Black Mesa

Post-Launch Review

Black Mesa

Developer: Black Mesa Modification Team

Released: September 14 2012

About

Black Mesa is a (near-) complete remake of Half-Life, originally released in November 1998. Black Mesa brings the aging game into the current iteration of the Source engine with upgraded graphics and tweaked gameplay. It follows the now-classic story of Gordon Freeman, a physicist working for the Black Mesa Research Facility, caught in the middle of a catastrophic dimensional rift and the military response to the event.

Modlight: Torchlight Respec & Textures

I just reviewed Torchlight, as you may have seen, so prepare for the awkwardly-named edition of Modlight: Torchlight!

Most of the review was written immediately after the final story boss and before the post-game content., so that's when I started poking around on the internet. Torchlight has a few achievements for installing mods. That's interesting and unusual. Even the games with the best mod support don't actually poke you and go "Hey. You should install some mods". So I looked into Torchlight mods, and found two that stood out to me.

The first is tiamat's Respec Mod, which allows you to - what else - redo your skill points. It's actually well thought out, and requires you to pay the respectable sum of 15,000 gold for a respec. That's a considerable amount of money, and means it's not something you'll do just for kicks or because you misplaced a single point.

Default graphics

The second is the Torchlight Texture Project, created by SorrySoldOut. This mod upgrades almost every texture in the game, adding detail and fixing a few issues. If you've been running Torchlight at full settings with no issues, it's definitely worth the install. Unless, of course, you prefer the more cartoony look.

With texture pack

Speaking of installing, it's quite easy to add a mod to Torchlight. All you have to do is navigate to C:/Users/(your user name)/AppData/Roaming/runic games/torchlight/mods and drop the folder right in there (the appdata folder is hidden by default, so you'll need to enable viewing hidden folders).

These are the two mods that caught my eye, but Altered Gamer hosts a list of their top 10 Torchlight mods (which is actually where I found these) which are worth checking out. Other notable mods include upgrading the merchants, more game content, and a ton of extra classes, all of which are pretty well balanced.

That concludes this issue of Modlight. Have fun!

Modlight: I Hate Mountains

I Hate Mountains is a custom Left 4 Dead 2 campaign created by the three-man French team of Nicolas, Marc, and Geoffroy. Of the custom campaigns I've played, this one is by far my favourite, with the highest level of quality and polish, some fantastic environments, and a surprise twist.

You can download I Hate Mountains from the official website or from the L4D blog.

Modlight: Finish your Guild Wars cartographer titles with Texmod

If you're a Guild Wars player who's working on your Hall of Monuments to unlock all the bonuses in Guild Wars 2, you might be looking to finish off your Cartographer titles. They're some of the most time-consuming titles to earn in the game... but what if it could be easier?

Texmod is a popular mod application. It works by overlaying textures to get the desired effect. With Guild Wars, one of the available options is to change the textures of your in-game map, making the unexplored fog a solid colour and therefore much easier to find.

I had done almost all of my Cartographer titles without Texmod, but nearing the end I found that there were just a few fractions of percentage points I'd missed here and there. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the unexplored areas on my map with the default fog, which is just a little blurry and is really hard to spot if you're looking for a tiny portion. With Texmod running, I realized that by scraping the walls on every map, I'd missed a few bits in the centre of some maps, and was able to quickly travel there and clear up the last bits of fog.

Some members of the community frown on using Texmod to get your Cartographer titles, but if you're up against that last 1% and you just can't find it, this is the tool for you.

Download Texmod here

Find instructions and download the Guild Wars Cartographer collection here

New Feature: Modlight

I'm announcing a new feature that will run occasionally! Hooray!

I call it Modlight. Mod + spotlight = modlight.

A Modlight post will highlight a specific mod for a game that is particularly awesome or helpful. I have two in mind right now, but I'll need more eventually. So if you use a mod that you find really awesome, let me know, and I'll see if I can feature it. I can't test mods for games I don't own, though, so keep that in mind.