There is some spiteful drama in the Half-Life modding scene this week. The developers of a heavily criticised mod for Half-Life 2 are intentionally blocking a small number of YouTubers from playing that mod, using Steam IDs to effectively blacklist and ban specific people from running it. Instead of launching the game as expected, these players will see the first-person shooter crash, alongside an error message that reads: "STOP talking SH1T about us". This is an act of revenge for previous criticism of the mod, say the affected videofolks, who are described in the mod's code as "anticitizens".
]]>Half-Life 2 just got a small update, mostly to fix a long-running music bug. But hiding in the patch notes is an apology of sorts, a nod to that most tenacious of bunnyhopper: the Half-Life 2 speedrunner. It seems the recent 20th anniversary update for the classic first-person shooter messed with some beginner speedrun strategies by introducing an invisible wall to a big sewer pipe. Valve have now corrected that, removing the offending blocker and restoring order to the universe. Well, almost.
]]>Half-Life 2 just turned 20-years-old, and to celebrate Valve updated the game with some new features. They also produced a documetary in which several of its development team look back on their work on the game and its episodic expansions - including the never-released Episode 3.
The documentary includes in-progress footage of the episode in action for the first time, and it shows an ice gun and a new liquid enemy type.
]]>Half-Life 2 just turned 20 years old, and to celebrate Valve have released an update for their classic first-person shooter. In brief: they've recorded developer commentary; they've added Steam Workshop support; Episodes One and Two are now part of the package; and there are some bug fixes and new graphics options.
Grab it before the end of the weekend (November 18th at 6pm GMT) and it's also free to keep on Steam.
]]>As Hamlet requested of Horatio, it is time to absent myself from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw my breath in pain to tell you that the Half-Life 3 speculators are at it again. Over the weekend, the discovery of a mystery Valve project called "White Sands" on a voice actor's portfolio has set tongues and fingers wagging about potential Half-Life news in the offing.
]]>Louis Gossett Jr., who made history as the first Black man to win an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor and had a prolific, successful career across film, television and stage - as well as voicing the friendly Vortigaunt aliens in Half-Life 2 and its follow-up Episode One - has died.
]]>Nvidia are making an early start on their Gamescom announcements, which include the reveal of Half-Life 2 RTX. This incoming mod for the seminal 2004 FPS will, in the style of Portal with RTX, rejig the original game with modern technical goodies like ray tracing, updated environmental details, and Nvidia Reflex support. DLSS will also be on hand to absorb the inevitably mahoosive performance hit from bouncing all those rays around, and that includes DLSS 3, provided you have a compatible graphics card.
It’s being developed by a collective of experienced HL2 modders, Orbifold Studios, without direct input from Valve. No release date yet, as Half-Life 2 RTX – or to use its full name, Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project – is still in the early stages. There is a teaser trailer, though.
]]>"We don't go to Ravenholm…" Half-Life 2's sixth chapter heading warns, and when you arrive at the outskirts of this abandoned mining town, you immediately see why. This headcrab and zombie-infested cess pit is an absolute horror show right from the off. Moans and screeches assault your ears from every nook and cranny of this dark murder hole, and if the hoarse crow calls and suspiciously high number of propane barrels weren't enough to put you off, the bloodied torsos lodged against its log cabin walls by deep set saw blades certainly will. Every fibre of your being is telling you to get the hell out of this place, and that surely, the Combine forces chasing you down here can't be worse than what's in front of you.
But I'd also add an addendum to that heading that goes something like this: "We don't go to Ravenholm, and definitely not with just a gravity gun." This is a place that demands you to have as much firepower as you can possibly muster, such are the monstrosities that lie in wait here. But what did baby Katharine decide to do when she was playing it alone on her terrible university laptop in the dead of night back in 2010? She decided to have a go at that old Zombie Chopper achievement for no good reason whatsoever. And what followed was even more horrifying than Ravenholm had any right to be.
]]>Civil Protection officers are shorter than I thought they’d be. Don’t get me wrong, I'm very much a Short King myself, but I assumed the gas mask-wearing enforcers of City 17 would be more vertically intimidating. As I defiantly refuse to pick up litter in Half-Life 2’s opening sequence, I find the approaching officer and his raised electric baton to be weirdly adorable. Until he hits me, of course. The resulting crack gives me such a fright that I fling my arms out and smack my hand against the corner of a bookcase.
This has been my experience of playing the first few hours of Half-Life 2’s excellent fan-made VR mod, a completely free add-on that transforms Valve’s 2004 masterpiece into a full virtual reality experience. Under my direct control, Gordon Freeman is less a time-displaced MIT graduate with a penchant for murder and instead a gawking tourist who’s more interested in staring at canal architecture than liberating humanity. I spend the majority of my time leaning in really close to walls and muttering, “That’s interesting,” before a leaping headcrab shocks me so severely that I damage some more furniture and scare the cat.
]]>If you own Half-Life 2 but never bothered with its freebie tech demo, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, do give it a whirl. Its showcase of HDR lighting might have lost the "Huh, nice" factor it had in 2005, but it’s still a satisfying slice of punchy HL2 combat, with a nod to the original Half-Life that Valve regretted not making in the main game. I know this because Valve told me, via Lost Coast's other innovation: its developer commentary.
I love these things, these spinning speech bubbles inflated with knowledge straight from the FPS coalface. So do Valve, judging by how dev commentary has appeared (in identical, node-activatable form) in most of their games since. They’re interesting and illuminating, don’t interfere with the game unless the player wants them to, and help build design literacy. Why, then, don’t more games offer commentary as well?
]]>In the almost 20 years since Half-Life 2 refined what first-person shooters could be, it’s been modded into just about every form you can imagine. From complete virtual reality conversions and real-time strategy games to fan-made remasters impressive enough to earn a thumb-up from Valve, there seems to be no limit to what Half-Life has been, is and could be.
