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Let's Speculate! Half-Life 2 Lighting Zoo
The Lighting Zoo, otherwise known as ‘lightingzoo’, is a level included in the pack of development VMFs that was leaked with Half-Life 2 back in 2003. It’s one of the lesser interesting levels in the pack of levels, but we’ll be covering it anyway just to quickly get it out of the way. Obviously on this occasion I won’t be bothering to produce a video but expect a number of screenshots demonstrating the level.
The map is marked as being last modified on the 6th of May 2002 but it’s hard to be sure as to who the original author was but it was likely produced by someone within Valve who didn’t work primarily as a level designer, more likely the work of one of the programmers at Valve. We can pretty much conclude this as the map features incredibly simplistic geometry, though includes a few different sections that seem to test the capabilities of the lighting tool, VRAD, at the time; displacements, animated lights and normal maps are featured in the different sections of the level.
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Let's Speculate! Half-Life 2 WADs
This is somewhat of a disclaimer I must put forward here. I have a habit of finding little things, and then theorising about them for a considerable amount of time to people (much to their annoyance, I’m sure), but never actually sharing it or writing it down. I have a website specifically for this now, might as well use it. That said, some of my thoughts or ideas are very likely wrong, but I’d like to put forward some interesting thoughts and theories for people to consider. Don’t take my words and consider them a fact. Don’t take them and publish them as fact.
Anyway consider this the start of a new series!
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Game Graveyard and Patreon!
Credits don’t go to me, I’m not actually sure who originally produced this, but saw it on Twitter and thought it was fitting.
Moving on though, yes there will be new content soon. I’ve been buying some new equipment recently for recording and I’m preparing to invest my time (and money) pretty heavily into this. However, I’m unsure in where things are going to go and how I’ll do things, so prepare for a lot of experimentation (not that there hasn’t been any already).
Currently, the plan is to get recording equipment so that I can actually do analysis videos, where I go into greater detail into some of what you see in videos, but another thing I’ve been looking into is, well, essentially “Let’s Plays”. Now I know, how are LPs relevant to this website? Well as you know I recently started doing a playthrough of Prey, because I feel it’s somewhat underrated and thought while it’s good to cover games in their earlier forms, it’s also important that people are aware of what the final product looked like. I want to throw my voice into the mix because it gives me a chance to talk about certain aspects of the game that I’m aware might have changed or generally go into finer detail on certain matters.
I have actually already tried this in an additional Prey video, that’s yet to be made public, which also includes a web-cam view of myself, which could be pushing it a little, but I really need more feedback before I can decide on what works and what doesn’t. I’m not the most confident individual either, so trying to adapt myself is rather difficult but all round I think this would be a positive thing so long as I can make it both entertaining but more importantly, informative.
I have recently started a Patreon. So if anyone wants to, they can both support the content being produced here but also receive something of a reward in return. I’m not completely familiar with Patreon so this is rather new to me, but I can’t emphasize enough how much your support matters to this websites continuation and generally means to me.
While there’s a lot of information on the page regarding the work I do, essentially your support means I can put more work in towards the quality of content I deliver and time I can put into it.
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Eradicator's Origins
Today we’ll be covering a somewhat forgotten gem, called Eradicator, that was released back in 1996 to some varied reviews and almost complete overlook. A science-fiction first-person action game that took place in the future. Essentially, the game was slated to be Acclaim’s answer to the sudden popularity of the FPS genre that was occurring at the time, however, it ended up essentially flopping; either due to failure in marketing or heavy competition. It’s also worth mentioning that the game was released in the same year as both id Software’s Quake and 3D Realms’ Duke Nukem 3D, which essentially likely contributed to its poor performance.
With that history out of the way, however, I’m happy to throw up a bit of information about the game that was shared by one of the developers. This is directly from the emails that were shared, albeit cleaned up and cut a little bit just to ensure the information is shared as clearly as possible. Grab the popcorn folks!
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