Half-Life 2

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…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, Cities: Skylines, Dark Souls, Disco Elysium, Half-Life 2, Pathologic 2, Stardew Valley, Streets of Rogue, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Yakuza 0.

Ultrawide gaming monitors are the kind of hardware that might seem too excessive, maybe even a bit too gamer to bother with for playing games on PC, especially when their demanding resolutions often require powerful 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, mostly…

Tagged with Bestest Bests, feature, Hardware, Monitors, Abzu, Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, American Truck Simulator, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Batman: Arkham Knight, BioShock Infinite, Death Stranding, Destiny 2, Dishonored 2, Everybody's Gone To The Rapture, Far: Lone Sails, Final Fantasy XV, Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition, Forza Horizon 4, Gears of War 5, Grow Home, Half-Life 2, Heaven's Vault, Hitman, Hitman 2, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Metro Exodus, Microsoft Flight Simulator, No Man's Sky, Red Dead Redemption 2, Rez Infinite, Rime, Sea of Thieves, Sid Meier's Civilization VI, Stardew Valley, Subnautica, The Long Dark, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Thumper, Tom Clancy's The Division 2, Total War: Three Kingdoms, Warframe, Yakuza 0.

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,…

Tagged with feature, One Off The List, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, Dark Souls: Remastered, Fallout 4, Half-Life 2, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Okami HD, Phogs, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

"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…

Tagged with feature, steam points, steam summer sale 2020, Valve, Cuphead, Disco Elysium, Half-Life 2, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

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…

Tagged with feature, interview, Valve, VR games, Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-life 2: Episode Three, Half-Life 3, Half-Life: Alyx.

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…

Tagged with Bohemia Interactive, EA DICE, Epic Games, feature, Valve, Arma II, Battlefield Heroes, Codename Gordon, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, DayZ, Fortnite Battle Royale, Fortnite: Save the World, Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead, Take On Helicopters.

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…

Tagged with feature, Reef Entertainment, review, Teyon, wot i think, Alien: Isolation, Factorio, Half-Life 2, Terminator: Resistance.

The best shooters endure. While other genres warp beyond recognition, there is something solid about the first-person shooter that makes it as dependable as a nice big AK-47. Maybe it’s the gung-ho simplicity - look down a barrel and pull the trigger. It's as fun to fire a double-barrelled shotgun from an early 90s FPS as the slick shotties of today. For that reason, this…

Tagged with Bestest Bests, feature, Alien: Isolation, Apex Legends, Arma 3, Battlefield 1942, Battlefield: Bad Company™ 2, BioShock 2, Bulletstorm, Call of Duty 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered, Call Of Juarez - Gunslinger, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Crysis, Day of Infamy, Destiny 2, Devil Daggers, Dishonored, Dishonored 2, Doom, Dying Light, F.E.A.R., Far Cry 2, Far Cry 3, Far Cry 4, Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Halo: Combat Evolved, Left 4 Dead 2, Marathon, Metro Exodus, Metro Redux, Natural Selection 2, No One Lives Forever, PlanetSide 2, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, Prey, Quake, Quake III Arena, Rage, Rising Storm, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter, Shadow Warrior 2, Star Wars Jedi Knight - Mysteries of the Sith, Star Wars Republic Commando, Star Wars: Dark Forces, SWAT 4, Team Fortress 2, The Chronicles Of Riddick: Assault On Dark Athena, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, Unreal Tournament, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Wolfenstein: The New Order.

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.…

Tagged with feature, neural net, Alien: Isolation, Final Fantasy VIII Remastered, Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition, Gears of War 5, Half-Life 2, Hitman 2, Kerbal Space Program, Papers Please, Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition, The Walking Dead, Yakuza 0.

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…

Tagged with feature, Arma 3, BioShock, Fate of the World, Frostpunk, Half-Life 2, Sandcastles, Sea of Solitude, Sid Meier's Civilization II, Sid Meier's Civilization VI, Sid Meier's Civilization VI: Gathering Storm, The Long Dark.

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,…

Tagged with Breadman, Craig Beattie, Damian Duda, Deppresick, Dolmo, feature, Filip Victor, Gunship Mark II, Marnamal, Modder Superior, mods, Phillip Marlowe, RunThinkShootLive, Spymaps, Valve Software, White Noise Team, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-life 2: Episode Three, Half-Life 2: Episode Two.

"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?

Tagged with feature, Have You Played, Valve, Half-Life 2, Half-life 2: Deathmatch.