Update! Now with non-hideous video!
Sometimes, you just don’t need to think up a funny headline. In this cause, the subtitle does its own job. The sauce… OF DEATH!
If you don’t know the John Woo-inspired mod Action Half-Life, you should immediately go and read this. Once you done that and then finished lamenting that there aren’t more mods with the same kind of fun!fun!fun! ethos, you can then go and nose trepidatiously at the just-released sequel, which relocates the kung-fu, Max Payne leaps and strangely gentlemanly brutality in the Source engine.
It’s early days, with obvious compromises, very few official maps and some key features missing, but the rudiments of AHL’s delectable blend of stupidity and balance are there. I’m worried it’s not yet doing enough to warrant its own existence (i.e. that there should be this as well as AHL1), but hopefully the community will gradually build it into something special, rather than the crude, if entertaining, skeleton it currently is. Happily, however, it has these things:
- An introductory movie that made me funk-shuffle around my bedroom whilst air-punching and yelling “FUCK YES”.
- G-Man with a porn tash.
Oh, just go and play it, would you?
Can’t find much in the way of videos yet, bar this one, which I believe stems from some beta tester rather than the creators. The unnecessary ow-ow-ow soundtrack and hyper-editing doesn’t sell it very well, alas. Honestly, you probably shouldn’t even watch it. I’ll stick a better one in once I find one.
Horror-video removed, and replaced with a proper trailer. Don’t panic about the first 10 seconds – this isn’t a real Rick-Roll. We wouldn’t do that to you.
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Now if one isn’t forewarned, how many people will sit through the first 10 second rickroll part of the video? Whoever thought up that idea wasn’t very bright in my opinion.
It would’ve been funnier if the real trailer kept doing the “smoke and sparks” thing another couple of times. (Which, really, you only ought to do once or twice at most.)
Man, I was really looking forward to this a while ago, then I started to worry that it may never come out and it fell off my radar. I’ve never played AHL, but an article Quinns wrote for this very website caught my imagination in a big way. Kind of nervous that it won’t live up to my inflated expectations actually, and also that I might struggle to find decent servers. Still, a tentative huzzah for this!
Once upon a time, my favorite HL Mod was Action HL. When HL2 was released, the team announced they had no plans to release a new mod for HL2. It was a sad day on the internets. But years later, BEHOLD! Action Half-Life 2! And there was much rejoicing.
BTW, “The Sauce of Death” is the best mod subtitle ever conceived.
Turns out that the mod I had been following was actually Distraction Half-Life 2, the development of which is apparently stagnant but not dead. I vaguely remember being aware of a couple of potential AHL successors, but I guess I must have either found DHL2 more interesting than AHL2 or more likely to be released. Who knows what I was thinking!
So how do I download Action Half-Life? I googled the website and the links are dead. I remember playing it back in the day and having a ball. Can anyone help?
:edit: nevermind, I found it. After searching the forums I found this link here: http://www.ghgmapdepot.com/dc2/ahl_dc_rc2.exe
MetalCircus: This link http://www.ghgmapdepot.com/dc2/ahl_dc_rc2.exe was posted in the MoA forums. I haven’t tested the actual file yet, but the download link works.
AHL with Vehicles? Oh my!
I actually always preferred The Specialists to AHL – something about the way gun combat and aerobatics worked in TS I think, as well as the aesthetic differences – but I had many fun times in AHL anyway. Seeing as TS is never going to see the light of day on Source (and it’s a real shame), I may give this a try. I miss my gun-fu.
On the topic of recently released source mods… http://www.radiator.debacle.us/
Damn, you got me all excited. This just looks like a half baked HL2DM tweak =/.
@abhishek
The trailer does not only start with a rickroll it also was released in April 1st.
I don’t remember AHL so much for the gameplay. but for its maps. Thanks to the versatility old Halflife’s goldsrc engine, you could even load one mod’s maps in a completely different one. You couldn’t guarantee that everything would work perfectly, but I had a lot of fun on a non-serious TFC server playing the maps made by Hondo. Sure, you could do deathmatch on them, but about 90% of those maps were the elaborate secret sections.
