Game Feed

A new Half-Life would have to be VR

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Like Doc Brown, I once hit my head and saw the future. I didn't come round in the bathroom having the idea for the Flux Capacitor, but I did bonk my noggin pretty hard in the office games room and sit back, dazed but delighted with what had just happened. I was playing the Budget Cuts demo on Valve's room-scale VR. Budget Cuts is a game about infiltrating an office that's patrolled with deadly robots. Because of the room-scale VR, you're really there: your actual body is your in-game body. This means that the robots are the same size as you - which is terrifying - and it also means that when you have to duck your head through a missing panel in the floor to look into the room below, you really have to do it. Except that while the game floor might be missing a panel, the real floor isn't. Bonk. I did it. Chris Bratt, who had also played the demo, had done it. A day later, so moved by what I'd played I brought in a friend to try it out. They did it too. We all hit our heads and we all sa...

Valve has fixed NPCs not blinking in Half-Life 2

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Valve has fixed NPCs not blinking in Half-Life 2, its 15-year-old shooter that may never see a sequel. That's not all. Valve has also fixed missing sounds on Combine soldiers, fixed a hitch when saving games, and fixed SteamVR running when entering the settings menu. The update is for Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, and Half-Life: Source. So, all the Half-Life 2s! Read more

Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, and Half-Life: Source Updates Released

by Valve

Updates to Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, and Half-Life: Source have been released. The changes include: * Fixed a hitch when saving games; * Fixed SteamVR running when entering the settings menu; * Fixed missing sounds on combine soldiers; * Fixed NPCs not blinking;

Half-Life 2 and Portal now on Nvidia Shield

by Steve Watts

Nvidia is aiming to sell Project Shield to gamers with two highly-regarded classics. Half-Life 2 and Portal are now available natively on the device. In a short promotional video, Nvidia announced the pair of games and says it worked with Valve to bring them to Shield.

Report: 37% of purchased Steam games are never played

by Steve Watts

If you ve ever felt ashamed of games you ve picked up but never played, at least you can rest assured you aren t alone. A study into Steam playing habits has found that more than a third of all games purchased through the service have never been loaded up even once.

Half-Life 2: Lost Coast Beta Updated

by Programmer Joe

The beta for Half-Life lost coast has been updated with new binaries on OSX and Linux. This enables the game to run on those platforms.

Half-Life 2: Lost Coast Beta Updated

by Programmer Joe

The beta for Half-Life lost coast has been updated with new binaries on OSX and Linux. This enables the game to run on those platforms.

Half-Life 2: Lost Coast updated

by alfred

We have updated the public release of Half-Life 2: Lost Coast. This update contains all the changes from the recent beta, thanks to the whole community for their help with testing and suggesting new features. Changes in this update are: Converted Half-Life 2: Lost Coast to the new SteamPipe content system, for optimized delivery of the game Added support for Linux operating systems Added support for Virtual Reality devices, in particular Oculus Rift Numerous bug fixes contributed by community members

Half-Life 2: Lost Coast updated

by alfred

We have updated the public release of Half-Life 2: Lost Coast. This update contains all the changes from the recent beta, thanks to the whole community for their help with testing and suggesting new features. Changes in this update are: Converted Half-Life 2: Lost Coast to the new SteamPipe content system, for optimized delivery of the game Added support for Linux operating systems Added support for Virtual Reality devices, in particular Oculus Rift Numerous bug fixes contributed by community members

Valve launches 'Steam Trading Cards' in beta

by Steve Watts

What do you do when your platform already sells and launches video games? Make the platform itself a video game, naturally. Valve announced the beta launch of "Steam Trading Cards" today. The collectible meta-game lets you upgrade your Steam profile by playing games and collecting and trading their associated (virtual) cards. The trading card system earns you cards for playing supported games, along with collecting and trading. Once you earn enough, you can craft a game badge, which can be used to earn rewards like profile backgrounds, emoticons, and Steam coupons. This also adds a leveling mechanic to your badges, in which you can earn XP to earn rewards like extra friends list slots and profile showcases. Joining the Trading Cards group will put you in a queue to get into the beta, and Valve will be allowing people into it in waves. So far, the beta supports Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, Don't Starve, Half-Life 2, Portal 2, and Team Fortress 2. Valve promises it will expa...

