Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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.
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Way back in the year 2000 I had a very brief stint on Dreamcast magazine, DC-UK. I won’t bore you with the details of my quick departure: just imagine the most dramatic escape scene you can, then double it. But while I was there I happened across a preview disc with Half-Life on it. I say preview, the damn thing was nearly complete and I played a tonne of it on that bizarre controller. It was cancelled. As is the way of these things, the code found it’s way onto The Google and now someone’s ported it to the PC.
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Being the dedicated RPS reader that you are, you’ll remember that Alec posted about the short film Beyond Black Mesa back in January. The mini-epic took place five years after the events of Half-Life, featuring independence fighters in the battle against the Combine invasion. Well, director Brian Curtin is back with an even shorter short, an utterly gorgeous live action version of the opening moments of the original game. It’s below.

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(I was going to title the post Gordon ‘The Body’ Freeman, but I figured people would just think it was porny fanfic). James Benson, the chap behind the splendid Dance Fortress video has gone for a rather different tack for his next project. He’s cut a new trailer for the original Half-Life, demonstrating how the game might look if Freeman was a real physical presence rather than just a hand with a gun. The first-person perspective remains, but it’s now augmented with believable arms. Arms that open doors, climb ladders, prise open vents, raise to protect the face from leaping Head-Crabs and even pick up and don a certain pair of spectacles that have fallen to the floor. I would like to play this non-existent videogame.
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In the week of Portal 2′s release, it seems apt that Valve’s games should dominate the mod scene’s output. While the range of titles you can mod these days is impressive, and so many of the tools are easy to learn, I’ve still yet to come across a moddable engine that’s quite as intuitive and flexible as Source. I can’t wait to see what people can do with Portal 2 when we’re able to mod that. It’s going to be very interesting to see the results. Onwards, then…
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The internet has too many wonderful things to look at. Stop it, internet! Stop having too many wonderful things! The sad consequence of this is that we’re sometimes a little late at showing you particular wonderful things, such as this wonderful stop-motion, papercraft animation of wonderful Half-Life and wonderful Half-Life 2 by the wonderful Stepan Yurov. They’re quite wonderful. Wonderfully, you can watch them both below. How wonderful!
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With Valve talking about making the Half-Life movie themselves, you have to wonder whether they might be well advised to hire this chap for the process. His trailer for short film I’m The Freeman looks about as good as we could hope a Half-Life movie to be. Assuming it was to CG, in the spirit of the TF2 shorts, of course. Go take a look, if you’ve not seen it already. Hell, go watch it again. I can’t wait for the full thing. (And the other movies on the guy’s site are quite something, too.)
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Game endings, then. They’re crap, aren’t they? Even games that tell engaging and creative stories have a habit of foundering abruptly instead of providing a satisfying finale. Maybe it’s because statistically, developers know less people will see the ending than any other part of their game, and a finale is a lot of work. Maybe it’s because creating closure is an entirely different discipline to holding someone’s attention.

We could have sat theorising in the RPS chatroom all day, but instead we collaborated on something far more proactive and arrogant: rewriting the endings of five of our favourite games. Check out our maddened riffing on Borderlands, Half-life, The Longest Journey, Morrowind and System Shock 2 after the jump.
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Preparing for a much-needed Windows reinstall, I’m currently unearthing all manner of old pieces from my freelance past. Many are… well, you know how it can feel to read something you wrote many moons ago. For the sake of all humankind, most of these documents must never see the light of day again. This heartfelt paean to the original Half-Life’s zombies (originally published in PC Gamer) remained reasonably proud, however. So, after some heavy jiggery and some light pokery, here it is…

Half-Life is credited with doing a great many things to save the first-person shooter from the Doom-derived rut it seemed stuck in during the late 90s – its perspective, its sense of place, its uncutscenes, its Rick Dangerousness – but rarely given so proud a nod are its zombies.
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Scientist, soldier, security guard and now silent cat: these are the tales of Half-Life the first. The mod known as Cat-Life was announced some time back, with its concept hitting twin notes of absurdity and “that makes a lot of sense, somehow.” It’s Half-Life with a cat. I’m pretty sure you weren’t able to work that out for yourself from the name, so I thought I’d better explain it for you. It’s the first-person-shooting videogame Half-Life, but starring a domestic feline instead of an improbably athletic physics dork. Do you understand? With a cat. Oh, you still don’t get it, do you? Well, a demo of the mod’s just sprung up. Perhaps that’ll explain all.
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