Half-Life 2 Message Board older than one year ago

#halflife Reader Michael sent us an image he's been working for a while. It's a map of Half-Life 2's City 17 done in an "authentic" style. More »

#fineart Artist Viktor Antonov has worked on a number of high-profile projects over the years. He's recently published his own book, The Colony. He's helping on a live-action adaptation of classic manga (and anime film) Cobra. He also did some nice art for shelved (yet promising) multiplayer shooter The Crossing. More »

#totalrecall Hacking attacks and digital theft have been in the headlines a lot lately, whether it be the loss of user details on the PlayStation Network or a preview build of an upcoming game. More »

Half-Life – Singularity Collapse is an impressive Half-Life 2 fan movie which you can see below. It’s a first-person movie, and features quite a bit of the protagonist looking at his hands, for some reason. Fortunately it’s also heavy on the action, including a Highway 17 style buggy driving sequence, which is particularly awesome. It’s not short on the special effects, either, with a bonkers hi-tech reactor sequence, explosions, HUD weirdness, and lots of explosions and gunplay. Worth a watch, I would say.(more…)

#watchthis It may be a little rough around the edges in some places, but in others, this fan-made Half-Life 2 movie is one of the most impressive I've ever seen. More »

#watchthis Source Code is a 2011 thriller starring Chesty "Jake Gyllenhaal" Jake. So it's fitting that when somebody made a replica machinima trailer of it, they made it using Half-Life 2's Source Engine. More »

#gordon? This poster, recently slapped up on the walls of some of New York City's subway stations, advertises the next season of AMC's Breaking Bad. But gamers like me who look at it will probably see something else. More »

This is it. The end. This column you are about to read will be the last ever Mod News. Sniff. It’s been a pleasure, guys.

But no, really, it has. Over the past year, I’ve had a fantastic time as RPS’ mods guy, and it’s been a real honour to write this column every week – even if it is essentially just a roundup of all the latest happenings on a particular gaming scene. I can assure you that the end of Mod News coincides with the Hivemind’s bigger and better plans for mod coverage in the months ahead. You’re being left in very safe hands.

So, folks, would you join me for one more dance? Here’s the last and final week in mod news, including stuff for Half-Life 2, Neverwinter Nights, Oblivion, Morrowind and Stalker.(more…)

(I was going to title the post Gordon ‘The Body’ Freeman, but I figured people would just think it was porny fanfic). james Benson, the chap behind the splendid Dance Fortress video has gone for a rather different tack for his next project. He’s cut a new trailer for the original Half-Life, demonstrating how the game might look if Freeman was a real physical presence rather than just a hand with a gun. The first-person perspective remains, but it’s now augmented with believable arms. Arms that open doors, climb ladders, prise open vents, raise to protect the face from leaping Head-Crabs and even pick up and don a certain pair of spectacles that have fallen to the floor. I would like to play this non-existent videogame.(more…)

I played a lot of Action Half-Life back in the day- it’s a mod which adds leaps, rolls, kung-fu and so on to Half-Life multiplayer, as well as a small collection of colourful weapons, each of which is (in theory) the equal of any of the others. It also boasted some of gaming’s most legendary map secrets. You can read my love letter to AHL here, or read my account of an expedition into one of those secrets here.

It therefore fills me with a delicate, Monday morning joy to announce that Action Half-Life 2 version 2 has been released. If you own Half-Life 2 you can get the installer here, a Linux server binary here and read some details as to what’s new and watch a trailer after the jump.(more…)

#legohalflifethesecondepisode Since it'll never actually happen, Martin Latta has gone and given the world the next best thing: unofficial LEGO Half-Life 2. More »

A bunch of folk seem to have become convinced that Valve would be revealing something at E3 next month. As all Valve-based rumours seem to be, this one held that said something would be Half-Life 3/Episode 3. People became excited, but they shouldn’t have done. Valve will not be revealing a Half-Like game at E3. They won’t be revealing any kind of anything, in fact, as a mass mail-out by Valve has just confirmed that “we are not showing any titles at this year’s show”. That doesn’t, of course, mean they won’t be showing something later in the year, but if there is anything to show it certainly won’t be then. So that’s that. Got it? Good.

