Valve Community

Halflife2.net features information about all Valve titles, as well as the largest Valve forum community outside of Steam. It is a good resource for news and general information about the games, and the community can answer most Half-Life related question. The site is hosted and supported by Valve themselves.

Half-Life Creations provides a professional atmosphere for third party developers. Forums, downloads and even hosting for modifications are availble on this friendly site.

Mine-Dog.net is an established group of gamers who enjoy playing all steam games together (and some non-steam games as well). They also enjoy making comics, movies, and all other forums of media. They currently run three servers that change games monthly. All are welcome to join.

Previous Design:

Netday is dedicated to custom maps of high quality only. Maps are added regularly (at least one per week). It also covers mods like Dystopia, Portal Prelude and JailBreak. The map reviews are both in English and in French. It is advert free and features direct download to all files.

Half-Wit 2 is packed with tutorials, guides and other useful bits of information to help anyone creating custom content for the Source Engine. There is plenty of good stuff here and well worth checking out.

Left 4 Dead 411 looks like the perfect place to start if you are new to the game. It contains plenty of help for new players. Don’t think that if you are a veteran you won’t enjoy the site though, there’s more information than a horde of zombies can digest!

Mod DB is the largest website dedicated to supporting independent development of games, including mods, indie games, and user generated game content.

Planet Half-Life is the daddy of them all. It’s been online longer than most and is generally updated daily.

SteamPowered is the home of Steam, a digital distribution platform. The website offers visitors the ability to buy and download games, interactive with other Steam users. There are always special offers and weekend specials. The site also contains support forums, stats and everything else a users needs to know about Steam! It’s also available in 17 other languages besides English.

The Whole Half-Life AKA TWHL is first and foremost a community of mappers and modders. It has very active forums and plenty of tutorials. There are also a lot of tutorials for various aspects of modding. In addition to regular mapping competitions there is also a Map Vault, which contains both finished maps and a lot of WIP as well.

TF2 Maps is a community mapping site based around an active forum. It offers map downloads, tutorials, servers, developer blogs and user galleries.

The Snarkpit has been online since 2001, making it one of the longest running websites that covers Valve’s games. It has had a number of redesigns over the years and always adds new features. It’s focus is maps and mods for a wide variety of games and mods. The site has an active forum and plenty of downloads. Many of the articles are quite short but they are still a good read.