Finished and pretty much enjoyed it all.

The weapons were great, my fav. was definitely the grenade singing "Merry Xmas". It had me constantly chuckling in the first 10 mins. Animations were overall clean, though sometimes too repetative/fast (helper elfs repeated the same 2-3 animations every 5 or so seconds, making them look pretty crappy)

I think some Santa taunts after killing the enemies would've worked ok. Something Duke Nukem in a red suit would say, perhaps? ;D

Mapping was solid throughout. Pretty much all areas looked convincing and had moderate detail.

Gameplay-wise - challenging. I think some of the changed weapons could've been introduced earlier. I didn't like the zombies having tons of HP, making you either waste tons of ammo, which isn't plentiful, or go for the frustratingly slow crowbar-kill.

Overall - a very nice Christmas mod. 5* and..

Merry Xmas!

"Couldn't load libary"
C:\Sierra\Half-Life\santasrevenge2\cl_dlls\client.dll"

Yes my HL exits after the first level. I installed this one on the Steam HL now.

Hmmm, its nice, but:

- Intro is too long. And when you die in the first room, you have to watch the entire intro all over again. Adding an autosave after the intro would help.

- Second map has very bad performance, it lags and the entire map is rendered. Did you compile with fast vis or something?

- Third map also has bad performance. Then HL crashed and i started all over again. Then HL crashed again on the third map, and i stopped playing.

Fix these issues and you'll get a higher rating.

+ Models, skins, weapons and sounds +++!

+ Mapping. It was decent, but overall very nice. I like the "giant toy soldiers" in the first room. Nicely mapped!

3 of 5 stars for now.

Video Review

Bottom Line

Despite it's flaws, Santa's Revenge 2 is still great fun to play. The concept is original and funny, it's executed well, making this mod a nice little time waste on the cold winter holidays.

Video Review

Bottom Line

This should not get as low a rating as I'm going to give it... But what can I do? I couldn't even get past map 4, but don't get me wrong. For a full mod made for the christmas season which was released on time - it's wonderful. I just really wish i could play it.

Video Review

Bottom Line

All in all, this is a nice gimmicky mod to play over the holiday season but its obvious bugs and glitches would make it a little intolerable throughout the rest of the year. However with a few minor updates this mod could quite easily become one of the more unique and entertaining games available for the dated Half-Life platform.

Guest Review

Upon playing this game a second time, I forget why i have this such a high rating when voting in the first place. Of course, this is a full mod, through and through, and at TWHL those are very rare. So initial kudos and bonus points are awarded for the mod format itself I guess. For starters, the difficulty select screen burned the shit out of my eyes with its bright yellow and red screen, and combined with me crying over the fact there was no Santa-training level, I had to take a nap for an hour or so to rest my eyes before continuing. The intro is nice the first time around. The lack of auto-saves made the second and third time watching the intro very aggravating. The helicopter's rear-rotor blade is busted, and i couldn't help but just stare at it while it twitched. Although the entire introduction camera scene was very well scripted, i couldn't help but to cringe every time i saw an error due to off-grid vertex. Each one of the 5 or so pillars had about 4 blinking lines on it that really took the polish off the first level, and many others to follow. In fact, i think this mod's biggest problem is the off-grid vertex issue. It's apparent in each level, and while it does not affect game-play at all, it's very hard on the eyes. The HUD was also a little bit of a problem for me. The brightness of the levels mixed in with the yellow of the display makes it very hard to see at times. The pistol cross-hair sprite had an error, and me being the ammo-conserving whore i am, used the aqua-glock throughout the gist of the game. Needless to say, it got on my nerves a bit. It took me a while to figure out that the SMG replacement wasan automatic water gun, as i thought for a moment it was a knock-off of the good-ol Bio-Rifle from the Unreal Tournament series. I thought the shotgun was a minigun, and i had absolutely no use for my christmas tree. Though it was somewhat useful to take down the minions fighting for you to get some extra ammo. I wish there was a grenade sprite-replacement for the HUD, but the bloodthirsty dodge vipersnarks more than made up for that. The fact that Hotdog took the time to replace the models is well worth the score. The only negative points here are the glitch in the shooting animation (Had me confused the first time, and rolling with laughter the second time), and the HUD. While hard to see at times, the HUD fit the theme of the mod well. Obnoxiously Christmas-y.Architecture was really the only factor that brings this mod down. As the levels were laid out well, the clipping errors due to off-grid vertices severely hurt the score here. Since the issue was so prominent throughout the entire mod, i can't really give a much higher score than this. There were some minor problems with maximum view distance, and also with the outside level (with the gas station and the hanging I-beams) there was a black... thing in the middle of the map which to me is a huge eyesore.Gameplay, on the other hand was entertaining the whole way through, the mind games were simple enough to conquer easily yet not too easy as to be fully obvious at first glance. I played on normal the first time through (easy the second, just to get a refresher) and i had a welcomed sense of difficulty. Plenty of action mixed in with beautifully scripted events and camera sequences make this one of the strongest factors to support this mod. The lighting was... good. There were no errors that i could see, but at the same time, there was nothing that really 'stood out from the crowd' so to say. Areas that needed to be well lit, were. And areas that needed to be darker worked well with the low light levels.As for ambience, I somewhat enjoyed the small voices of the kids and your elves. The grenade bounce sound was brilliant, and the songs included gave me a good chuckle. I guess i was looking for a bit more when it comes from the sound department. In my opinion some greater ambience could have been added in the rescue scene, and some machine sounds would be nice too. I cant quite remember the last time i heard a snowman snarl at me either. The snowman sounds did not fit the models, i was a wee bit disappointed.Texturing was all in all good. There was plenty of custom textures to go around, and they were all used very well. My only complaints come from the over-stretched transparent grate textures, and the elevator doors were not transparent. Yet they were used exactly how they were supposed to be implemented; to give a good sense of surrounding. And that they did.