Oh, I do regret writing this post now. “News: there won’t be any news.” HOT SCOOPS Y’ALL.

#cartography Between all the running and riding in little boats and more running you end up covering quite a lot of ground in Half-Life 2! What makes this somewhat unique, though, is that you do it all in immediate succession. More »

We've showcased some PC mods here on our humble site before, but we're pretty sure we're ready to crown Overclock forum user Frenkie "King of the PC Mods" -- his Half-Life 2-inspired H.E.V. recharge station mod seen above is total pin-up material. As you read this, we're printing out the images he posted over on Overclock, throwing them all over the floor and just rolling around in them, trying to soak up the magnificence.

Of course, the downside to all of this is that we're reminded of Half-Life 2: Episode 3 yet again ... and how much we need it.

In the week of Portal 2′s release, it seems apt that Valve’s games should dominate the mod scene’s output. While the range of titles you can mod these days is impressive, and so many of the tools are easy to learn, I’ve still yet to come across a moddable engine that’s quite as intuitive and flexible as Source. I can’t wait to see what people can do with Portal 2 when we’re able to mod that. It’s going to be very interesting to see the results. Onwards, then…(more…)

If you've been having trouble with Garry's Mod lately, specifically the error, "Unable to shade polygon normals," don't take it to the Steam forums. You can solve that issue rather easily -- by buying a copy of Garry's Mod.

Creator Garry Newman tweeted yesterday that he enabled the error, which is designed to occur only in pirated copies. "Having fun watching people complain," he added, linking to a Google search for "Unable to shade polygon normals." The error code spits out a number, which happens to be the user's Steam ID. Posting the error code on the Steam forum gives Valve an easy way to find the user's Steam ID, compare to list of GMod owners, and then make with forum bans.

"It's the simplest stupidest DRM possible, a phone home," Newman said on his blog. "It is not uncrackable. You could crack it with notepad. Or by disconnecting from the internet." The point isn't to make impenetrable DRM, he said. "Making it uncrackable isn't the motive here - laughing at [pirates] is."

#wellplayed It looks more organic than robotic. More »

A mod for Half Life 2 called School Shooter: North American Tour 2012 has been pulled from its hosting site, ModDB, after picking up some attention for its controversial nature. The mod allowed the player to explore a school-like environment in a first-person shooter context, with the option of attacking various unarmed NPCs. ModDB has posted a short statement about why it pulled the code, saying that although it feels "people should have the right to be creative and share what they want on a community / developer run site," the "confusion and hate" surrounding the project led to the removal.

As you can see from a video of the mod posted on YouTube, there's another reason people don't need to share it around, and that's because it's just not very well made. The "Boring" effects are pulled from Bulletstorm's "Duty Calls" parody, but they fit this one just fine, too.

#source The intentionally, unabashedly offensive School Shooter: North American Tour 2012, designed to be "the most realistic student slaughtering modification ever made," has lost support from its former host. ModDB, original host of the Half-Life 2 mod—and hundreds of other mods—has pulled School Shooter from its site. More »

#portal2 Portal 2 takes place after Portal, long after enough for Aperture Science to be wrecked and covered with plant-life. What happened? Valve plans to explain some of that gap in the coming weeks, before we can play Portal 2 on April 18. More »

#violence What kind of video game would proudly promote the option to wield Columbine shooter Eric Harris' TEC-9 and Virgina Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho's akimbo pistols while embarking on a murderous rampage? The unashamed School Shooter: North American Tour 2012, a new game mod "dedicated to being the best school shooting experience an angsty little shit could ever experience." More »

#video Let's be honest. There are two types of fan films: crappy looking ones and great looking ones. Freeman's Days? It looks great. More »

#valve In 2003, Axel Gembe got his hands on the game everybody wanted, Valve's Half-Life 2. He hacked into the developer's network and swiped the game's source code—which eventually wound up on the internet. These days, Gembe says he's "very sorry" about that. More »

Half-Life 2 was never destined to release on time. It is a Valve project, after all. However, Gabe Newell and company couldn't have predicted that -- months before its expected release -- the game's source code would be stolen and distributed on the internet. "Is this going to destroy the company?," a designer supposedly asked Newell when it happened in 2003.

