had to noclip out. I thought maybe I’d keep playing but a lot of the stuff is just bullshit. Not worth playing at all. This map is from 2004, but I’m not going to forgive it for that. There are much better maps to play, play them instead.

  12. Think Twice

    This feels like the creator made a lot of different rooms to experiment with, and then decided that it would be fun to just mash them together in a way it can be called a “map”.
    Poor brushwork, texturing, combat… but I still kind of enjoyed it. It feels a bit weird saying this, but I found the weirdness of the map to have a funny kind of charm to it. I can’t really explain it.
    If you want to see something weird, you can play this. If you want something good then no.

  13. Avoid It!

    Yep. Someone made his first map long time ago, trying to do erything at onece. In the begginging I thought it will be horror map because of scary ambience and red lighting. However I stepped in the next room, and it was much brighter and less scary than previous room. The creator threw around all props, enemies and weapons he could find, and some things are changed (red barrels don’t ignite before detonating and they have bigger radius of explosion, for example).

    Man, I even accidentally got out of the bounds and spent several seconds running around the map.

    Overall, first try in mapping is not really lucky.

  14. Maybe?

    Go down once. Textures are just curves.

  15. Think Twice

    A very basic map with Combine and zombies to kill.

    I died once in this map, as the weapons provided at the beginning weren’t good to fight in range, but the rest of the map was simple enemy killing, nothing else really.

    Overall, a simple map where you just Run and Shoot, maybe even Think a bit when trying to kill the Strider at the end of the map.

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