Half-Life 2 mod Minerva re-released on Steam as Director's Cut

by John Keefer

It's been about six years since the Minerva mod for Half-Life 2 was released, but after some cajoling from co-workers at Valve, developer Adam Foster has given it a new coat of paint and is releasing it on Steam as a Director's Cut. "It's taken long enough, but via lots of nagging and prompting from fellow Valve employees I've finally got round to getting MINERVA, the Half-Life 2 mod which got me a job at Valve, up on to Steam," Foster said in an email to Shacknews. "It was originally released in late 2007 to pretty much universal acclaim, but now there's about to be a super-fancy Director's Cut edition with tweaked visuals, bug fixes, better puzzles and all kinds of subtle improvements. Nothing hugely new, just old stuff tidied and polished for this re-release." The mod, which is still free, tasks you with uncovering the mystery of an underground Combine facility while being fed information via text by a female character named Minerva. To play, you will need Half-Life 2: Episode One i...

The Specialists mod team Kickstarting free 'spiritual successor'

by Alice O'Connor

You, the grizzled PC gamer in the corner, you remember diving around with akimbo pistols in that Half-Life mod in The Good Old Days, don't you? No, not Action Half-Life. No, you big silly, not The Opera. Gosh, no, not Matrix Half-Life. You know, The Specialists! Some of the folks behind that side-diving, slow-motion shooter are now working on a "spiritual successor" mod, Double Action, and want Kickstarter help to finish it faster. You can give an alpha version a go now, too. Like the Specialists, Double Action aims to recreate the jazzy action scenes of films like The Matrix and John Woo's bang-bang movies. Think dual pistols, slow-motion, and stunts, stunts, stunts! The Specialists programmer and designer Jorge Rodriguez is leading Double Action, with other folks from the mod working on it too. The Kickstarter campaign (via PC Gamer) is looking for $18,000 so they can take time off work to finish up the initial beta release this summer. Otherwise, it'll be at least 2014 before we can...

Half-Life 2 VR mod awaits Oculus Rift

by Alice O'Connor

With the Oculus Rift getting people all hot and bothered about virtual reality once again, one canny modder has prepared for its launch by whipping up a VR mod for Half-Life 2 and its episodes. Able to track the player's head and any plastic weaponry they may be holding, the mod looks jolly impressive in a new video. If you have some VR kit of your own, you can download it right now and get playing. It's not as simple as adding tracking, oh no, as HL2 must be tweaked to better suit having the display fill your entire vision. The HUD is split into individual elements which fade in and out when relevant, and you can manually lower Gordon's gun so it's not always in your face. It also removes any head-jerking effects, like when shooting or hit by a shock baton, presumably because if your head snaps back in the game it also kicks back in real life and snaps your neck. Creator Nathan Andrews himself controls the gun with a Top Shot Elite, a plastic gun controller which came with the Cabela'...

Half-Life 2: Episode 4 media details the 'Return to Ravenholm'

by Steve Watts

"Return to Ravenholm," aka "Half-Life 2: Episode 4," was a Half-Life 2 episode set in the spooky abandoned town. It's been canceled for a few years now, but we've gotten a better look at the game that could have been thanks to some new concept art and animation tests. It was in development at Dishonored developer Arkane Studios around 2006, but was ultimately scrapped. Valvetime revealed the new shots, with Rock Paper Shotgun's Craig Pearson confirming their authenticity. According to Valve's Marc Laidlaw, the project had been canceled because the defining qualities of Ravenholm (headcrabs and zombies) were feeling "played out," and the game's placement in the timeline of the other episodes was a "creative constraint." But if you're curious to see the small bits remaining of the project, check out the video below.

Black Mesa: Uplink remakes Half-Life demo

by Alice O'Connor

The Black Mesa mod is a remarkable accomplishment, remaking Half-Life in the Source engine, and now a mapper building upon their work has remade another slice of Valve history. Black Mesa: Uplink remakes HL's classic Uplink demo, which curiously for a demo was a new slice based upon levels cut from the game during development. And now that's available in shiny Source-o-vision. Black Mesa: Uplink is out now on its ModDB page and here on Shacknews. To play, you'll need to own a modern Source game on Steam and have the Black Mesa mod installed. Mapper Michael 'Hezus' Jansen made Uplink over three months, building upon the assets and eight years of work from Black Mesa. Set roughly around Half-Life's Lambda Core chapter, Uplink sees Gordon Freeman on a mission to activate a radio antenna so people can escape, only an awful lot of soldiers, mutants, aliens, radiation leaks and jumping puzzles are in his way. "I've recreated something people played 13 years ago, that means it's intertwined w...