Bottom Line

Overall, a very well put together mod. Everything from the self-install, to the splash screen, to the end credits were fit perfectly together. Definitely a must-play mod. Christmas season or not, give this one a go.

Review

One doesn't usually see plenty of bigger Christmas-special projects, mostly because the Spirit of Christmas Mapping comes late, mostly by mid-December, and it's usually impossible to create anything half-decent in such a short period of time. However, Hlife_Hotdog seems to be getting the aforementioned spirit somewhat sooner and has already managed to provide TWHL with solid Christmas mods two years in a row. Not only does the sequel to Santa's Revenge, Santa's Revenge 2: Xmas Meltdown pack your sleigh with gunpowder-filled snowballs, it also hands you an extra pair of mittens.Following the story - some evil kid arranged a whole kindergarten Wehrmacht against Santa (you) because someone didn't bother making presents for this Christmas. So before you know it - elves are being slaughtered, your Grotto's getting some extreme TNT-induced makeovers and worst of all - you're forced to finally get off your comfortable Santa's throne and haul some obnoxious arse. This is where you're introduced to the witty and creative replacements for weapons, items and monsters, plus a new Santa's interface. Ironically, even if default weapons are replaced with their toy counterparts, like a squirtgun for the 9mm Pistol and scale Dodge Viper models for Snarks, the kids (formerly human grunts) you fight bleed for real and don't seem like they're going to be OK once gibbed with the Christmas tree Crowbar replacement. To counter that, the fact that you're using toys as weapons is made pretty clear when it takes shitloads of ammo and patience to take out even the weakest enemies. I understand trying to make things challenging, though unless you've got a couple of "just-in-case" Santa sleighs stuffed with explosives parked behind the back, you'll most likely be spending 3 or more frustrating minutes Christmas tree-bashing or squirt-gunning those bloody steroid-stuffed snowman zombies. Adding to the frustration factor, the absolute lack of autosaves often forces you to replay the same hard-as-hell sections over and over again. Another amazingly annoying thing deteriorating the experience was the use of dense fog in large battle arenas with less cover. Fog, being just a client-side visual effect in Half-Life, only limits the player's view distance, leaving any other monsters with perfect, clear vision. In the park level, this results in being raped with every projectile imaginable from all four directions at once, while running around desperately frantically looking for who and from where is shooting at you. Impossible? More like to-hell-with-this-shit-hard.There were also some other annoying nitpicks, like unrealistic fall damage in the rooftop area, where a 3 meter fall kills you instantly, or the booby-trapped present placed in the barn outside the Grotto exploding in your face once aproached. Not leaving any kind of notice or warning (you could've gone ala The Citizen with a large "DO NOT TOUCH" sign) turns a trap with loads of lulz potential into just another reason to quickload. Surprisingly though, monsters were placed quite well throughout (with the exception of the park level), along with ammo and powerups, which would've made gameplay quite enjoyable if it only wasn't for the godlike strength of your enemies. I also enjoyed some parts, like the parachute sequence, swinging on huge metal support beams from building to building in the rooftops and of course the final boss encounter (that little bastard should've been armed with the Egon, or at least crowbar! ;> )Much like gameplay, architecture was, even if mostly quite diverse and clean, often lacking that "something" to make it really bloom. Santa's Grotto, for example, like any fairy tale-like imaginary place, lets the mapper leave his usual coherence or realism constraints behind and simply go nuts making up the craziest, most inventive and maybe even surreal environments for their respective made up occupants to prosper in (or not). However, even if having a rather unique style for its interior with red ribbon-like supports and trims, it was still a set of boring blocky grey concrete corridors, broken up by the occasional open