Eurogamer interviewed Axel Gembe, the young man responsible for breaching Valve's security and stealing the code. Gembe describes himself as a devoted fan of Valve, admitting that the original Half-Life was his favorite game. After being infected with malware, he became inspired: instead of trying to remove the program, he reverse-engineered it to understand how it worked, and then began working on his own code. Hungry for details on the long-delayed Half-Life 2, Gembe knocked on Valve's virtual doors and found it "easy" to get access.

After the breach, Valve struggled in finding leads on how the source code got stolen. But on February 14, 2004, Newell received a rather odd e-mail. Gembe was confessing to the crime, noting that he was "sorry for what happened." Naively, he asked Newell for a job at Valve, thinking it would be best for both parties involved. "I hoped for the best," although Valve was already coordinating with the FBI for his arrest. "I was not the brightest kid back then."

After serving a two-year probation, Gembe eventually found work in the security sector, wisened from his experience. "I was naïve and did things that I should never have done," he told Eurogamer. "There were so many better uses of my time. I regret having caused Valve Software trouble and financial loss."

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell recently discovered another thing he could do instead of releasing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 -- speaking to a high school class about the business of interactive entertainment. Check out a lengthy video of the teleconference below -- you might just learn a little something.

Selected in December as Mod DB's annual "Best Upcoming Mod," Dear Esther is actually a remake of a 2008 Half-Life 2 Source-engine mod by the same name. The original mod was developed by indie studio thechineseroom (at the University of Portsmouth, UK) and was "stumbled across" by Robert Briscoe, a former level designer at DICE who had worked on Mirror's Edge. While "far from perfect," Dear Esther had both intrigued and inspired Briscoe, he wrote in May 2009, describing it as "an interactive painting or story, told through the eyes of a dying man on a journey to try and make peace with his tormented mind."

"The whole thing is enveloped in deep mystery and hidden meanings," he continued, "I had the idea of taking the groundwork for the mod and develop [sic] it into a fully fledged, production-quality product." Briscoe took his idea to the original creative director Dan Pinchbeck, who "was very enthusiastic about it, giving me his full support on the project."

21 months of steady development later and the Dear Esther remake is on track for a commercial release this summer on Steam. That's right -- Pinchbeck and Briscoe approached Valve, which was "impressed enough to grant a Source license for a full independent release," recounts today's announcement (oddly dated July 30, 2010) on the just launched dear-esther.com. "Rob was creating something so extraordinary," Pinchbeck told PC Gamer UK in the new issue (via Beefjack), "[that] it deserved a wider audience than we could give it as a mod."

You can get a glimpse of Briscoe's recreation in the June 2010 test footage postead after the break.

[Pictured: work-in-progress screenshot; source: Robert Briscoe's Devblog]

#halflife2 A group of hardcore Half-Life fans with a pretty good camera, twelve hundred bucks and years of their lives have completed their short film Beyond Black Mesa, a tribute to Valve's dystopian sci-fi shooter. More »

#clips The Half-Life series is a fan favourite for a ton of reasons, but the main one is that its universe and story are so strong. Strong enough, even, to be re-told in under seven minutes using...paper. More »

#pc Just when the memory of how beautiful Half-Life 2 can be begins to fade, Reddit user Enjuaguese reminds us all with these panoramic shots of the game's City 17. More »

#art Did any of you make a new year's resolution? These guys did. Let's hoping most of them, Gordon Freeman aside, can actually stick to them! More »