Project Orion

for Half-Life

26th January 2008

Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3

From the Read Me: “Orion is the facility that formally was known as Black Mesa. It started up again 3 years after the incident…”

Basic Details
  • Title: Project Orion
  • File Name: hl1-sp-project-orion.rar
  • Size : 2.70Mb
  • Author: Ilija Petrusic AKA Icewollf
  • Date Released: 02 January 2004
PlanetPhillip Note

A big thanks to Johny_BeOK & his Team over on Modifikace do hry Half-Life for supplying the file on a CD which he sent me a few years ago. It’s a great site and if you speak Czech then please visit it for all your HL needs. Thanks Johny!

Download currently unavailable.

Screenshots

Click on the thumbnails below to open a medium size image. WARNING: The screenshots may contain spoilers.

Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3
Reader Recommendations
Avoid It!
Think Twice
Maybe
Play It Later
Play It Now!

8 recommendations, average score: 3.38 (out of 5), standard deviation: 1.73 (what's that?)
Total Downloads

Please note: These statistics are valid from December 2010

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If you believe this release is missing important tags, please suggest them in a comment?
Jump to a review
Play It Now!Play It LaterPhillip says Play It!Avoid It!Think TwiceMaybe?Play It LaterMaybe?

23 Comments

  1. Ilija Petrusic
    Play It Now!

    Hey! been bustign my balsl to find this =Dall my stuff has dissapeared and I wanted to take alook at my old baby again =) so thank you!

  2. Ade

    care to explain that “Ugg”? Develop an opinion in more than 1 word? 😀
    I’ve dlded this some time ago and don’t know if I should play it or not

  3. AI
    Play It Later

    Just finnished this mod, played well with no problems! Could have more action tho, and the ending —> a cliffhanger! Too bad no next part! So this old man says 🙂

  4. Black_Fox

    Heh… I downloaded this mod many years ago, when I was completely unable with computers. Never played it though and should you ask, no, I had new hdd at least 4 times and don’t have it really anymore.
    The site is in Czech and if you’d like to know, what’s written in “ORION” section, it’s plain “Episode Project Orion is done. It’s here for download.”.
    Furthermore, some Czech sites indicated that the mod couldn’t be run at all and author never supplied final version.

  5. Phillip says Play It!

    Just a quick note. This was listed as a Lost and a little research revealed it was on my Filecloud server! Sorry for the confusion. I have now renamed it and also added it to my primary download server at FileFront.

    Basically it is a simple Black-Mesa style mission. The name on the credits is “TailGunner” but I am sure that it is the same person as “Icewolf”.

    The mod itself is quite fun to play but I found it a little dark, although the room where I played it was brightly lit, so maybe that made a difference.

    The controls have the option of Prone but I couldn’t seem to use it.

    There’s plenty of variety and the areas are nicely detailed. I actually had to cheat at one point. I use had because a fall from a duct always killed me because my health was too low. There was no way to back track and get more health, so I had to cheat. For me this is a design flaw.

    Negative Points
    – Too many ducts.
    – Too many ducts that break.
    – Not enough health.
    – Not enough combat.

    Positive Points
    – Plenty of alternative paths.
    – Some interesting layouts.
    – Nice detail in most areas.

    Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half Life 1, 2 and 3
    It’s well worth playing, especially since it hasn’t got the promotion of other mods. But it is not a classic. If you are craving a 15-minute HL1 fix, then this is it.

    5 Word Review

    Not another duct collapse!
    (What’s This? )

    Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half Life 1, 2 and 3

  6. Splatzone

    Wouldn’t duct collapses be understandable in a facility this old? 😉

    Dloading now…

  7. TheRipper

    It’s already listed on this site, under the name “orion’. Filesize is different, but it’s the same, i’m pretty sure.

  8. it’s already listed on this site, under the name “orion”. Filesize is different, but it’s the same, I’m pretty sure.

    You are right and I have merged the comments and removed the other one.

  9. Gilfrarry

    Are you sure it’s the same? I know WinRAR can be better than ZIP, but 2.7MB = 9.5MB?

  10. TheRipper

    I can’t look it up anymore, but I thougth the other one was 3.2. That’s not so much difference.
    Anyway, same author, same releasedate and I even saw the same typical blue walls in some of the screenshots.
    Yeah, it’s the same.

  11. Ade

    the 5 word review has only 4 words ..

  12. the 5 word review has only 4 words ..

    That’s becasue the idea is really 5 words or less, but I wanted to keep the image header simple.

  13. Naked-Headcrab

    lol screenshots are in software render mode… I had forgotten what it looked like. This certainly took me 9 years back (when I first played HL and didn’t have any 3D hardware) 🙂

    Sorry for going off topic, I just couldn’t help it 😉

    BTW, downloading this map rite now!