]]>Last time, you decided that fighting your double is better than optional challenges giving rewards upfront. I am an impartial observer here but oops oh no I have accidentally copy/pasted a remark from commenter Oli Baba, who said "Rewards upfront is one of the coolest mechanics to grace gaming and seems to be losing only because so few people have come across it." Whoops, I really must fix those hotkeys. Next, I ask you to choose between cooly saying nothing, or being told how cool you are. What's better: a silent protagonist, or combat style ratings?
]]>The Source VR Mod Team have been faithfully modding the Half-Life games into virtual reality - an excellent way to relive Valve's classic shooters. The team modded Half-Life 2 last year and followed it up with a mod for Half-Life 2: Episode One a couple of weeks ago. They’re now back with Half-Life 2: VR Mod - Episode Two, coming to Steam later today.
]]>Back in January, the makers behind the excellent Half-Life 2 VR mod announced they were moving on to making a virtual reality goggle version of Half-Life 2: Episode One - and we now know it will be arriving on Steam later today. What's more, we also have a release date for their VR mod of Episode Two. That will come next month on April 6th, according to its Steam page.
]]>In the latest edition of Ask RPS, our new mailbag feature where RPS supporters pose us questions that we then answer in public posts for everyone to enjoy, we're turning our gaze to that loved and loathed staple of the video gaming landscape: achievements. Ah, achievements. Never mind if they're good or bad. Today, we're remembering the terrible things we've done to actually get them.
The question comes courtesy of Fachewachewa, who asked: What's the worst thing you've done for an achievement? Or more generally, a time you were focused on a specific goal in a game, reached it (or gave up), and after, looked back and thought, "Why did I do that?"
Why, indeed. Come and find out which achievements have spawned our biggest gaming regrets, and why not tell us about your own gaming follies in the comments? We can all wallow in our foolishness together.
]]>“I was deranged,” says Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw of his decision to publish the plot of Episode 3 as fanfiction. “I was living on an island, totally cut off from my friends and creative community of the last couple decades, I was completely out of touch and had nobody to talk me out of it. It just seemed like a fun thing to do… until I did it.”
Laidlaw first discovered that community in the mid 90s, in the office of Valve, where Gabe Newell and team were already hard at work on Half-Life. “I’d seen bits and pieces of the levels they were working on, but as soon as I heard the name, I just got this amazing buzz,” Laidlaw says. “I could see the whole world they were aiming at somehow, and I felt it was a collective vision. This is one reason it’s so weird to me when people try to attribute authorship to me that I’ve never felt. It was all there when I got there, in embryo.”
]]>Time to dust off your headset and motion controllers, because a free VR version of Half-Life 2: Episode One is coming to Steam. Created by Half-Life 2: VR Mod’s SourceVR Mod Team, Episode One is the first of Valve’s episodic adventures to get the virtual reality overhaul treatment. It’s planned to follow up with Episode Two at an unannounced, but at a later date. You can take a gander at Half-Life 2: VR Mod - Episode One in full flow below, without wearing the fancy digital helmet.
]]>If you go down to the woods today, you're in for a big surprise. Spoilers: the surprise is an ambush from Combine soldiers and antlions, sent to welcome you after your helicopter crashes in Half-Life 2 mod Evacuation. There are zombies, too. Maybe today was not the best day to go down to the woods.
]]>The problem with game of the year lists, if your feet are suitably submerged in the PC Gaming swamp, is that they don't tend to highlight anything you won't have already heard about. That's less true for ModDB's Mod of the Year Awards, which can shine a light on experiences that may have slipped under your radar.
This year's publicly voted for crop (as with most year's crops) was heavy on mods for old-school shooters, though mostly not too old-school for me to skip them. Second place was won by impressive S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call Of Pripyat overhaul Anomaly, while first place went to Half-Life 2 mod Entropy: Zero 2. Check 'em out below, along with the runner ups.
]]>Sometimes, I like to daydream about what games could have been like if they’d taken another direction during development. Raising The Bar: Redux is exactly that, a reimagining of Half-Life 2 as though Valve never dropped their original concepts for the sci-fi shooter sequel. The next instalment in the modding project to bring that abandoned game to life, Division 2, is releasing soon. You can watch the fairly hefty trailer for Raising The Bar: Redux: Division 2 below.
]]>Half-Life 2 was the first game I ever played in VR. Back in the primordial days of 2013, I was lucky enough to get my ungainly sausage-mitts on an Oculus Developer's Kit – the prototype headset that eventually led to the Oculus Rift. Understandably given the name, there were not games for the developers kit outside of a few incredibly basic demos. But there was Half-Life 2, for which Valve had implemented a hacky VR mode that you could activate with some console tomfoolery.
]]>Half-Life: Alyx demonstrated that Valve's first-person shooter series could work in virtual reality, but who knows when Valve will release another one. Thankfully some modders have stepped in to fill the void. There's now a publicly playable beta of Half-Life 2: VR Mod available on Steam that makes the nearly 20-year-old shooter playable with a headset and motion controllers.
]]>For several weeks, a Nier: Automata player has caused intrigue and excitement by posting mysterious images and videos from an area no one had seen before. Was it a secret area? An unfinished area? A hoax? Viral marketing? A mod? If it was a mod, it was far more complex than any so far. Turns out, that's because a group of fans have secretly been making their own mod tools, and plan to release them soon. In the meantime, I've enjoyed pranksters memeing on the mystery by creating secret churches in other games, including Half-Life 2 and Super Mario 64.
]]>Welcome back to the second edition of The RPS Time Capsule, a monthly feature in which the RPS Treehouse gathers round a small tiny shoebox to stick their favourite, bestest best games into from a specific year to preserve until the end of time. The first time capsule we dropkicked into space was all about the best games from 2010. This time, we're excavating the best games from 2004. Which games will make the cut, and which ones will be consigned to the all-consuming digital super bin? Find out below.
]]>A fan-made Half-Life 2 remaster could be heading to Steam. The "Half-Life 2: Remastered Collection" was spotted by data mining site SteamDB last year, but at the time, it was flagged as “not Valve related”. However, according to another, more recent leak from Tyler McVicker, the mod and a half has now been sanctioned by Valve, and will be coming to Steam “soon”. But what is it?
