Rock, Paper, Shotgun

So what’s this, then? RPS readers: ASSEMBLE! We must solve and reveal. A video, below, featuring some remarkably impressive special effects, seeming to be part of the Half-Life universe. Not only does it feature some really neatly woven background mattes on regular film, but there’s a sense of scale that seems like it should be beyond a couple of guys mucking around on their weekends. Who has the capacity to take over a street, leaving cars strewn all over? And buses. Make sure to watch it in HQ.

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This is your late-night silly: Mike Rose, of the deliciously lovely IndieGames, spent the time he was supposed to be studying for exams last year making a Parklife spoof in the Half-Life 2 engine. He’s only just remembered he did it, and sent it our way That you haven’t done this is why you’ll never know the fame and glamour that inevitably awaits Mike Rose. It is, of course, below.

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The Purchase Brothers (their website is currently squished by traffic), independent filmmakers and commercial directors, have released the first part of their Half-Life-inspired short film series. And it’s pretty good. It’s a mixture of live action and game footage, and makes smart use of in-game sound effects, and some really fantastic location hunting. Originally developed to test post-production techniques for their work, as well as to create a ’spec’ commercial to demonstrate their talents, it eventually became a series of shorts telling a story within the Half-Life universe. And it’s below.

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Just in case you missed the comments linked trailer for the Black Mesa Source mod:

You know what I hate? Accidentally hitting quicksave when you meant to hit quickload, leaving yourself trapped in some ostensibly unwinnable situation and sobbing like a child about a terrible turn of events that you can blame no-one but yourself for.

You know what I love? Managing to win that unwinnable situation anyway: ultimate triumph in the face of self-made adversity.
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To celebrate Half-life being 10 years old this week, Valve have thrown a special offer. You can get the original half-life for 98 (count ‘em!) cents until November 21st. That’s literally cheap. Also, inexpensive. Also, value for money.

Er… that’s all. How can I enliven this post. Oh, I know: I’ve still never completed Half-life 1. What enormous gaping holes are in your play-histories, readers?

Yep, Valve’s unfortgettable opening salvo officially gets a decade under its belt on this very day. This terrifies me in ways I can’t quite vocalise.

Said terror is not simply because it makes me feel so very aged, but also because it’s been so long and yet still most FPSes seem entirely ignorant of what HL did with setpieces, incidental detail, gaming-specific narrative style, pacing and world-building. The straight line to most of today’s shooters that started with Doom seems to almost bypass Half-Life. Fortunately, there is one huge, positive side-effect which does ensure HL’s legacy is unassailable: modding.
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At the annual Who Can Shout The Loudest competition that is the PC Gamer UK Top 100 meeting, there are rules. These rules differ from year to year, and in 2008 one of them was “only one game per series.” So we couldn’t say Thief and Thief 2, or Morrowind and Oblivion – which sounds harsh, but the idea was to ensure as diverse a list as possible. And yet still no-one nominated Big Mutha Truckers 2.

There ended up being a couple of exceptions to this rule, and the one I particularly fought for was Half-Life. I simply don’t consider HL1 and HL2 to be especially comparable games, despite sharing a lead character, partial arsenal and a name. I also much prefer the first game, for all its greater shlockiness.
Why? Because it’s Indiana Jones. HL2 is more 1984-as-action-movie, and while it’s marvellously well-realised, far more polished and thematically consistent, I don’t find that as thrilling as all of HL1’s rip-roaring high adventure.
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Did you know there’s an official slice of the Half-Life saga that never found its way to PC? Decay was a bonus game mode in the Playstation 2 port of the first Half-Life, much as Blue Shift was supposed to be the exclusive extra bit in the ultimately canned Dreamcast version. But while the latter saw its own PC release (replete with the at-the-time ace High Definition pack) and can be had to this day from Steam, Decay seemed damned to dwindle into olden console game obscurity. Oh, the irony of its name.

Which is odd and sad, as it was developed by Gearbox and is, to the best of my knowledge, the only official attempt to make something other than a straight FPS out of the Half-Life series. Fortunately, a Ukranian team have painstakingly recreated Decay as a free mod for the original Half-Life, even grabbing the original sound files off the PS2 disc (hope they don’t run into any trouble for that) – which means new voicework from the chaps behind Barney, Kleiner et al, plus a couple of new characters, so this really does feel like Official Half-Life. More importantly, it’s your first and only chance to get chatted up by Barney. Well, unless he has an ulterior motive behind that drink he keeps promising to buy Gordon.
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One of our roving reporters, Quintin Smith, reports on the state of commercial PC gaming in Japan, with observations on a Gundam horse-touching subgame, a careful look at Hentai sales, and a wacky touchscreen card game that doesn’t have anything to do with PC gaming. Onwards, for Japan and some NSFW content.

Hi! So I’m in Tokyo for a few months right now, and recently Jim got to asking if I could write something about the state of commercial Japanese PC gaming. At least I think that’s what he asked.
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