Toronto as a Half-Life mod

City 7: Toronto Conflict is a Half-Life mod featuring several familiar Toronto landmarks, which allows you to realize your age-old fantasy of running around the Eaton Center, heavily armed, fighting bad guys and invaders.

City 7: Toronto Conflict, is an action packed Half-Life 2 mod with a variety of unique levels and game play. Explore what has become of City 7 in areas like Dundas square, Eaton Center , Mel Lastman square, St. Michael's Hospital and TTC system under the Combine rule. This version features Gordon Freeman as the main character, stuck in Toronto due to a teleporting accident in Kleiner's lab. Try to escape this war torn city by finding any type of teleporting technology and send him back to City 17.

Despite our small development team and short production time, we managed to get halfway to the CN tower and have already created 2-3 hours of fun and action packed game play! We want to finish this mod the way it was intended it to be, as a glimpse at what happen to a part of North American during the Combine invasion.

Link (Thanks, Ron!)

• [sparkdale]

  I really wish someone would make a driving game set in Toronto. The design of this city is practically begging for it.

• [JimXugle]

  I think the site has been boingboing’ed… anyone have a torrent or mirror?

• [k386]

  Shouldn’t this have been a mod for Resident Evil?

• [Cpt. Tim]

  this is the one reason i lament waiting for it on the 360. no mods.

  ah well. I never can afford a cutting edge computer for gaming. dropping 300 or so on a console every 5 years is more realistic for me.

• [yurei]

  Also, the Toronto mod features [stereotypically] friendlier and more polite aliens than the US variant.

• [MoistVonLipwig]

  This is fantastic, I can’t wait to play through this!

• [Brian Damage]

  This mod is really awesome. My wife and I laughed ourselves silly when we saw an newspaper dispenser with “LIES” graffitied over the front.

  Even if you don’t have Half Life 2 (which is required to play) you can enjoy the screenshots. Many are uncannily realistic, right down to the DWA (Designated Waiing Area) signs in the subway stations. Lucky owners of this great game can have the pleasure of blasting people in said stations.

  http://www.torontoconflict.com/media.htm

• [Hokkaido Hillbilly]

  This makes sense…I always sorta had an image of Gordon Freeman that looks suspiciously similar to Cory *grin*

• [Scixual]

  I have this dream of being able to do ths for any town or city — either in half-life or otherwise — as a sort of fundraising thing like the run of local-version Monopoly games you used to see.

  I, personally, would like a virtual version of my home town, that I could plug into different kinds of game scenarios, zombie invasion being what I would really like to play out.

  I would bet realtors could be behind such a project, too.

• [airshowfan]

  There is a great Half Life mod for Rio de Janeiro. There might be more than one, but the one I have seen takes place in the labyrinthine alleyways and buildings (and occasional open spaces, used (naturally) as soccer fields) of a slum on the side of the Corcovado mountain. The Christ statue looms overhead, and downhill is a view of Rio’s Lagoon and, a little beyond that, beaches including Ipanema. This captures both Rio’s stunning beauty and its sad poverty.

  Unlike the Toronto mod, the locations of the Rio mod are, however, semi-imaginary; while a real slum exists only two or three miles east along that mountain’s southern slope, the area where the mod seems to be located (as far as one can tell by the view from there) is not (yet) inhabited, and particularly steep.

  I love video game levels that take place in realistic representations of real locations. I remember a light-gun arcade game, about 10 years aho, where the user aimed a turret-mounted machine gun (which vibrated in a satisfying way) while being flown in an imaginary attack helicopter through very accurate representations of locations in Manhattan, including Times Square and Battery Park.

  Unfortunately, most video games set in real locations aim to capture only their look and feel, and maybe the specific features and locations of a handful of famous landmarks. I too wish that more people would make mods that would make even local residents appreciate how well their home areas are reproduced in-game. This is probably more realistic for parks, large buildings, and maybe a few square blocks’ worth of area, rather than a whole city. In a whole-city game you’d probably have to wander (or fly) around too much, making it harder to appreciate small details, but when your level is a couple of blocks, designers could put a lot of effort into small details.