]]>FPS games are a classic PC gaming staple, and whether you've been playing them since the 90s or started your journey more recently with the boom in battle royales, there are plenty to choose from when it comes to the all-time greats. To help you narrow down what to play next, we've created this list of the best FPS games to play right now, from single-player epics to team-based shooters you can play with mates. Heck, some don't even necessarily have guns in them at all, and you may find the odd boomerang or bow in here too.
]]>If you're not familiar with Noclip (the website, not the documentaries), I have a treat for you. Coded and maintained by creator "Jasper", Noclip.website contains versions of game levels that you can fly around in 3D to take a closer peek at. The site features a heck of a lot of Nintendo games (and some Dark Souls), but Jasper has also shared a bit of toying with Half-Life 2's levels. They've recently stitched together (almost) all of HL2's levels to do a bit of a flythrough showing off how they look all lined up in space together. Surprisingly decent, it turns out.
]]>The Oxford English dictionary describes a bug as: "a sort of computer oops". It is the result of errant coding, mismatched texture, wonky physics or (sometimes) a briefcase. Developers must fight bugs day and night to safeguard the digital realms we call our playgrounds. Sometimes they lose that battle and a bug comes stomping ravenously into our game, ready to upset us. But sometimes that bug is not an annoyance or a game-breaker, but instead the funniest thing to ever happen. Here are 9 of the best bugs in PC gaming.
]]>Way back in 2007, Alec Meer (RPS in peace) played a promising RTS mod for Half-life 2. "It's a ton of fun to see the familiar in such a different and well-considered format," he said. "But it's very, very early, with a lot of work to go."
And a whole lot of work it was - 13 years of it. But over the weekend, Lambda Wars finally launched in full, inviting players to explore the world of Half-life 2 from a new perspective (that is: a strategic top-down one).
]]>Jingle that pointless metal money over here, little human. You need a place to put all that ridiculous cash, and I know just the thing. Vending machines. They are like regular shops except imagine your Mars bar didn't leave the shop assistant's hand and you had to slap their arm to loosen it free and afterwards they just smiled at you as if nothing was amiss with vacant eyes like two pilot lights and a tin voice like someone speaking through an office intercom which suddenly erupts with high decibel hatred: "WELCOME TO THE CIRCUS OF VALUE".
Here are the 9 best vending machines in PC games. Have a good day.
]]>Many of you are by now bathing in twinkling neon ravelights and swooning into the metal arms of Cyberpunk 2077's humourless unhunks, who stalk the streets of Night City like animatronic pizza restaurant mascots gone feral. That is fine. There are worse places to find oneself in the labyrinthine hell of video games. Places such as these. Here are 9 neighbourhoods you wouldn't want to bring up your children in.
]]>Ultrawide gaming monitors can seem excessive compared to regular 16:9 gaming screens, especially when their demanding resolutions often require powerful and expensive graphics cards to make the most of them. Once you try one, though, there's no going back. I've been a big fan of ultrawide gaming monitors for years now, as their extra screen space not only makes them great for juggling multiple desktop windows, but supported PC games also look uttery fantastic on them - and to prove it, I've put together this list of the best ultrawide games on PC.
]]>All dogs go to heaven, we have heard it said. But what about videogame dogs? By the virtue of their non-existence you may suspect they are refused entry. However, after contemplating the issue for some time, our finest minds in the listicle archives have concluded that, yes, even videogame dogs go to heaven. What a relief. Here are the 10 goodest boys in PC games, all approved for divine ascendence.
]]>"It'll be easy," I thought to myself, when it was suggested someone do a nice, timely little post on the new-ish Steam Points system, and the various new goodies on offer through it. "Sure, no problem," I said, when Matt refused to write it because he thought Steam Points were "pointless", and I was the only other writer on the call with Graham. Matt was being negative, I figured, and I'd show him the error of his ways with my happy-go-lucky, anything-goes, good times attitude. I'd breeze onto the Steam store, have a browse of what points-purchasable things were on offer, and do a quickie piece highlighting some of the most chuckleworthy.
Well, turns out Matt was right, and I was not.
]]>Since the moment Half-Life: Alyx launched in VR, folks have been trying to detach it from its headset requirements. To be fair, I get it - that the first Half-Life game in a decade would be restricted to expensive tech felt a little demoralising. But this weekend, one modder brought that dream closer to reality by quietly releasing Pancake Base, a mod that aims to make Alyx play just like its older siblings by giving our leading lady the sturdy, first-person arms of Half-Life 2's Gordon Freeman.
]]>Hard to imagine worse things to eat while in VR. Do you really want sticky fingers clutching your index controllers, melon juice splashing over your expensive electronics? It's probably for the best, then, that the one watermelon in Half-Life: Alyx is impossible to find in normal play - a sweet, tantalising snack tucked away only for those brave enough to break out the cheats.
]]>If Black Mesa actually getting finished left you lost without a fan-made refresh of an old Half-Life to cheer on, rejoice: the new hotness is bringing Half-Life 2 into Half-Life: Alyx. Several modders are already showing off their progress in bringing Gordon's adventure to Alyx's shiny new VR game, though it's all hella far from finished. Hey, we all need something to believe in. Come check out these two projects.
]]>It's taken 13 years, but we finally have a new Half-Life game. It may not be the long-awaited Half-Life 3, but as you've probably seen from our Half-Life: Alyx review, Valve's first foray into virtual reality shows they're a developer that are still very much at the top of their game. But Half-Life: Alyx isn't just the work of a talented team of developers. It's a game that's ultimately been shaped by the people who have played it - the hundreds, if not thousands of playtesters who helped Valve turn their most famous FPS game into a VR sensation.
To find out more about how Half-Life: Alyx came into being, I sat down with Valve's Robin Walker and Jim Hughes a week before the game's big release day. We talk about everything from revisiting the Half-Life series and the challenges of bringing it to virtual reality, to what this means for Half-Life 3 as well as just whose idea was it to have headcrabs jumping directly at your face. Some of the answers you'll have seen appear on the site over the past week, such as how playtesters became obsessed with collecting every last thing in sight to everyone assuming they were playing as Gordon Freeman until Alyx was finally given a voice, but there's plenty more to discover here as we lay out our chat with Robin and Jim in full. Enjoy.
