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1 day ago
Feature: One Off The List
An obscenely rich teenager throws his VR controller across the room in a fit of blind panic while playing Half-Life: Alyx. It leaves the window of his bedroom at 5m/s. It falls 10m vertically and hits his neighbour’s greenhouse, smashing the glass. How many metres did the controller travel horizontally before coming to a stop in the tomatoes? Use a kinematic formula to determine your…
2 days ago
Feature: What it means for Half-Life 3 and where VR goes from here
We talk Half-Life: Alyx with Valve in “the meanest interview ever”
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…
People already got the basics of Half-Life: Alyx working outside VR
It was inevitable that fiddlers and modders would try to make Half-Life: Alyx into a regular ol' non-VR game, and yup, they're already encouraged by preliminary digging. Fans have poked around with debug options and got Alyx running without cybergoggles and with basic FPS keyboard controls, though that's a long, long, long way short of Alyx being playable the same as any ol' Half-Life. Valve's…
3 days ago
Feature: Every VR headset tested for comfort, visuals and experience
Half-Life: Alyx may have been built from the ground up to support Valve's super expensive Index headset, but as you may have seen from my Half-Life: Alyx PC requirements and VR headset specs article, you can actually play it on any VR headset that supports SteamVR, including the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift headsets and any Windows Mixed Reality headset. Heck, you can even play Half-Life:…
Feature: Light puzzling
Learning how to hold my torch is the best part of Half-Life: Alyx so far
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For a few years, VR seemed like a peripheral, literally and figuratively. Now that Half-Life: Alyx is front and center in our minds, folks are collectively adjusting to getting their heads around the biggest VR release—what—ever? In Alyx's first update, Valve have now added a new way to control turning your head, which is apparently more tricky than you'd imagine.
Watch this teacher’s maths lesson from inside Half-Life: Alyx
Parents and teachers are scrambling to keep the kiddywinkles occupied and educated in these Covid-19 days, and I've not seen anything that engaged me more than this maths lesson given inside Half-Life: Alyx. San Diego teacher Charles Coomber jacked into Alyx this week to record a refresher on angles, drawing on windows with Alyx's virtuamarkers and even salvaging a broken plank from her balcony to…
4 days ago
VR has done wonders for the Combine’s life expectancy, say Valve
The Combine are still public enemy number one in Half-Life: Alyx, but moving the series to VR has done wonders for their overall health, Valve have told me. Whereas before "the average lifetime of a Half-Life 2 Combine soldier was probably somewhere between 10-20 seconds," according to Half-Life: Alyx's lead programmer and designer Robin Walker, "as soon as we started to do play-testing in VR,…
5 days ago
Back in 2017, head honcho Gabe Newell revealed Valve were working on "three full VR games". We got one of them last night. Half-Life: Alyx is very good, according to Graham's Half-Life: Alyx review, but it seems the other two have gone missing. According to Valve designer Greg Coomer, "there aren’t three other titles in development." We only wanted two, Greg.
Until Alyx spoke, “everyone just assumed they were playing as Gordon Freeman,” say Valve
As its name implies, Half-Life: Alyx sees you step into the virtual shoes of Alyx Vance, Gordon Freeman's fellow Resistance member from Half-Life 2. But in early playtests, several players still thought they were playing as Half-Life's silent protagonist, Valve have told me. "We spent a bunch of time early on messing about with Alyx, trying to figure out what kind of language players responded…
Half-Life: Alyx playtesters were “obsessed with collecting stuff”
Honestly, have you ever seen some silly garbage in a game that you could pick up and not wanted to keep it? Collect it? Hoard it? You haven't. Admit it. According to RPS's inside scoop with Valve's developers, the effect is multiplied in VR. Valve tells us that Half-Life: Alyx playtesters just couldn't get enough of collecting things. You name it and folks want to…
Feature: Get your Quest playing Half-Life: Alyx in seven easy steps
Half-Life: Alyx can be played on practically every PC VR headset under the sun, from the super expensive Valve Index to entry-level Windows Mixed Reality headsets. However, you can also play it on the standalone Oculus Quest when you take advantage of Oculus Link, which connects your Quest to your PC like an ordinary Rift headset. In this article, I'll walk you through exactly how…
Valve haven’t made Half-Life 3 yet because their attempts weren’t good enough
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.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has new Half-Life stickers, pins, and patches
Most of us may lack the cybergoggles necessary to jack into Half-Life: Alyx today, but we can carry a bit of Alyx over into Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Over the weekend, Valve added new Half-Life-y stickers to slap on guns, patches to slap on uniforms, and badges to display in your profile. Some of them are cute! Unfortunately, they're obtained through nasty little loot boxes -…
Feature: Can you really play it on the minimum spec?
Half-Life: Alyx VR performance: How to get the best settings and the smoothest experience
Half-Life: Alyx has finally arrived, marking Valve's big return to their most famous game series as well as their first foray into the realms of VR. You can read more about wot Graham thinks of the game itself in his Half-Life: Alyx review, but here I thought I'd focus on Half-Life: Alyx's VR performance chops, and in particular what kind of experience you can expect…
Feature: The Half-Life game you wanted
Half-Life: Alyx is the Half-Life game you've been waiting for, even if it's not the one you were expecting - and even if you'll never play it. Valve's first full virtual reality game is a masterclass of first-person shooter design that makes clear the company haven't forgotten anything about making these kinds of games in the nine years since Portal 2, or the 13 years…
6 days ago
Valve explain how Half-Life: Alyx streamers can give spectators a smoother view
Right now, this very second, Graham is writing up wot he thinks of Half-Life: Alyx. The thing, it is real. If you own cybergoggles, you'll be able to play it yourself from 5pm British time. If you don't own VR kit and want to watch a friend or an amiable internet personality play, though, Valve have released some handy tips for streamers and spectators. They…
1 week ago
Gabe Newell says brain-computer interfaces will be an “extinction-level event” for entertainment
In a rare interview, Gabe Newell has said he's been spending "a lot of time" looking into brain-computer interfaces. "The Matrix is a lot closer than people think", he says, and it's going to be "an extinction-level event for every entertainment form that's not thinking about this." He also talks about Half-life: Alyx, his fondness for Doom, and why he can't stop playing Dota 2.
For folks who've already waited 12 years for a new Half-Life and absolutely, positively will not wait another second longer than necessary, Valve have announced that Half-Life: Alyx will be available for preloading from Friday. You'll need to have pre-ordered it, which usually we wouldn't condone, but loads of folks are getting the game as a pack-in freebie with VR goggles and hell, goggheads already…
2 weeks ago
HTC have announced they're going to be bundling in free copies of Half-Life: Alyx with every Vive Cosmos Elite VR headset today - and that includes everyone who pre-ordered the headset as well. The Vive Cosmos Elite, which launches worldwide today, is HTC's latest high-end PC-based VR headset and will come with a redemption code for Half-Life: Alyx in the box, which will then unlock…
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