  14. Avoid It!

    Ugg…

    How does this help anyone decide to download this at all? Especially since every other comment has been decently positive, and therefore any bad is not self evident.

  15. shawn
    Think Twice

    There isn’t anything special about this mod, and since there’s no save feature, when I fell behind a ladder and got stuck, I could either start all over again, or stop playing. It was an easy choice…

  16. TheRipper

    and since there’s no save feature

    This is nonsense. I just gave it a try, and all saves work, menu and quick. It’s even got autosaves…
    Ther must be somthing wrong with your setup.

  17. Ezequielhl
    Maybe?

    I don’t know what thing this mappack use to load their maps, because when I played this, the load times didn’t exist REALLY. My character suddenly jumped, but a new map were loaded and I never saw “THOSE YELLOW LETTERS”.

    The mapping is very good in architecture, a pain for the small dose of action. And this never continued cliffhanger… just…

  18. Ade
    Play It Later

    The only place you can get stuck is behind that ladder, sometimes it loads through a jump and sometimes I see the “Loading..”, but that’s ok! The first sentences kept appearing – bit annoying. Nice gameplay, though, really enjoyed going through this mod, a little non linearity, a little variety in enemies, but no puzzles 😐 No story either but I didn’t feel like I needed one in such a short period of time. I haven’t had trouble with my health, you just have to be more precautious as you notice the lack of h-packs.
    It’s a nice fix and I’m looking fwd to playing the second part.

  19. Mel
    Maybe?

    OK as far as it went, looks like part one of an unfinished game.

  20. Gilfrarry

    This is a long story.

    Once upon a time there were two posts on PlanetPhillip. One was named Orion.

    Note the Basic Details from that post:

    * Title: Orion
    * File Name: orion.zip
    * Size : 3.34Mb
    * Author: Ilija Petrusic AKA Tailgunner
    * Date Released: 02 January 2004
    * Download: PlanetPhillip Filecloud Server

    The other post was named Project Orion.

    Here are its Basic Details:

    * Title: Project Orion
    * File Name: projectorion.zip
    * Size : 9.5Mb
    * Author: Icewollf
    * Date Released: 01 January 1990
    * Download: Unknown

    Since Project Orion was unavailable, I looked for it. The first place I looked was the author’s site, but it was unavailable. Then I tried the Internet Archive of the author’s site, which offered the same 10.6 MB file for download, but the download kept getting dropped at exactly one megabyte.

    I ran the incomplete executable anyway and managed to extract a few files, including the liblist.gam and two maps.

    Some searching took me to a Ten Four forum thread on lost Half-Life levels, where Project Orion and other levels were discussed. Over time I kept coming back to this thread, without success. This was in April 2007.

    Several months passed. Someone inquired about Project Orion. Phillip looked for it, found the 3.34 MB orion.zip from Orion (not Project Orion), repackaged it with a planetphillip.readme.txt, and uploaded it as a 2.70 MB hl1-sp-project-orion.rar under the Project Orion post, concluding that Tailgunner was the same person as Icewollf.

    Then TheRipper came to the conclusion that Orion and Project Orion were one and the same, according to this comment. Phillip agreed and merged the original two posts. On this same page I questioned whether there weren’t two mods, but he was sure and I wasn’t ready to prove otherwise. This was in January 2008.

    Some more months passed. I was looking for something else and came to this comment. It said that a Czech site had kindly uploaded one mod and would hopefully do the same for Project Orion. I wondered if they had done so, and if it could still be there. So it occurred to me to go to the link given for the one mod, and substitute Orion.exe for its filename in the link. It didn’t work, but orion.zip did, and it was 11.4 MB.

    This orion.zip turned out to have the same contents as the original Orion.exe from the author’s site, obtained via the Internet Archive. At least, ten files from the first megabyte that were available to be extracted from Orion.exe had the same md5 sum as their counterparts in orion.zip.

    This means that both mods have an orion.zip, adding to the confusion. The orion.zip for Orion is 3.34MB, and the orion.zip for Project Orion is 11.4 MB. The author of Orion is Ilija Petrusic, who is apparently Swedish, and the author of Project Orion is Icewollf, who is Czech. I have played both mods and can attest to their individuality.

  21. Looks like I’ve got a bit of work to do and separate them again. Thanks for your excellent diligence and hard work. I and PP readers certainly appreciate it.

  22. Mel

    So are we going to get Project Orion posted here for download? By that I mean the Icewollf version.

  23. Gifrarry

    You’re welcome.

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