]]>Half-Life: Alyx is out today and, as you'd hoped, it is good. Graham-certified good, in RPS's Half-Life Alyx review. For all its goodness, Alyx is not officially Half-Life 3, which Valve still have not made. There are a few primary reasons that the fabled "3" hasn't made an appearance, Valve have now explained. Chief among them, they just weren't happy with what they came up with.
]]>It has come to my attention that some people have not played the Half-Life games, to which I can only say: mate, I think you might really like it. Valve will soon return to the series after thirteen years with Half-Life: Alyx in March, and ahead of that they're inviting everyone to catch up on the story so far. From now until the launch of Alyx, the Half-Life games are free for everyone to play in full on Steam. You know, some of these really are quite good.
]]>I love a spin-off. Angel? Great stuff! Count Duckula? The Better Call Saul of cartoons. Kourtney and Khloé Take Miami? Take me, I’m yours! I could go on and on cutting-and-pasting from this Wikipedia page, but I’ll get to the point. Games also have spin-offs. Often they’ll be forgotten about. Sometimes they’re even disowned. On a few occasions, they’ll take on a life of their own and exist apart from the game that spawned them, never calling, never visiting, only sending a multipack Christmas card. Below are a few stories of surprising spin-offs. The 2D Half-Life 2, the Fortnite that failed, the single-player Counter-Strike that no-one asked for, and more.
]]>Valve today formally announced Half-Life: Alyx, a "full-length" game exclusively for VR. Half-Life is returning after 12 years, though Gordon Freeman seemingly is not and this isn't Half-Life 3. Set between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2, this one stars future sidekick Alyx Vance in the years before Gordo's return when she and her dad were building the resistance. And yes, this really is only for VR. Come watch the announcement trailer.
]]>The nicest thing I can say about Terminator: Resistance is that if a Terminator were sent back in time to wipe out its code, the timeline of gaming in general would almost certainly proceed unchanged. Confused by the apparent failure, Skynet would keep on sending Arnies back to delete it, unaware that the job was already done, and that its agents were just piling up awkwardly in the offices of developer Teyon. The killer AI would squander all its resources on needlessly ferrying metal strongmen into the past, spiral into logistical collapse, and leave humanity to be declared the winners by default. Hooray - Terminator: Resistance saved us all.
That's about it, however. Although I started out with a mind to write a Wot I Think about it, the truth is there’s barely any Wot to Think about in Resistance. Everything it does has existed in games since the advent of the mouse, and its particular format was perfected 15 years ago with Half-Life 2. They're remarkably similar in a lot of ways, but where Half-Life 2 offers everything with pace and precision, Terminator: Resistance is about as lively as that eye-ball Arnie scrapes out of his head in the first movie. As such, this isn't so much Wot I Think, but Wot Might Have Been: a glimpse into the alternate timelines where Terminator: Resistance was something fresh and fascinating.
]]>An enterprising thief allegedly burgled Valve's Bellevue office last June, making off with a prop (I assume) minigun and an estimated $40,000 (£32k) worth of games and equipment. The intruder shoved the goods into a wheelie bin and lugged to his car across the street.
There will be no jokes about this grave matter.
]]>Oof, imagine not blinking for half a decade. My eyes shiver at the thought. But this is what the NPCs of Half-Life 2 have been suffering. The dry eye epidemic was first reported to Valve's GitHub repo back in 2014 and since then it turns out only a select few have felt the joy of smashing their eyelids shut. But after almost five long years, City 17's tortured citizens can finally blink again, thanks to a small official update.
]]>Those of you chained to the churning wheel of the internet might have seen this facial recognition algorithm thingo doing the rounds. It's called ImageNet Roulette, and it's basically a website where you feed in a photo of your human face and see what the cybergods of our terrible future make of you. But it's probably not safe to show the neurohive your real face. So we showed it 13 pictures of videogame characters instead, to see if the machine lords of the net realm can tell who they are and what they are all about. The short answer: not really, but sometimes. The neural net, it turns out, is a dangerous idiot.
]]>In Vectorpark’s Sandcastles, you build fantastic towers and watch the waves erase your work every 10 seconds. It’s a very direct metaphor for the global climate crisis that threatens to flood coastal cities and exacerbate natural disasters. Sandcastles confronts us with our totally predictable watery doom, but we also find fun and expression in our totally foreseeable destruction. When the planet dies, at least we’ll be entertained.
Before you commit to starving and drowning, you should probably understand how and why it’ll happen. To imagine this nightmarish hellworld, readers can flip through climate fiction novels (“cli-fi”) and movie-goers can watch a big unprofitable climate disaster blockbuster every few years. But us mouse-clickers, we obviously don’t read books or watch movies. Instead, we play with climate. Behold, the climate crisis game.
]]>Half-Life 2 is nearly fifteen years old now, and despite Valve's sequel plans seemingly fizzling out, it doesn't look a day over ten thanks to the efforts of modders. Chances are that Half-Life 2 and its expansions have been gathering dust on your Steam account for years now, so here's a quick refresher -- mostly focused on the past five years -- on what's available, single player-wise. Want to turbo-charge the original game, or send Gordon Freeman on a whole new adventure? We've got you covered both ways, plus a trio of Silent Hill-inspired spookfests. Below, a hand-picked basket of goodies, and a crowbar to open it.
]]>"Toss a toilet at your friend today!", goes the Steam blurb. That does rather capture the spirit of Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, doesn't it?
]]>I’m not sure anyone at Respawn has properly busted their ass on the curb. It hurts. The last time I cracked my rear off the concrete in a moment of skating hubris, I was limping for days. Fortunately for the fifty million folks flying around in Apex Legends, a billowing cushion of air has turned what should be an embarrassing accident into the most compelling movement skill in years. There are, uh, a few battle royale games. And each one has had to find its identity to stand out. PUBG has its impossibly large open fields and tense sniper standoffs. Fortnite requires you be a Minecraft building savant to change the level around you during battle. In Apex Legends, though? It’s all about that need for speed.
