Journal #6862

I just played a strange mod of half-life. Well, actually 2 strange mods. The first one is just a code change where all the barneys conspire to join up with soldiers and barney shoots your ass down as soon as you step out of sector C tram, so that was no fun.

The second one was more interesting; it was called Lv426. Available from filefront. In this mod you are part of the US Colonial Marines, sent to investigate a remote science station because the personnel there failed to respond for 24 hours. The story sounds cliche because I just made it up on the fly. There is no readme in the mod so I just made up the back story.

Anyway you and your idiot fellow marines venture foolishly into the temple. All of you are armed with m41a's, which I'm sure you've seen in plenty of other mods (azure sheep being the best example). Unfortunately your fellow soldiers have their m41a's on single shot mode, while you were smart enough to set yours on fully auto. And your fellow soldiers drop a sig handgun when they die, and their m41a's disappear for no explicit reason. (Read: no code changes in this mod.)

This is you and your marine squad regrouping in an ominous and dark space installation.

Moments later.

The entrance to the facility is now locked, and you are stuck in it with a bunch of Aliens. Watch out, because upon seeing you they will run up to you like a player model and attempt to sock you in the face. Keep running, but you will soon lose your way in this poorly lit facility. The aliens usually appear out of nowhere (monstermakers in front of you), in all directions and try to punch your lights out.

So what do you do? Well I really don't know. Scattered throughout the facility are buttons with unknown functions. Really. You have to wander all over this dim place pressing random buttons that you have no idea does what, and every once in a while aliens will ambush you a la monstermaker. It is kinda creepy at first though, but once you get bored and hopelessly lost, the novelty factor will drop dead quick. And when you run out of ammo, you too will drop dead quick.

This mod features two other maps that I didn't get to. One is tunnel, where you start out with ONLY EXPLOSIVES and traverse a dungeon filled with Aliens. You have ONLY EXPLOSIVES. So I ran around to avoid then and WOW at the end of the corridor there is an RPG. So I ran towards it and suddenly the floor collapsed and I got a face full of black abyss.

The other, names stadium2, should immediately ring bells for you. Take a look below.

I'm not even kidding, this map is called "stadium2". Can anyone guess where you've seen this before? Here's a hint, there's a map called "stadium3" in sven coop. So what shady past connections exist between this mod (Lv426) and the popular Sven Coop? More on this after the commercial.