What The Headcrab: Episode 008

16th March 2016

Howdy All. I’m a few days late with this episode but hopefully you will forgive me.

Plenty of news this podcast as well as a break from tradition.

One quick word of warning, I sometimes refer to things on the screen and if you just listen to the podcast it may seem strange. Sorry.

Also, I seem to say “Kinda” a LOT this episode, not sure why that is, again sorry.

So, let’s get started.

Pick of the Episode

This week’s pick is the From Earth. Features some amazing work and will sure excite many listeners/viewers. Here is the trailer:

Listen to the Podcast

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Let’s get started
  • From Earth – Steam Beta Release
    Long time Source modder Au Heppa has released a beta version of his much anticpated mod: From Earth. I haven’t played it but here is what I think happens. You play as a human who crash lands on a planet. You have two choices: try to communicate or fight. Communciation requires you to try to learn their language and fighting requires you to kill anything that stands in your way. Kinda reminds me of a joke slogan for the British army – “Meet interesting people and kill them!” I am curious to know how many people start off by trying to learn the language but end up going Rambo when it gets too hard. ANyway, I wish him well and hope it is very successful. Go check it out.
  • Raising the Bar: Suiting up
    So, Gordon has a new suit, well a concept art new suit. Please news of a stunstick. Kinda hope it’s a crowbar with a CP stunstick duct-taped upside down to it. That way he could do a spin and use the stun or crowbar proper. Laslty, there is a model of what look slike a flare gun. In addition there was a bunch of new media: Gordon’s New HEV Suit Concept, Stunstick Concept, Flaregun Remake, Xen Light, Arm Prototypes, Antlion Caves Blockout, Diamond Metal Floor, Brick. Check those out if you are interested.
  • Car-Poral Keys announce VAs and some screenshots.
    The truth is out! I’m the narrator for Car-Poral Keys weird, funky mod that puts you in the shoes of Jim who has had his keys stolen. This update mentions me and another voice actor called andywilson92, which means he was eithjer born in 92 or he is 92 years old. There’s also plenty of screenshots too.
  • Half-Rats: Parasomnia Demo next month!
    Not only is the demo annoucned but there are some cool images of a new enemy model and talk of a new weapons etc. As always, it’s written in Half-Rats’ style. In addition, there is news of the gattling gun, which sounds super fun but comes with limitations and finally an image of Cinderman, who is one of 14, yes 14 enemies in the final mod. Demo is due to be released on April 27th.
  • Abandon: The Town UI updates
    Bradley starts off with a plug for my audio Interview with him
  • and goes on to talk about changes to the Ui, specifically related to the regenerating helath and how the player receives information. There’s a short but clear video too. Good work Bradley, keep it up.

  • Legend of Gordon: Major Update
    A lot of people, including myself and eagerly looking forward to this mod. This udpate briefly talks about the Dynamic Health System, Fully Linked, Explorable World, Keys / Locked Doors – Most Puzzles and the Bare bones version of the Inventory system (not in video). To be honest, I haven’t watched the video becasue I hate seeing mods before I play them, but I know that not everybody feels like me and it’s a choice. So here is the video.

    Also remember to tune in to twitch every Monday – Friday 11 AM to 4 PM as he will be streaming mod development live! Link: https://www.twitch.tv/abominable37. One problem is that I don’t know what timezone that is.
  • Arctic Adventure: Update
    WOW, three years since the last update is quite a while. This update talks about some new features including random location of items like keycards, less linear gameplay, new soundtrack and lastly a demo is due soon. Have to admit this mod was new to me but I have started tracking it.
Released Mods

Breaking with tradition, I thought I would mention two big mods that were released recently.

  • Episode 3: The Closure
    Leon’s Opus finally got released and as expected to polar points of view. Bascially, it comes down to this: If you loved Leon’s previous work you will probably love this. However, if you prefer more tradtional Valve-style releases then you probably won’t. I say try it and I hope to play and stream it soon.
  • They Hunger Again
    This is a Source remake of a GoldSource classic. Current reviews aren’t that good but if you can spare the space, I suggest at least trying it.
Other Half-Life related YT Channels

This week I want to talk about the Bolloxed Gaming YouTube channel. The channel prioduce high-quality, no commentary playthroughs of the Half-Life games as well as lots of mods. Over the comning days, I will be embedding all the related videos into RTSL as well as creating a new TAG for the channel. If you can’t wait for that, head over to the channel and start watching the videos now. As a taster of what’s to come, checkout the Episode 3: The Closure video.

One video that you may find particualrly interesting is Half-Life: The Movie: The Half-Life Story told using the Black Mesa Source Mod and the Cinematic Mod with the original player models. In Full 1080p and Maximum Detail.

I will be featuring other YT channels that I will be partnering with in future What The Headcrab episodes.

Have I missed anything?

Finally, I scroll through ModDB’s list of articles and look for the HL or HL2 icon to guide me as to which piece of news is related to which engine. The problem is that some mods have their own icon and I might miss them, so please don’t hesitate to let me know of SP mods that could interest other users or me.

Well, that’s it for this episode. If I missed an update from further back than two weeks ago, sorry about that. I just can’t cover more than two weeks in each episode. Hopefully, from this point forward, I will create a new WTH episode every two weeks.

If you like what I am doing, help me create more and better content – please support me on Patreon.

Background music for the podcast is a PS2 Menu loop by Clamshaw: YouTube or Steam.

7 Comments

  1. Always love a bit of WTH. Thanks! 🙂

  2. This was released a few hours after I recorded the podcast/video (yesterday) so it didn’t make the show, but he is the third Q/A from Archie and Urby, makers of the long awaited mod The Core:

  3. watched a bit of “Half-Life: The Movie”.

    just reminded me of how much I hate “Cinematic Mod”.

    1. I think the Cinematic Mod rocks – apart from the player models – which is why in the movie I used the default ones. My edit is far from perfect but I’d like to think my effort wasn’t in vain! 🙂

      1. The problem is not your movie 🙂 and I think not many people have an issue with Cinematic Mod, but I absolutely hate it. I hate the new weapon models, the soundtrack, the character models, but thats the “obvious” stuff. I also don’t like some of the visual “improvements” they made to a lot of areas.
        It breaks the atmossphere, it doesnt feel natural or realistic anymore.

        And why the fuck are posters of half-naked women everywhere? The creator of that mod is just disgusting.

  4. Zekiran

    “From Earth” is… interesting so far, but still really, really buggy. Got stuck trying to climb something (it even said, ‘climb = space bar’ so… kinda figured you COULD climb there) and had to give up. Floating geometry and scenery, and such terrible grammar errors in the display panel information… But it’s an excellent start.

    The fact that your character *has a body* is wonderful. The screen FOV still seems… wrong, to me. It’s cranked to 90 but has the same sort of weirdly compressed feel that that one recently re-released mod has, and no in-game option to make the fov wider or change the aspect.

    Worth following its progress, but it’s very much beta if not late-alpha in my opinion.

  5. I’m very late to the party but I just recently realized podcasts are a good way of getting some entertainment while working in the office, so I’m getting into podcasts and just started listening to What The Headcrab. It’s great! I look forward to going back through all previous episodes!

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