]]>A calamitous crossing of worlds has occurred in Two Point Hospital, the spiritual successor to Bullfrog's Theme Hospital, with Half-Life headcrabs glomping onto heads and all manner of decorative doodads from Sega PC games scattering around hospitals. If you've not yet played the wacky hospital management sim, hey, you're invited to try the whole thing for free this weekend on Steam. The trial weekend has just started, so hop to it. Well, don't hop if you're suffering from Hurty Leg, Premature Mummification, Night Fever, Lazy Bones, or Mucky Feet, in which case the doctor will see you now.
]]>Then the bus EXPLODED. Hello, this is the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, and we are here to talk about the best game openings and intros. Whether they are cold opens or slow burns, we love a good first impression.
]]>Ah, the non-player character. Stoic endurer of all our sadistic whims. It’s time the monsters on the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, made tribute to these humble little robots, whether they’re annoying companions, side characters, or disembodied human heads. Let’s talk about some of our favourites.
]]>A proper playable demo of Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition is coming next week, containing the RPG's first chapter, following the recent benchmark tool. A demo! In this day and age! Bless their hearts. Square Enix have talked a lot about wanting to do the PC version right, mods and all, and they do seem to be going for it. They're even teaming up with iconic PC chap Gordon Freeman, adding the Half-Life hero's HEV suit, glasses, and crowbar to FFXV's Steam version. Well, he's not using them, is he?
]]>There are few actors who have imbued a game character with such an emotional depth as Robert Guillaume's voice work for Half-Life 2's Eli Vance. The father of Alyx, and of course the man behind Benson in Soap, died last night after suffering with prostate cancer, aged 89.
]]>The Orange Box is one of the strangest quirks of gaming history. Never before had a developer released three brand new, entirely separate games at the same time in one package, and thanks to digital distribution, it probably won't happen again. What makes The Orange Box truly remarkable though is that it contained two of the most-anticipated games of 2007, and what proved to be the biggest surprise hit of the year (some might argue ever).
The company was Valve and the games were Half Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal.
]]>The lesson here is "never go to sleep." All sorts of things happen while people sleep. Cats go on adventures, presidents threaten nuclear war and, well, ex-Valve writers post thinly-disguised plot summaries of the unreleased and, so far as best guesses go, long-cancelled Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Long time Half-Life scribe, the excellent Marc Laidlaw (who left Valve last year), casually tossed out a link to his website last night, which led to a short story about Gertie Fremont, Alex Vaunt and their climactic battle against evil alien invaders the Disparate. (The site's having a wobble, but the page is archived right here).
While that might sound like satirical tomfoolery, the actual story very much sounds like how the final chapter of Half-Life 3 could have played out. It involves time-travelling cruise liners, resurrected overlords, the heart of the Combine and the fate of one Doctor Gordon Freeman.
This is really happening.
]]>So committed is third-party Half-Life remake Black Mesa [official site] to emulation of its much vaunted inspiration that it has now fully embraced ValveTime. Black Mesa was first released as a free mod in 2012, followed by a spit'n'polished paid version two years ago, but still with the notorious jump'n'fail alien world section from Half Life's final act missing. Plan was to rethink rather than merely remake Xen, in a planned act of historical revisionism to make people think Half-Life was brillo all the way through. (Note: Half-Life was brillo all the way through).
Last Autumn, the team declared the Gordon would finally be bouncing his away across fleshy coral oddities once away this summer. Well, no - there's been a delay. The good news is, they are now showing off Xen's great outdoors for the first time, as well as revealing a few changes planned for Black Mesa as a whole.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
I know what you’re looking for. You’re looking for a game that let’s you be a janitor in a school riddled with drug dealers and class clowns. But also a game that will let you be a cop fighting robbers. But also a game where you are a soldier in World War 3. But also a game in which you are a prison guard keeping rowdy inmates in check. But also a game where you can be a footballer. But also--
]]>Happy 20th birthday, Valve! Yesterday. Happy 20th yesterday. Sorry, I only just saw the Facebook notification. On August 24th, 1996, ex-Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington made a beautiful baby who was mighty eye-opening.
In the dreamy game of "What if...?" one curious hypothetical is: what if Valve never existed? There can't be many companies who've had nearly as much impact. Steam (eventually) revolutionised digital distribution, changing the entire landscape of PC gaming. Half-Life was seminal; its mod scene was legendary. That'd be plenty, but Valve have made a load of other really good video games too.
]]>You might have noticed all your friends' avatars and profile pictures turning into comic book drawings or impressionistic paintings over the last few weeks. That's because of Prisma, a photo editing app for iOS and Android that let's you apply a couple of dozen filters to images you feed it. The app goes further than simply messing with the hue like Instagram does, using a process similar to Google Deep Dream to warp and twist photographs - without shoving fucked up dogs in every corner.
I spent last night feeding it game screenshots, to find out what No Man's Sky, Half-Life 2, SimCity and more would look like if their artists abandoned realism.
]]>I've just finished Mirror's Edge Catalyst, a first-person parkour game about Faith Connors and a scrappy band of outlaw runners and hackers who deliver secret packages under the noses of an oppressive corporate government. By rights you should root for these underdogs. If only they weren't all dicks.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Gearbox's Barney-starring add-on is the black sheep of the Half-Life family, although at the time I never encountered any reason why that should be the case. My teenage tastes were perhaps less discerning then, but more importantly any return to Black Mesa was irresistible. I wanted new monsters and new guns, everything that a young'un wants from a follow-up to their favourite shooter, and I also had a vain hope that maybe I'd get to shoot that creepy suit-guy in the face and rescue Gordon.
]]>A fan-made, semi-official follow-up to Opposing Force, the Half-Life expansion Gearbox made, is now out. Prospekt [official site] continues telling Half-Life-y events from the perspective of marine Adrian Shephard, who's still chasing after Gordon Freeman. This time he's helping Gordo, though, causing trouble out of sight for the Combine during HL2's Nova Prospekt section and onwards. It's the work of fan Richard Seabrook, and Valve have given him the all-clear to sell it. This can only be good news for my dream of Valve endorsing my career as a writer of erotic Dog/turret fanfic.
