half-life-2 posts

Remember how excited you were when Half-Life 2 was finally released way back in 2004? Seeing the beginning of the game in the mysterious and slightly run down City 17 remains one of the best openings for a game ever.

Now the first part of that game has been recreated by fans for Valve's zombie shooter Left 4 Dead 2 in a five level campaign called, what else, City 17. Valve has decided to make it the latest featured campaign for Left 4 Dead 2. That means Valve is hosting servers running with that campaign. As the game's official blog states, "While it is may be lacking Gordon, Alyx, and Barney it's not lacking zombies."

Just a few days ago, we reported that one of the creators of the long-in-development Black Mesa mod for Half-Life 2 said it would finally be released before the end of 2010. Now a new article previews the mod and states that the Source Engine remake of the original Half-Life is " ... more or less complete - albeit with lots of tweaking to go - right up to the Xen levels."

The web site AtomicPC got a chance to play a build of the mod thanks to the fact that one of its regular forum members works as a texture artist on Black Mesa. While a gallery of screenshots from the mod has since been removed due to a mis-communication with the mod's project leads, the article praises what was seen in the build, saying "The combination of attention to original detail, and new material provided by the modern team is impressive." Hopefully that means the mod will finally be released in the near future.

[Via Kotaku]

Download the Black Mesa HD gameplay trailer at Big Download (104 MB)

It's a known fact that good movie adaptations of PC and video games are almost non-existent. And that's why Valve has decided to turn down tons of requests from Hollywood movie studios over the years to make an official Half-Life movie. But here's the kicker; Valve may decide to make a movie adaptation of their first person shooter franchise themselves.

PC Gamer's web site has posted up a portion of its upcoming chat with Valve's head man Gabe Newell that will be featured in the UK edition of the print magazine. Newell states that when the original Half-Life was released, the developer took meetings with Hollywood writers and directors on Half-Life movie proposals. Newell states, "And their stories were just so bad. I mean, brutally, the worst. Not understanding what made the game a good game, or what made the property an interesting thing for people to be a fan of."

So Valve has decided that it should make any Half-Life movie and Newell says the various Team Fortress 2 "Meet The Team" character class movies they have created, "is us trying to explore that." It should be interesting to see if Valve actually goes ahead with these kinds of plans.

It's perhaps one of the most anticipated mods for any PC game and we've been waiting a long, long time for its completion. It the Black Mesa mod that has been trying to do a full graphical remake of Valve's 1998 shooter Half-Life with the much improved Source Engine.

In late 2008, a truly spectacular trailer for Black Mesa was released that showed that the team was serious in its attempt to bring us a modern looking Half-Life. The trailer promised that the mod would be released in 2009 but that year came and went with no Black Mesa love. However in a forum post on the mod's message boards one of the mod's team members basically wants fans to go into a coma until the "end of 2010". Will this be yet another broken promise or will we finally get a chance to play the original Half-Life with some truly updated visuals? We are not holding our breath but we are still hopeful.

[Via Rock Paper Shotgun]

Download the Black Mesa HD gameplay trailer at Big Download (104 MB)

The popular Firearms multiplayer mod for the original Half-Life has just gotten its first Source engine game release with Firearms Source 1.0. The fast-paced mod requires that at least one Source Engine game be installed on your PC that allows you to download the Source SDK base.

The mod contains eight maps, four gameplay modes (Push, Territorial Conflict, Search and Destroy and Capture the Item), 31 different weapons, different types of armor, items and explosives and a professional music soundtrack. It also contains a player skill system that allows your player character to gain skills and abilities while playing online.

Download the Firearms Source 1.0 mod from Big Download

Valve's games have certainly been a huge inspiration to other game developers. We've also seen a few fan-created live action movies based on Valve's creations. This week one of them, Beyond Black Mesa, came to our attention via a YouTube teaser trailer.

The trailer shows off some Half-Life 2 elements (the grenade, the Strider, etc) but the final product will tell an original story about resistance fighters dealing with the Combine five years after "the Black Mesa incident". The final version of the movie, who took two years to make but only cost $1,200, will be shown on Monday, July 26 at the Action on Film International Film Festival in Pasadena, CA.

[Via Rock Paper Shotgun]

Some of you are getting ready to take off for a three day weekend. Some of you might even be taking today off, making this Fourth of July a four-day weekend (lucky you if you have that set-up). So what do you do with all that free time. Steam's summer sale is still going strong and today through 1 pm Eastern time on Saturday you can get extra-big price cuts on the downloadable games listed below:

Day of Defeat : Source - $2.49
Beat Hazard - $2.49
Half-Life 2 - $3.39
Star Wars Empire at War Gold (original game + expansion) - $4.99
Max and the Magic Marker - $5
Saints Row 2 - $7.49
Borderlands - $10.19
Bionic Commando Pack (Bionic Commando + Bionic Commando Rearmed) - $11.14
Prototype - $14.99
Crysis Maximum Edition (Crysis and Crysis Warhead) - $14.99

We had a feeling that it was too good to be true. After Valve announced that a "surprise" was coming in place of its Portal 2 E3 2010 press conference, lots of folks thought it would be Half-Life 2: Episode 3, the long, long awaited final chapter in the first person shooter saga that began in 2004's Half-Life 2.

Well, Valve's head man Gabe Newell has slammed that rumor in the face by saying via email (and reproduced by fan site Halflife2.net) that the E3 2010 surprise is not Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Newell also called the images that hinted at such a surprise fake, something we pretty much knew already. Oh well.

This is one of those stories that we actually hate to report about because, well, we feel kind of forced to at this stage. When Valve announced that their Portal 2 event at E3 2010 was canceled to be replaced by a "surprise" a lot of folks, including us, speculated that the "surprise" might actually be a reveal of the long, long in development Half-Life 2 Episode 3.

While we still think such a reveal might actually be in the works (hey anything is possible) some images have popped up on the interwebs that show the classic lambda symbol with the words "Freeman June 14". The image comes from the Twitter page of the founder of GamerTag Radio but Rock Paper Shotgun (without actually naming its source) has already declared the image to be a fake. However we think that while this could very well be a Photoshop dealie, it's still possible that Half-Life 2 Episode 3 (or maybe even Half-Life 3) could be the surprise and someone outside of Valve is just trying to stir the pot. If that's the case, well, mission accomplished.

This week's list of the top 10 best selling PC games on the Steam service (according to revenue) is full of games that have been on sale. The top two games this week are Valve's 2007 game collection The Orange Box and Relic's RTS game Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War II Gold Edition, both of which had big temporary price cuts this week.

In fact six of the games in this week's top 10 were put there due to temporary sales. The full list is below:

1. The Orange Box - Valve
2. Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War II Gold Edition - Relic/THQ
3. Battlefield Bad Company 2 - Digital Illusions/EA
4. Modern Warfare 2 Stimulus Package - Infinity Ward/Activision
5. Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Elite Echelon Edition - Ubisoft
6. Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War II Chaos Rising - Relic/THQ
7. Modern Warfare 2 - Infinity Ward/Activision
8. Half-Life 2 - Valve
9. APB All Points Bulletin - Real Time Worlds/EA
10. Killing Floor - Tripwire Interactive