Half-Life Message Board

I considered myself a pretty good Half-Life player, until now. This speed run video, which reportedly took four years of planning to execute correctly, proves I was completely wrong and should stop thinking so highly of myself. [Image: Valve]

Like any form of competition, speedrunning generates arguments over authenticity. Does a speedrun count if it relies on a bunny-hopping mod, in-game glitches and different runners tackling different parts of the game in short segments? I’m not sure I care either way. No matter the methods, Half-Life 1 being completed in 20 minutes and 41 seconds is an accomplishment of endurance, skill and effort. More importantly it’s a beautifully entertaining video, full of ingenuity and grace and physical comedy. The new record time is embedded below. You must watch it.

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After months of theorycrafting and planning, speedrunner quadrazid and his friends were able to run through Half-Life—a game that's anything but short—in 20 minutes. And the fact that it's almost 10 minutes faster than the previous world record shows how perfectly executed their run was.Read more...

Watching The Core's trailer makes you forget you're looking at a mod for a game that came out in 1998. It's just gorgeous.Read more...

Readers. I crawled to the end. You warned me. After part one of the diary, you really did warn me.

At the beginning, I thought Half-Life was the best game I’d ever played. There were so many finely crafted moments; so many things I learned. I avoided reading the slightest thing on it. I wanted it unsullied. As time went on in Half-Life, I gradually realised that each level is a discrete little chocolate box of incidents, scripted events, little puzzles and touches. There is so much attention to detail in the way that everything is centred on the player’s experience, how to psyche you out, how to spook you, how to mess with you. And then, as each new level drags on, you begin to wonder what it is you’re aiming for. By the time you reach Xen, you’re done. By the time you get to gonad beast, you’re completely, oh so really, done. But wasn’t it something? But wasn’t it really something? (more…)

Happy birthday, Half-Life! To celebrate, we all get to buy Black Mesa.Read more...

Half-Life celebrates its 15th birthday today. Valve’s genre-exploding, literal game-changer first appeared on the 19th November 1998, taking the well-loved first-person shooter and crafting something extraordinary. It was considered a turning point. A new bar for games to beat. And one that was safely broken by, er, Half-Life 2 six years later. Below are some of RPS’s favourite memories of the old, old game.

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I’m not sure how I missed this back in August, but it’s splendid enough to warrant a belated post on a Saturday. The two men of Corridor Digital have been creating extraordinary movie shorts for years (one of my all-time favourites being The Glitch), primarily based on videogames, featuring extraordinary special effects that rival those of big budget Hollywood studios. Certainly their profile is a lot larger in recent times, and their work is now very often paid for by the publishers of the games they’re recreating. (This live action video of Rayman Legends (no, really) being one of the most bizarre.) However, they still create projects for their own entertainment, and their origin story for the Gravity Gun is absolutely stellar.

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In the depths of late night despair you might sometimes lie awake thinking about how you are a life-long PC gamer and have never played through the original 1998 PC darling Half-Life. The thought lingers on you like some grotesque bug with the ability to whisper: ‘You are an impostor. You are fake. You are phoney.’ Well even if you don’t have terrible self-esteem, I do. I’m like Drew Barrymore in Never Been Kissed. Except the kiss is Half-Life. And Gordon Freeman is that guy from Alias that ends up kissing Drew Barrymore awkwardly on a baseball pitch.

Or whatever.

Here’s my first time with Half-Life, documented in badly made videos recorded whilst I was travelling Europe.

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Perhaps you've heard of The Stanley Parable? It's this game, see. It's a game about stories. It's... well, it's complicated. Maybe you're wondering what it's really about, why everyone is talking about it? Well. Allow me to elaborate.Read more...

Looks like that Half-Life 3 trademark filing that got everyone's dander up earlier this week was bogus. It's been removed from the Web site for the European Union's trademarks office. Read more...

If Gabe Newell laid down some real talk: then maybe he'd say some of the things in this fake but hilarious open letter written by Dorkly about Half-Life 3. Read more...

