Man, when’s the last time I did a game finds video? Back in January, to be exact. Well, after several months in the making, I finally got around to making the damn video a few days ago.
Boy oh boy, there’s a lot of stuff in there. A bunch of PlayStation games, cheap magazines, games from across the ocean, and undeniably my biggest game find yet. Give it a look and see what you guys think. Expect something more substantial later this week, maybe about that soundtrack I mentioned in the video.
One more thing: I will be at PAX Prime again this year. I might do a blog entry or two after the event, since I won’t be able to bring a computer with me to liveblog anything. It’ll be more fun this year since it’ll be four days long.
(If you’re viewing this from a place where you can’t watch videos, or you like handy dandy lists instead, there’s a list of everything I got under the “Read More” link below.) Continue reading…
I’m gonna be honest: I have a bad pack rat habit in my life. I often will buy things for the explicit purpose of blog material, no matter what it is. Games, plug and play devices, stuff like that. Controllers are no exception, I often tend to grab some oddball or promotional controllers, which was incredibly common in the 2000s during the PS2/Xbox/GameCube era.
I naturally saw this controller at a thrift store, and I couldn’t resist grabbing it. I guess you could say I pulled a Scorpion and grabbed it while saying “GET OVER HERE!” Okay, I didn’t actually do that, but humor me, will you?
Those analog sticks make Baraka look like he’s carrying balls on his hips.
This is a PlayStation 2 controller made by Nubytech to promote the then-new Mortal Kombat: Deception, the third installment of the more 3D era of Mortal Kombat, which took a few pages from its competitors like Virtua Fighter and added things like weapons for characters.
The 2000s-era Mortal Kombat games seem to be less fondly remembered than the original trilogy and the reboot era from Mortal Kombat 2011 onwards, which is a shame, because that’s when the series got really goofy. Loads of characters, the introduction of the Krypt for unlocking bonus goodies, even adding bonus games based of Puzzle Fighter and Mario Kart. I haven’t played them myself, but if there’s anything I can give Mortal Kombat credit for is having a glut of unlockable goodies.
Half-Life is one of my most favorite games of all time. It blended action, platforming and story perfectly to be one of the awesome shooters of 1998. But it wasn’t always that way.
Valve, back then a small development studio, made a press demo version of Half-Life that showed a drastically different version of the game: While the story and certain game elements was similar, almost all the levels and designs were different from what we got. In a sense, it felt a bit more like in line with Quake than the Half-Life we know and love.
I always liked Half-Life’s dithering effects in the software render. Can’t really explain why.
This version was originally slated for November 1997, but it missed the release date, causing Valve to delay the game and release it a year later with many significant changes to the final product, all for the better.
Getting a chance to play the Half-Life that never was is really a treat, which has many unfinished levels — some early versions of levels in the final game — as well as tech demos such as skeletal animation. You can shoot a robot and make it do that dancing baby animation that was popular in the late ’90s! Not only that, it has documentation about the game and Valve itself, a walkthrough of all the levels, even copies of Paint Shop Pro and WinZip for some reason…
Here’s me playing through one of the levels, The Security Complex. It’s one of the more complete levels of the game. I go through the stage area at least once, then show the solution as given in the walkthrough.
Thanks to reddit user jackaljayzer for uncovering this gem, who got it from a friend in Bellevue, Washington; and to Valve Time (now defunct) for revealing the leak. Further information about this prototype build can be found on The Cutting Room Floor, and it’s a nice amount of stuff there that compares this prototype to the final released game.
If somehow you are one of the few who have never played Half-Life, go buy the game on Steam already. There’s a reason I say it’s the best game of all time.