]]>We live in complex times. When I was a youngster, it was perfectly reasonable to buy a game simply because it had more monsters than the other games. Playing through shooters, RPGs and platformers alike, I'd be tempted to give up when I reached the point where no new enemy types were appearing. The very idea of a game with only one type of enemy, no matter how intelligent and believable, was poison. Give me all of your mutants, demons and aliens, I cried, give them to me now.
Here are a few of my favourites, ranging from the first-person shooters of my teenage years to the surreal horrors of my childhood.
]]>While you wait for Half-Life 3, your skin will weather and crumble and you'll become so aware of how much time you've wasted praying for a sequel to a shooting game that you'll suffer an existential crisis and move to the Himalayas to spend your days building windfarms out of sheep skeletons. Before that happens, you might get to play Prospekt [official site], a fan-made Half-Life 2 campaign which picks up the abandoned story of Half-Life: Opposing Force protagonist Adrian Shepherd - and has been given Valve's blessing to be sold on Steam next month.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Okay, now we're nearly 300 deep into these recommendations we're clearly getting a little obscure, a little desperate, but it's still possible that a few people will have played this oddity. Half-Life 2 came out in 2004, but as there's been no Half-Life 3 in the eleven years since one can only assume it didn't sell well.
]]>"Laughter is the best medicine," say people who are about to discover laughter actually makes a broken nose worse. Laughter's pretty okay, though, as are other emotions - and creative mediums can help stimulate them. Valve have rolled out the red carpet (it smells rusty?) for the year's finest Source Filmmaker machinima, little films mostly starring Valve characters, declaring which are the bestest best so you too can easily experience such human emotions as Action, Comedy, Drama, Short, and Extended.
]]>An envelope arrived in the post this morning. Thick, stuffed with books. Diaries, in fact. Someone has sent me Gordon Freeman's diaries from the last eight years. I don't really know what to do about this. I mean, this is obviously big news, but this is also someone's private life. But what if it was Gordon himself who sent them? What if he wants the... the misery therein to be exposed?
I've decided on a compromise. I'm going to publish some extracts, picked almost at random from the lot. If Freeman wants them taken down, he can get in touch and we'll honour that right away.
]]>I have just booted up Half-Line Miami [official site] - a mashup of Hotline Miami and Half-Life as created by student Thomas Kole.
As someone who has never really played Half-Life 2 or Hotline Miami (I did about one level of Hotline Miami at a demo booth one time and apparently own it on this here PC - who knew? As for the Half-Life games, I played the original until a bit where you have to climb into a ceiling vent which you reach by dragging a box over. I'd killed something directly below the vent and their corpse became an immovable object so I couldn't put the box in the right place to climb up. After trying all the solutions I could think of I gave up rather than restart at my last save which was ages away. I tried the second game as part of the Orange Box on XBox 360 and got as far as Water Hazard.) I feel well placed to explain Half-Line Miami.
]]>Level 28! No, the other kind of level. The type that you run around in, shooting people or jumping on their heads and that sort of thing. Adam, Alec, Alice and Graham gather to discuss their favourite levels and/or maps from across the vast length of PC gaming, including selections from Deus Ex, Call of Duty and Quake III. Someone even makes a case for Xen from Half-Life, and means it.
]]>There is a peculiar irony to the impression people have of gaming. When “videogames” are lazily portrayed in the wider world, they inevitably show a soldier being shot through a gun scope. Hell, even within the highest enclave walls, people are wont to dismiss the poor taste of others by snarking, “They’d probably like it if it had a gun floating at the bottom of the screen.” The first-person shooter is the most emblematic genre of gaming, and yet it’s now the most under-served, under-developed, and rarest of mainstream releases. There are barely any new non-indie FPS games. And it’s all Half-Life’s fault.
]]>Today in News You Should Probably Be Glad You Never Heard About At The Time Because You're Already Disappointed Enough And This Would've Been Frustrating And Yeah I Guess You Would've Written A Lot Of Annoyed Comments On The Internet And TBH Neither You Nor I Want That But Boy, What If This Had Happened: Deus Ex director Warren Spector and his (now-closed) studio Junction Point were at one point working on a Half-Life game.
The mystery game would've been a Half-Life 2 episode separate from Valve's own core episodes, introducing a new physics-y magnet gun. But it was not to be, and Junction Point went on to focus on Epic Mickey instead.
]]>It’s over ten years since Half-Life 2 was released. The other day I found myself arguing that there still hadn’t been a first-person shooter released that was better. Then wondered if I was talking out of my hat. In an effort to learn whether Half-Life 2 is as great – nay, as perfect – as the version in my head, I’ve replayed it, and realised there’s so much I’d forgotten.
]]>Zapping Combine soldiers with the supercharged gravity gun was a right lark, a fine moment in Half-Life 2. Today I've been larking around with a different type of turbo gravity gun in a new mod, and I think I prefer it. See, it lets me 'rocketjump.'
HL2 mod Transmissions: Element 120 [official site] is a short singleplayer mod introducing a new zapgun. It blasts balls of concussive force that send enemies and physics objects flying (and its levels are heavy on blastable props) and, of course, you. Look down, jump then blast a ball, and go sailing through the air like a beautiful murderous butterfly.
]]>Oho, 'Half-Life 2: Update' is an extremely cheeky name for a mod. Write it on the internet and a few thousand ears will immediately prick up. "Is more Half-Life? Means Half-Life 3? Check file structure! One file will have a 3 in its name! Is Half-Life 3! Rabble rabble rabble!" So no, this is not an official Half-Life 2 update, but it has got the nod for a free standalone Steam release tomorrow.
Designed to take fuller advantage of what more recent updates to the Source engine can do, this apparently final version of the community-made mod includes graphical updates and 'countless' bug fixes, plus a new fan commentary mode. You're probably going to want it.
