I know that it's Friday and you're looking forward to a nice weekend and all but you need to stop what you are doing and pay attention. If you pre-ordered Portal 2 through Steam and have any of the indie game titles that are included in the Potato Sack deal, you can help get Portal 2 released early!

I know, I know, it's the weekend. You've beaten Splinter Cell Conviction and every other game that's been released over the past few weeks and you want to go back to Modern Warfare 2. I understand; we all feel that way. However, take notice of this free flash game.

Lighting up the Reddit gaming section like a Christmas tree on steroids a couple of days ago was Sydney Shark, a game where, well, you're a shark. But not just any shark; we're talking insanely powerful taking-blimps-and-making-yachts-explode shark. DOn't believe me? Check out the above screenshot and if that doesn't tickle your fancy then you simply aren't human.

Newgrounds: Sydney Shark

I think it is pretty easy to say that Half-Life 2 is one of the best games ever made. The Valve community knows this and has been making mods for it ever since the game came out in 2004.

However, of all the mods ever created I don't think anyone is prepared for this one. Community member Trase went out of his way to edit over 1300 sound effects present in the game. What did he replace them with? His own voice.

This is probably the funniest thing you'll see all weekend. Try to stifle your laughing my friend; it's not the end of the work day just yet.

Here's the link if you want to experience it yourself: http://tinyurl.com/lk3aeb

There comes a time in every gamer's life, usually during a bout of frustration, when they make the remark: "that's stupid, even I can make a better level than that!" I've said it, I'm sure you've said it, and I'm certain it is said by every eight-year old child on Xbox Live at least several times a night. For me though I've always pondered what I could do if I put my money where my mouth is and here is my first attempt at finding out if I can owe up to my words. When Left 4 Dead arrived back in November I found one of the most exciting combinations I've ever found in a game, a method that had been experimented with successfully through several mods over the years had finally found their place into a proper triple A title. My statement wasn't along the lines of "I can do better than that." No, it was "maybe I can make that."

This wasn't my first foray into creating levels. When I was seven-years old my father and I sat down with the recently released game Doom II and tried out a mod called "Doom Chicken." While it wasn't much in the way of a modification to the game itself (the Imps became giant chickens that threw eggs at you and the rocket launcher fired off explosive hens) it was my first experience with user-made content in a video game and I was intrigued. Shortly thereafter he and I went into the level editor and, based on my instructions, created a quick and dirty level in a matter of a few hours. While I enjoyed the difficult gauntlet we had created I didn't really delve into designing levels until a few years ago in high school I had experimented with the Unreal 2 engine. While it never panned out (to this day I HATE unreal scripting) I appreciated the concept behind the editor, having the player build space out of a completely filled world not unlike digging a tunnel out of a mountainside.

The first thing I learned when starting up the Hammer editor was that what I had learned years ago was completely turned on its head; instead of creating a level out of filled space I had to create everything out of an empty space and enclose it, not unlike a snowglobe. When I first started considering what I wanted to do with Hammer I thought about all the iconic locations seen throughout the lore of zombie films: farms, military bases, malls, prisons, all of which were taken. Dead Before Dawn, the campaign based on the Dawn of the Dead movie remake, was already well on the way and, as a beginner to Source editing, was far too ambitious a project for me to aspire for. Then, one particular foggy day back in early March a friend of mine sent me a ludicrously funny text message: "something's in the mist!" I rofled at first at the Steven King movie line and then the thought struck:

A supermarket. In all my very long hours of surfing the internet while at work not once had I read about a campaign for Left 4 Dead that involved a grocery store, one of the potentially best holdouts in the event of the zombie apocolypse. It was a simple, elegent idea that nobody had claimed as of yet so, here today I formally announce dibs.

Ladies and Gentlement, I give you Price Check.



That afternoon I went to the local HEB and started taking stock of what I'd be looking at (while getting groceries) and, while it seemed like a good idea at the time, something was very wrong to me. If I kept the level as a fully laidout grocery store the final product would not reflect the creepy nature of Left 4 Dead games, nor would they reflect good gameplay, versus or otherwise. Instead, I realized that a grocery store would serve as a proper evacuation site for the refugees. So the idea began to form: a former supermarket converted into an evacuation site somewhere near or in Riverside. Over the next couple of days I went to work with a couple sheets of graph-paper and started considering different pathes to approach and what the finale should ultimately be. Unfortunately, the Source SDK tools for L4D hadn't arrived just yet (I'd have to wait until the middle of May for that) so in the meantime I put it to the side and played a shit-load of versus over the course of the next eight weeks.

What you see before you is the result (so far) of six weeks of on/off work on my very first Source creation. Unfortunately I'm not prepared to show you the outside of the store today simply because I haven't worked on it. I've got a lot to learn between now and its release (3D Realms said it best when they said "when it's done") about triggers, displacements, lighting, and so much more. I did find a lot of help from the Valve Developer Community tutorials as well as those created by 3kliksphilip. Special thanks goes out to them for providing those tutorials so, if you are a member of the VDC or are Philip thank you.

As for the direction I want to take Price Check the answer is still under debate. I'd like to do a full campaign beyond this single finale but I don't think I have it in me to create it all by myself. While I'll be enlisting a friend of mine to help me to some basic texture work it seems that, right now, I'm the only one who can deliver level content. So, this is a call to the Source development community: if you are interested in creating a a full campaign please contact me at Slackerchan at hookedgamers dot com.

Thanks everyone for looking. Updates to come as, well, I get around to making them.