I thought this was pretty damn lame. Very cheep feeling mod, bad gameplay, just bad bad bad.
@Heliocentric
@Dr. Gonzo
Fuck yes. The Opera was GREAT.
It would be nice to be able to even find out for myself if this was to my tastes, still keep getting an engine error just after getting past the funky intro. Do I have to have certain games installed or something? It’s just getting frustrating now.
Ok. AHL1 weapon models are ugly
I’m sure the game is fun, but that video was fairly dismal. Which makes me thankful that I didn’t see the previous one.
Looks like a bit of fun. Now if I just had the time…
I played the hell out of the original AHL, I think it was the first game that got me into a) The idea that an unofficial “mod” could be drastically different from the source game and b) That you can change the visual appearance of weapons.
AHL wasn’t AHL without Golden 1941 Colts with dragons on the grip. Or berrettas with a reload animation whereby you just THREW THE GUNS AWAY and pulled out new ones.
Team Last Man Standing was always my favourite mode, invariably because it always seemed to end up 1 on 1 at which point the call of “Kung Fu in the street?” would be made, and after the 5 minute battle royale it all comes down to two guys fighting it out.
Oh and throwing knives, those things were ace.
Still, these are memories of 10 years ago. Maybe one day someone will make a game that truly appreciates multiplayer gameplay like this. Maybe.
Crikey – unless my eyes deceive me they’ve gone a ripped a map out of The Hidden.
There’s there a mod you guys should check out.
http://www.hidden-source.com/
“Astley’s in the noose (hang loose kid)
Lift the lid on the crimes he did”
This all makes me want to see that original video posted.
And at Lu-Tze – I also have extremely fond memories. I don’t know if this new version would quite hold up in comparison.
Tom is right, Hidden-source is the one of the best mods out there, wonder if it will ever exit beta?
This was fun for about 5 minutes. The intro was amusing, the Wilhelm when people die made me chortle, and blasting suckers with the sawed-off was satisfying. The fact that it felt uncontrollable and that the map I tried was WAY too full of people to survive for more than about 8 seconds, not so much.
For those commenting on the use of an HS map, it’s all good – Boxy released a deathmatch version of Stalkyard a while ago, which is (hopefully) the version that appears in the vid.
Admittedly, his version is just a remake of the original HL map – so it’s all a bit ambiguous.
AHL was always incredibly limp to me. I’m hoping this improves on how weak and totally unthrilling AHL was.
Always preferred the Opera since it had a single distinct, and unified aesthetic, instead of Desperado meets Die Hard meets the Matrix.
the hidden-source is also a gmod game mode too.
Also i think map usage has more to do with what the server puts up.
Also this is worth a go, as AHL was (is?) awesome.
edit-wow, its just a 56mb file.
Finally got it working the other night, for awhile it was ok. Speed was nice, diving around was a bit of a laugh, but otherwise it felt quite “meh” to me. Certainly nothing like the epicness I was expecting after reading about the first AHL, but it is still quite new I suppose. Random weapons should be the only option in my opinion though, it does get silly when Handcannon spam occurs in a map with lots of tight corridors and corners.
I tried AHL2 for a bit with some friends a few days back, good and simple fun. There were only like four of us and we didn’t have really good maps but it was still fun for an hour or so.
waffles – ‘cept, it really isn’t, we’ve had endless issues with the guy who made the stalker gmod gametype nicking our content without asking permission.
It should say in the article that this isn’t a beta. Hell, i wouldnt even call it alpha yet.
In other words, obviously the game is not finished by far. I’m having a lot of fun at playing ahl2, but i can understand people feeling differently, just wait on the next release and give it another try, because there’s lots of new stuff coming up. Right now it’s pretty much a port from ahl1 (the weapons etc. are).
The maps are (almost) all HL2DM (so is stalkyard, which is not a map from the Hidden).
O. M. G. ! ! !
after Duke 4’s death this made my life bright again!
it is an early beta, but its almost as fun as AHL