Over the weekend, the SourceRuns Team, comprised of fourteen players, got together and finished Half-Life 2, from beginning to end, in 1:27:51.09. Which, as you'll see in the video above, is madness. It's also a new world record. Apparently it took "over 600 days of hard work", which means they deserve the title they gave to the run, which is "Half-Life 2 Done With a High Magnitude of Velocity". Those interested in the specifics of the run, the team's YouTube page has links to all their documentation, including the glitches they used to squeeze out a few seconds. Half-Life 2: DWaHMoV - Half-Life 2 Speedrun - 1:27:51 - WR [YouTube]

“Added breakable functionality to all door types.”

Well, first-person shooters, it only took you 21 years, but you’ve finally cracked it. Our ultimate foe has at last been defeated.

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Bossa Studios never intended for Surgeon Simulator 2013 to become a part of a Half-Life 3 conspiracy theory—the ARG puzzle found underneath a medic figurine was simply another element in the game that would require the player to use some inference. "Surgeon Simulator is a trove of easter-eggs and references, this is a big part of its core, its fun," Henrique Olifiers, co-founder of the studio, said to me via email. "Some of the game's levels aren't even available if you don't read between the lines; it's easy to find those who don't realise there's a level in space, for instance, because it's not accessible through an obvious way." With a game like that, Bossa figured that an ARG made perfect sense. Why an ARG now though? Well, they had an update planned for July, but until then, they figured it might be fun to give fans something to do in the meantime. That's when they thought of an ARG. They thought of a few puzzles, one of which is the now-famous card featuring Korean....just like a botched update to Half-Life 2 recently. Many thought that similarity, along with the game's inclusion of Team Fortress 2 characters,was simply too big of a coincidence to ignore. There had to be a Half-Life 3 connection, right? So players took the planets on the image, and came up with different possible release dates for Half-Life 3—most of them this year. 2013, Half-Life 3. They were half right; the Korean was influenced by the Half-Life bug. Just not in the way most people guessed. "One of the points of using a non-Western alphabet is that you cannot simply type it into Google Translate, there's more crunching involved," Olifiers explained. "The day the team was adding [the puzzle], the Half-Life 2 bug showed up minutes before, so 'hey, Korean, there you go'. At that point (and even some time after we released the patch) we had no idea the bug was being linked to Half-Life 3 somewhere else in the depths of the web." People took the image and devised all sorts of insane theories about what the puzzle teased. It didn't help that the Korean in the game said "The time is," which incidentally are some of the same words Half-Life starts with—although Bossa thinks that people would have made a connection even if they had chosen Japanese. Korean and Japanese, both eastern languages! People already had a Half-Life 3 ARG on the brain thanks to PC Gamer. "The problem with ARGs is that our brains are hardwired to find patterns everywhere. We see numbers, faces and correlations where there are none, that's how most conspiracy theories are born and how some people get convinced there's a gigantic human head on Cydonia," Olifiers said. "But that's also what makes ARGs so interesting, what make them work: the different interpretations and solutions clashing for the survival of the fittest, discussed by the players." Illustrating the point of how out of hand these conspiracy theories can get, Olifiers sent me this image by Ivan Bakula: "Perhaps our mistake was to stick the puzzle to the bottom of the medic figurine, which we added in the same update as we thought the game was missing a reward for completing the Heavy's surgery. Should we glued the puzzle to the bottom of a mug or a pencil sharpener, maybe this wouldn't have happened. Or it would anyway. Who knows?" You'd think that with so much ruckus, the game would get a major sales boost, right? "While I would love to tell a story of riches and gains from it all, I'll have to disappoint," Olifiers said. "The game's sales averaged almost the same as the days before and after the episode, as we expected it would be the case." Thankfully, it sounds as if the experience isn't stopping the studio from doing more stuff like it in the future—the Korean thing, after all, is a small part of a larger puzzle.

Remember that suspicious Korean puzzle in Surgeon Simulator 2013—which people assumed teased a Valve product? The developers say it's an ARG, but it's unrelated to Valve or Half-Life.