]]>The leaked Half-Life 2 beta is an old, old story - and how it happened, and what happened next was documented masterfully by RPS chum Simon Parking a few years back - but a recent fan compilation of all the characters in it who never turned up in the finished article is fascinating. This is the Half-Life 2 that never was, and yet, to some extent, it does exist after all.
]]>Way back when RPS was a wee bairn, Alec gurgled and waved his flabby babyfists at Half-Life 2: Wars, a mod turning Valve's FPS into a Company of Heroes-ish RTS. Pistol squads facing off against headcrab zombies, breaking out RPGs to take down Combine gunships, and all that. Well, RPS has grown a lot since then, as has Alec, and so has HL2: Wars too. Having renamed itself Lambda Wars (it tried Spike but the other mods at school were merciless), it's matured over the years and is now available on Steam as a standalone game free for all. You don't even need to own Half-Life.
]]>In almost every strategy, management or sim game I play, I will immediately turn off the music which comes with the game in favour of my own. That means that Steam Music Player sounds like a good idea to me even if I long ago abandoned mp3s in favour of streaming. The built-in functionality, which lets you browse your music library and control playback from in-game using the Steam overlay, has just left beta after its initial announcement back in February.
To celebrate, Valve have made the soundtracks for some of their games freely available to those who own the associated games, including Half-Life, Half-Life 2 and its Episodes, Portal, Portal 2, and the Dota 2 documentary Free to Play.
]]>I'm three columns into this series of Oculus Rift round-ups, and it's telling that so far I haven't covered anything that would fit the formalist description of a game. No, I'm not getting involved in anyone's tiresome war about Proteus or Gone Home, but sticking to a more universal whipping boy - the first-gen Oculus' issues with readable text, usable HUDs and motion sickness. Clearly VR still being the wild west plays a major role in keeping devs from making large-scale games for it, as does there being a limited install base for now, but the real problem is getting any of this stuff past experiment status. Let's look at some of the games which try to regardless.
]]>Every dog has its day, but can the same be said of mods? For every celebrated success story there are twice as many polished, lovingly crafted amateur works that never found the audience they deserve. NeoTokyo is one such example: a Half-Life 2 mod set in a near future Tokyo inspired by Ghost In The Shell. It had lush, detailed maps, a soundtrack of "brooding cyberpunk electronica" (Spotify, Bandcamp) that one listener (Alice) called "redonc", and combat mechanics that one player (me) called "tops guns."
Five years after its original release, NeoTokyo is now available as a standalone install via Steam. It's still free and mostly unchanged since its last major update in January 2013, but hopefully this brings a new audience to the game. Perhaps every mod does have its day. Trailer below.
]]>Consider this your daily dose of nice. Artist Joey Spiotto, aka Joebot, draws films and videogames as the covers of children's books. His game work includes imagined covers for Half-Life 2 (above, in part), Skyrim, BioShock, Portal, Mass Effect and more.
]]>It's only taken 600 days and 14 people, but Half-Life 2 has finally been completed in under 1 hour and 28 minutes. The speedrun I've embedded below is the product of Source Runs team, and it reduces Valve's opus to a dramatic, comedic relay of astonishing keyboard gymnastics. Each player passes off their best run through to the next, completing the game as a team. There are 200 segments covered in the same time it would take to watch Paranormal Activity. In fact, some might say what you're about to see is parano - [*snip* We'll have none of that - segue Ed].
]]>I hate Adam Foster, creator of last decade's rapturously-received Half-Life 2 mod series MINERVA (not to be confused with BioShock 2: Minerva's Den) and more recently a Valve employee. I hate him not because he is talented, not because he works at a cool place and not because I have a pathological distaste for people called 'Adam.' (Smith, you're fired). I hate him because today he has made me feel SO OLD.
One of the first long-form pieces I ever wrote for RPS was an interview with Mr Foster about his excellent, thoughtful mod, and its fine accomplishments in level design and mood. That was in 2007. Now it is 2013. Six years later. And I am posting about MINERVA again. He now works at Valve, and meanwhile I'm still typing words into the same CMS, but older, grimmer, fatter. At least I've changed my chair twice since then. Something Foster has also done is repackage and spit'n'polish his mod for a well-deserved re-release on Steam today.
]]>With Black Mesa Source somehow now actually released, maybe we need a new impossible mod dream to dream. How about this Jurassic Park-themed mod for Half-Life 2, now six years in the making without any danger of issuing a release date? That's how PC gaming rolls.
It does have some great footage to show off, though. Clever girl.
]]>I probably need to leap back into Garry's Mod. For about a year, it was one of my go-to games/game-like things. If I was feeling bored, I'd find the most elaborate ways possible to pit a single, pistol-armed human NPC against hundreds of languidly slithering legless zombies and cackle until my mental health was severely in question. Eventually, though, I squeezed all the grim carnage I could from even the juiciest of scenarios, so it stopped being my time-waster of choice. But now, it sounds like Garry's wonderful toybox - in much the same fashion as an infinitely multiplying army of single-frightened-human-hungry Ant Lions - has expanded quite a lot. And more's on the way. Kinect support, for instance, is right around the corner, and Garry's released a video of how exactly it'll work. Flail your arms wildly at the break until something happens. Or just click on it.
]]>Haha. Yeah, Garry knows what to do. I've posted videos of his Kinect experiments below, and you can see exactly why the infamously aberrant Half-Life 2 mod actually needs Kinect support by watching those. Readers with memories will recall that we talked to Garry about his plans for the mod earlier in the year.
The Kinect support will apparently arrive "this week or next".
]]>Half-Life is back. Back in Black Mesa, the fan-made, Source-powered remake that's been years in the making. It was never going to happen, and then suddenly it did. After all that, is it a polished recreation of Valve's beloved shooter, or an awkward perversion? I'll be waiting for you, in the word chamber.
]]>I have the most terrible guilt about gazumping Jim's sterling Sunday Papers, but I do so with signficant news. SIGNIFICANT. So significant that I'm attempting to post this from my phone while on the train. Will it work? Will you ever see these words? Such a vague, mysterious situation draws certain parallels with the subject of this post - the fabled, long-delayed, oft-accused of non-corporeal status Half-Life 1 fan remake Black Mesa Source. Which, would you Adam & Eve it, now has a release date.
