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3 weeks ago
Get your speedrunning shoes on and prepare your glitches: Awesome Games Done Quick has arrived for its yearly speedrunning extravaganza. As with previous years, the charity event is raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. It's been live since yesterday evening and runs until this Sunday, and there are already some fab runs in the likes of Mirror's Edge and Dragon Age: Origins to catch…
2 months ago
Black Mesa’s Definitive Edition update makes it just about finished
After over a decade of work (and nine months after actually releasing the game), the Black Mesa gang are finally just about finished remaking Half-Life. Today they launch a big update they're calling the 'Definitive Edition', with changes including a visual refresh of many areas, performance improvements, extra polishing, and a redo of one level from the bit with all the trains. They... still have…
3 months ago
While next year's Awesome Games Done Quick won't be held in-person, the charity speedrunning event is still going ahead, and it looks like it has some brilliant runs in store. AGDQ 2021's game list was revealed over the weekend, and oooh January can't come soon enough. From the new mythological roguelike Hades and charmingly difficult platformer Celeste, to old favourites like Half-Life and Left 4…
8 months ago
Earlier this week, Alice O pointed out the work of Graham Dunning, an artist who creates improvised dance music in Half-Life by replacing the game's audio with clips from 90s rave tracks and sample CDs. Now, Twitch isn't known for being the greatest music-streaming platform about, so this weekend Dunning released Panopticon - a moody album of experimental noise arranged in Valve's seminal 1998 shooter.
9 months ago
This artist uses Half-Life to generate experimental dance music
I've just watched an experimental dance music gig created by an artist playing Half-Life. Graham Dunning has replaced every single sound in Valve's shooter with samples he says come "from 90s rave tracks and sample CDs", giving Gordon Freeman drums for feet, making sentry turrets loop vocal samples, turning ambient sounds into pounding loops, blasting drum breaks out guns, and all that. So he creates…
10 months ago
Now Play This livestreamed virtual field trips and hiking tours last weekend
As with many other events in the year of Covid-19, Now Play This—the yearly exhibition on experimental game design—transitioned to a virtual space last weekend. Although not every planned part of the exhibition could be shown off in the new format, they still appeared to get up to some neat stuff that you can now watch back yourself. Game designer Gareth Damian Martin took players on…
Record-breaking Half-Life speedrun briefly trades crowbars for lightsabers
Half Life's introduction is famously slow. Long tram rides and lengthy speeches from co-workers preparing Gordon Freeman for an experiment that would destroy the world. An atmospheric start, for sure, but it's a pain for folks trying to beat the game as quickly as possible. For one speedrunner, though, those dead minutes aren't an obstacle - they're the perfect opportunity to start practising for a…
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.
11 months ago
Long in the works Black Mesa—the fan-made Half-Life remake—is out. For real. It's been in development longer than some folks who might play it today have been alive. Black Mesa 1.0 is now live and officially a graduate from Steam Early Access. From the sounds of it, Crowbar Collective's 15-year project is coming out Cum Laude.
After fifteen years in development in various forms, Black Mesa will finally launch in full on March 5. Started as a mod, the Valve-sanctioned remake of Half-Life eventually became its own commercial game and entered early access in May 2015. Since then, they've been working on remaking the much-maligned final chapter of Xen, overhauling and fixing bits, and generally tweaking. Which they've now about finished.…
12 months ago
This Half-Life mod ran the dialogue and signs through Google Translate until they became nonsense
You know the cyberjape of running text back and forth through Google Translate in different languages until it comes out as wacky nonsense? Someone has done to that Half-Life. The new mod Half-Life: Google Translate Edition has garbled Valve's game, from changing sign textures through to recording new lines of dialogue. I played a bit (and recorded a wee video) and yeah, I still find…
1 year ago
The whole Half-Life story is free to play on Steam right now
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…
Half-Life: Alyx is a VR prequel to HL2, coming in March 2020
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…
Half-Life 2’s downtrodden NPCs have been unable to blink for five years, until now
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,…
It’s crab-fighting time: Black Mesa’s Xen beta is diving into the Gonarch’s Lair
It feels like only yesterday that Half-Life remake Black Mesa was a joke. The highest-profile vaporware of the Source modding community. That thing had been milling around since 2005. Nobody thought it would ever actually come out. I remember feeling properly shook when eventually did in 2012, seven years later. Except, it wasn't exactly done. Crowbar Collective have been trying to figure out Xen, Half-Life's…
2 years ago
Black Mesa launches its first three Xen maps into public beta
The long-delayed Xen chapters of Black Mesa - Crowbar Collective's remake of the original Half-Life - feel tantalisingly close now. In a Steam blog post yesterday, the devs warn that "If you want the polished, complete Xen experience, you should wait. It won’t be long!", but if you're ready for your first taste of their re-imagined alien world, you can try it now. The first…
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…
To celebrate Half-Life's twentieth birthday today [more on that later today -continuity ed.], the Black Mesa gang have made a new trailer showing progress on their commercial Half-Life fan remake's final chapters, the alien world of Xen. They also say that they're now planning to add the Xen chapter in 2019, some time from March to the end of June, so that's three-ish years after…
The cruel and unusual Halfquake mod trilogy returns on Steam
The latest Half-Life mod to resurface, repacked and polished on Steam is Halfquake Trilogy - defining 'masocore' well before I Wanna Be The Guy made it a genre. Halfquake is a trilogy of surreal and cruel puzzle-centric mods by Philipp "Muddasheep" Lehner and they're some of the most interesting maps produced for the original Half-Life. Featuring striking, abstract environments, genuinely clever puzzles, some very stupid ones…
Half-Life mod Echoes pushes both its engine and players to their absolute limits
While Black Mesa may be rebuilding Half-Life's world on a slightly more modern foundation, modder James "MrGnang" Cockburn reckons there's some life in Valve's old GoldSrc engine yet. Half-Life: Echoes is an impressive mod released last Friday, putting the player in the shoes of a scientist elsewhere in the Black Mesa facility when everything goes to hell. Cue the usual running, gunning, fighting soldiers and weird…
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