area, often stuffed with crates. A bit of the usual details like pipes, gratings and random gadgets, plus some Christmas trees or lights (as seen in Santa's Revenge 1) would've spiced things up just right there. More areas suffer from similar problems, like the rooftops, which are, pretty much, plain concrete surfaces with a vent or two desperately trying to break them up.It's not all coal in your stockings with architecture, however. Even if the interior had its issues, the first room with Santa's throne was rather spectacular. With its superbly crafted large toy soldier statues, overall good detail and a cool destruction sequence in the end, it was really close to how the other areas should've ended up looking like. Adding to that, the Grotto exterior and surroundings, even if nearly unplayable with wpolies going as high as 3000 (thanks to the awesome idea of killing leaks by putting a skybox around the entire level), was also nicely built. Having quite nice (yet poorly optimized) scenery and decent detail, it probably was my second favorite area after the throne room. Another and, again, very laggy area, was the park. The canal looked very convincing thanks to awesome reflections, paths were nicely curved and detailed; Only thing I think it lacked architecture-wise was more height variation in terrain. Even with the huge r_speeds in that area, some extra hills and trenches for cover, if properly optimized, would've pretty much saved gameplay there and made the park much more believable and interesting to explore.Though it's ambience and lighting that were the weakest aspects of this mod. Ambience, even if not completely overlooked, was very lacking and, in most places, left out. Bland corridors were even more boring without a single ambient sound to at least somehow spice them up, outside areas, where ambience is usually the main thing making that place feel open and borderless, had either a single silent wind sound in the background, or no ambience at all. Some other key areas, like the throne room also suffered from this problem. It would've been fun to hear some more subtle Christmas-themed ambience aswell - that alone would've added a lot to the holiday atmosphere.As for lighting - there's not really much to say. Apart from the single half-decent-lit area, the park, where you couldn't see any of the lighting due to the dense fog, almost every other single room was lit with the usual plain boring yellow. Hell, even blue texlights lights emitted the same bloody color. Lighting usually saves average-looking boring rooms and makes them at least somehow more interesting. In this case, though, it just added to the dullness and deteriorated the Christmas atmosphere.Bad things aside, texturing was refreshingly solid throughout the mod. I found no serious issues and even if there were any minor alignment issues or scaled up faces, these were mostly compensated by a nice array of custom textures. They weren't anything too spectacular, yet did their job right and with all the other cool custom content, made Santa's Revenge 2 feel even fresher (add some motivational posters for the elves inside the Grotto next time! ^^ )

Bottom Line

Even if lacking in most areas, this is an awesome piece of work for a Christmas mod. With the hilarious new content and some of your patience, Santa's Revenge 2: Xmas Meltdown could probably be considered the best way of bringing a bit of Half-Life to the holidays.

Finally posted that MotM. ;>
Congrats!

Please somebody upload this mod to rapidshare,or another mirror,because i cant download from filefront,and send me link of the file to my e-mail maximka52@inbox.lv
Thanks!

Well, the link is dead. Author don't have this mod too, as he said, so can somebody upload this mod again? It is a pity that "MOTM Winner" mod not avaliable for download. I have long searched for, but it's not on any HL-website.

http://www.gamefront.com/files/17767256/santas%20revenge2_setup.exe

Grab it quickly, because it's really fun

its down

Enjoy:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/9t6uk950b1yh4c5/Santa'sRevenge2-XmasMeltdown-byHlife_hotdog.exe

Important!!!

If you play this mod on a modern computer, you should enter

fps_max 60

in the console. Otherwise, monsters will be turning super slowly because of a bug in Spirit (old versions of Half-Life's DLLs also have this bug).