I spent a lot of time as a teenager designing levels for Half-Life 1, and I’ve been uploading some old screenshots to Flickr recently.

These screenshots chart my progress as I learnt Half-Life’s map editor and engine, and show the gradually more complicated architecutre, lighting and texturing I created with each obsessive re-design.

This is most clearly demonstrated in the ever changing corridor from my aborted Sven Co-Op map, which starts looking like this:

And finishes looking like this:

There are many more horrible examples of arbitrary architecture below, and I’ve written a little about what I remember from each map. Also, as a treat: scans of scribbly ideas scribbled on crumpled paper.

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It’s tempting to pussyfoot around with weasel words such as ‘among’, ‘could be’ and ‘we said the same thing two issues ago, twice’, but no. Look at the screenshots. This is awe-inspiring, and not in a lazy, misapplied superlative kind of way; I mean that it causes mixed emotions of reverence, respect, dread and wonder, as inspired by great beauty.

Crysis is so beautiful, in fact, that when picking screenshots for this post I chose two that contain no enemies or explosions.

My review is now online.

I watched The Simpsons Movie and noticed a lot of repeated jokes, plot points and images from the long-running TV series. I’ve listed some of those similarities below, with appropriate screengrabs from series and film. Naturally, this means there are massive spoilers.

Homer pointing at the camera, calling everyone behind it suckers. But! He’s pointing at us, too! Dr. Hibbert does the same gag in 6×25 - Who Shot Mr. Burns?

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