Last December, reader Michelle decided to take a swing at building her own replica gravity gun from Half-Life 2. It's done now, and it looks fantastic. It looks like it was a ton of hard work, from re-modelling the gun's 3D wireframe to laser-cutting to a ton of painting and fiddly construction, but the results are totally worth it. You can see a progress build of the gun, as well as more final shots - showing how it lights up - below. Gravity Gun (Half-Life 2) [Overworld Designs]

Maybe there’s more to Half Life 1 mod Cry of Fear than screaming, gibbering faces and jump scares – the trailers have shooting, conversations and chainsaws – but my nerves, frayed rather than reinforced by years of vacationing in Silent Hill, failed to survive the opening scenes when I played last night. There’s something about the look and feel of the dated engine that unnerves me far more than something draped in bells and whistles ever would, although I’ve just conjured the image of a jester at a rave and that’s as petrifying as it is ridiculous. The Half Life engine has taken on the quality of a museum or funhouse packed with animatronics, and it’s perhaps that aspect that is most troubling. Well, that and the jump scares. Here’s how I got on.

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Last year, we saw a prototype of a Half-Life 2 gravity gun made by NECA, a toy company previously behind the replica Portal guns. While the gravity gun replica won't be out until June, NECA released the first official image of the final design this Monday. Take a look. From the NECA website: The Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator (ZPEFM) is a full size 1:1 model of the tractor beam type weapon featured in the Half Life video games and used by Gordon Freeman. The replica is created directly from digital data supplied by Valve and is fully accurate to the in-game model. The ZPEFM is nearly 2 feet in length and features glowing orange LEDs, 2 handles, 2 triggers, and 4 unique sounds directly from the game. As a bonus, a carefully concealed fold away kick-stand allows you to display your device on the shelf or desktop when not in use. Requires 3 “C” Batteries, not included. In addition to this reveal, NECA has also opened up pre-orders for the replica.

#valve You may have gotten awfully excited today when you read that not only is JJ Abrams talking to Valve about making a game, he's also talking about making a movie with the studio. More »

I’m off in the strange, far-away land of Las Vegas right now, and I just got done watching Gabe Newell and JJ “Warring Trek of the Stars” Abrams chat each other up on stage. I’ll have more from the talk for you soon, but here’s the big take-away: Valve and Abrams are officially collaborating. “What we’re actually doing here,” Newell said at the talk’s conclusion, “is recapitulating a series of conversations that have been going on [between Abrams and I]. This is what happens when game and movie people get together. And we sort of reached the point where we decided that we needed to do more than talk. So we’re gonna try and figure out if we can make a Portal movie or a Half-Life movie together.” Meanwhile, Abrams added: “And we have a game idea we’d like to work with Valve on.” Finally, Gabe wrapped it up: “Really, it’s time for our industries to stop talking about potential and really execute on it.”

#halflife More »

#halflife2 The world is bursting at the seams with Grand Theft Auto IV mods. You'd think there wouldn't be room for any more. But there's always room for wapeddell's Morgan Freeman. Oh, sorry. Gordon Freeman. More »

#halflife Gaming Heads, a company that's been making Valve-related merchandise for a few years now, will later this year be brining out this impressively (and huge) Gordon Freeman statue. More »

#mods Earth's Special Forces is a mod for the original Half-Life's engine (not Half-Life 2's source) that transforms Valve's shooter into a massive arena for Dragonball Z battles. More »

Way back in time, when the world was in 8-bit and we all paid for our cholera gruel with children’s teeth, Valve were working on Half-Life. It wasn’t very good, and Valve took the decision to rewrite most of the game. Somewhere in the multiverse there’s a universe where that version of Half-Life was released. The first difference between there and our us is that the 1997 alpha wasn’t improved. Valve and Steam are no more, and SiN is the game we all remember fondly. Games For Windows Live is the main digital distribution channel. We clearly have the better universe, but if you want a glimpse into the world that could have been, then you I have videos of the the original Half-Life alpha for you.(more…)

#halflife This footage is taken from something called Half-Life Alpha, a demo of Valve's classic shooter playable in 1997, a year before the game would eventually be released. More »

#thewalkingdead Fresh off their success with The Walking Dead series, as well as experience with half a dozen other properties that belong to someone else, developers Telltale have told Red Bull (the website of...the drink) what their dream projects are. More »

#jurassicpark Boom. More »