]]>"It was never meant to be a big deal. I was just fucking about!" says Garry's Mod creator Garry Newman. His innovative physics-based mod for Half-Life 2 turned out to be a remarkably big deal, not least by being a forerunner in iterative and community focused design, and a game that's perennially in Steam's top twenty game stats. It's an exercise in giving gamers tools and no direction, one of the few games that makes just messing about a core goal. Its strength is a flexibility that makes it a platform for people to make things like comics, maps, weapons, even gamemodes. It might have grown by enabling sexually suggestive poses of Valve's stoic game characters, but six years on there's so more to GMod than just fucking about. Here's how it got there.
]]>UPDATE: Guess what! Gamescom are now saying that Half-Life 3 and Dragon Age 3's appearances on the list was "a mistake", according to Eurogamer. Although they won't say how that mistake happened. Also, Lamda Generation heard from Valve (a rare treat) saying they weren't showing any games this year.
Another Half-Life 3 confirmation rumour? Why not. T3 have spotted, on the Gamescom pdf designed to show press what games are appearing, the Half-Life 3 is listed as Valve's entry. You can see it for yourself right here.
]]>There are a few Half-Life 2 mods that basically constitute The Further Adventures of Gordon Freeman. Sometimes these isolated chapters make me want to dive headfirst back into the unfinished trilogy, and sometimes they're just a reminder of what Source did well. Other times, though, they manage to articulate More Half-Life 2 while at the same time having a strong whiff of first-order originality, served with their own own flourishes of design brilliance. Minerva was one such outing, and Mission Improbable is another.
]]>Allegedly, at least. This footage of the aeons-in-the-making Half-Life 1 remake seems far too elaborate to be a hoax, so the real question mark hangs over whether it's out there by accident or not. ValveTime.Net say they received it from an anonymous reader, and have no clue as to whether the footage represents a recent build of the Source Engine-based mod or not.
]]>Scaring someone is a fine art. Scaring someone when they're expecting to be scared makes it even trickier. So Grey is a big task for the Deppresick team of modders. A total conversion mod for Half-Life 2, it's a horror game that borrows liberally from every other horror game, movie, book, and scary painting you once saw. I put on my bravest trousers and had a look.
]]>Joe Martin is a Half-Life 2 obsessive who often wells up with actual tears when he thinks of the content Valve cut during development. Imagine his joy at finding the Missing Information mod, which collects workable snippets from the stolen HL2 beta and assembles them into a Steam-compatible mod. Joe takes a look at the parts of HL2 Valve didn't intend for us to see, and wonders if the game we got was the best it could have been.
]]>The rumors of Black Mesa's death have been greatly exaggerated. It has, however, been over three years since Gordon Freeman went for an all-too-brief jog in his shiny new hazard suit. No, gaming's favorite man of zero words and 1000 crowbar swings per minute hasn't suddenly affixed a chainsaw to his gun or moved his adventures to an unnamed wartorn Middle Eastern setting, but a lot's changed.
Once upon a time, this was Valve's firstborn with a fresh coat of paint. Now, though, the Black Mesa team's pouring its own blood, sweat, and tears into one of gaming's most sacred holy grails - for better or worse. Only time will tell. But how much time? One more year? Two? Half-Life 2: Episode 3 (aka, a billion)? And what state is the remake in now? I spoke with project lead Carlos Montero about all of that and more.
]]>The universe has a weird fondness for improbable coincidences. Name your franchise Half-Life, and it takes half a lifetime to come out. Create a robust mod based around a game in that franchise, and its development mirrors that of its crowbar-wielding, hazard-suit chic father series nearly one-to-one. The lofty promises, the incredibly lengthy periods of radio silence, the incessant cries of "vaporware" and "it'll probably be a huge letdown" - all of it.
Maybe, though, that part's not such a coincidence. To hear project lead Carlos Montero tell it, Black Mesa's an obsessively redesigned, rebuilt-from-the-ground-up love letter to Valve's opus. The goal, then, is to improve on something already considered by many to be perfect. And that, as it's turned out, has been a lot harder than Montero and his constantly fluctuating team first assumed. So, first up, we're delving into what exactly has taken so long - especially in light of 2008's rather stunning trailer that promised a release date of, er, three years ago.
]]>The appearance of Valve's Gabe Newell on the inaugral Seven Day Cooldown podcast seems to have generated all the headlines in the world. Apple's new boss didn't really visit Valve, DOTA2 will use a brand new kind of free-to-play and, now, why 'Ricochet 2' has been so long coming. There is, I'm afraid, absolutely no way that 'Ricochet 2' is a veiled term for another game rather than a sequel to weirdo Tron-like jumpy multiplayer mod Ricochet. And doubly-definitely not a game that might have a 'Half' in the title. No sirree.
]]>Looking at Steam's Stats page, Half-Life 2 is currently sandwiched between Plants vs Zombies and X3: Albion Prelude. But this weekend, if the Call For Communication Steam Group pull it off, Valve's own game should be somewhere near the top ten. The protesters are hoping that the surge of players will send a message to Valve: “we want to know what's happening to Gordon Freeman.”
]]>Valve have created themselves an interesting situation. Presenting themselves as bastions of consumers, remarkably accessible to gamers, regularly inviting in groups of modders - often to give them jobs - and always being present to offer a quote on how customers deserve to be treated with more dignity, they establish themselves as being our friend. And then from that position, they sure do like to muck about. And as Eurogamer's Tom "Tom Bramwell" Bramwell mentioned on Twitter this morning, it's hard not to sympathise with a growing body of Valve's customers who are asking for better communication.
]]>
![קודי רכבת סטאר של Honkai [דצמבר 2024]](https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/honkai-star-rail-bronya-fu-xuan.jpg?width=1200&height=630&fit=crop&enable=upscale&auto=webp "קודי רכבת סטאר של Honkai [דצמבר 2024]")
