HalfLife

Valve just released a 25th anniversary update for Half-Life that adds a whole bunch of new content, some welcome quality-of-life upgrades, and even Steam Deck support, according to an announcement on the Half-Life website. Also, you can download the game for free for a limited time.Let’s start with the added content. The game now includes Half-Life Uplink, a “mini-campaign” that was originally available only on CDs from magazines and hardware manufacturers, the company says. There are four new multiplayer maps that Valve…

Hello. Good day. Welcome. Yes, do come in. Sit down. Anywhere. No, just find a seat anywhere. Yes, there’s fine. Yes, I know it’s cold today, but the heating will come on soon. Right. Did everyone read the required text for this lecture? Good. There wasn’t any. Today, we’ll be discussing Valve’s influential 1998 first-person shooter Half-Life. And by “discuss,” I mean I’ll be talking while you sit there and look intrigued — maybe stroke your chins or excitedly scribble notes or something. Yes, this is indeed a flimsy…

And it won’t cost you an arm or a leg What happens when you combine the world’s most popular toy brand with one of the most influential first-person shooters of all time? That’s right, you get LEGO Half-Life 2. If you ever wondered what it’d be like to take on the Combine or seek the Vortigaunt’s help as one of the Danish company’s little plastic figures, wonder no more. The mod is available on the Steam workshop (thanks, PCGamesN) and comes from user Not Dave or Daniel. It’s described as a “full conversion” project…

Half-Life 1 is one of the best first-person shooters ever made, and its fan community is still going strong nearly 25 years after its release. A developer who goes by PinkyDev has recreated the original Half-Life as an isometric twin-stick shooter, and the developer says that Valve has given its permission to put the fan-game on Steam.Originally titled Half-Life Loop (now called Codename Loop to prevent confusion), the premise of the game is that G-Man has trapped series hero Gordon Freeman in an infinite…

A demo is out now It seems almost impossible at this stage for there to ever be a third Half-Life game. It’s just been so long, and chances are that a threequel would struggle to live up to the hype. However, there are still new ways to get your Gordon Freeman kicks. For example, modder PinkyDev is working on a modification that turns Valve’s iconic FPS into a roguelike shooter. Called Codename: Loop, the demo for the project has just been released, so you can try it out before it releases fully. There’s also a…

I haven’t played Half-Life: Alyx, but I really, really want to. Last month, I picked up the PlayStation VR2 as my first virtual reality headset and have been enjoying a wide range of games on it since then, from Zombieland: Headshot Fever Reloaded to Horizon Call of the Mountain. Although the lack of exciting new titles in PSVR2’s launch window library doesn’t bother me that much as this is my first VR experience, I do still recognize that there are only a couple of games that are pushing the PSVR2’s technology and…

Marc Laidlaw, a writer for Valve‘s first two Half-Life games and their episodic follow-ups, has admitted it was “deranged” to post an early outline of Half-Life 2: Episode 3‘s plot to his website. In 2017 – one year after leaving Valve – Laidlaw published a short story titled ‘Epistle 3’ on his personal website. Upon its release, fans and journalists soon realised the piece was a thinly-veiled outline for Half-Life: Episode 3‘s plot, despite the game being cancelled by Valve. Speaking to Rock Paper Shotgun, Laidlaw has…

Half-Life 1 is one of the most beloved PC shooters ever, but its chunky polygons and low-resolution textures might not appeal to those playing it for the first time today. Luckily, modder Sultim_T has crafted a mod that adds ray tracing to the game, and it's definitely worth a look. If you aren't familiar with ray tracing in retro games, the feature essentially replaces the game's baked-in lighting with dynamic rays, which transform the game's visuals tremendously. You can see the difference…

Ray-sonance cascade If you’ve been holding off on replaying Half-Life until it gussies itself up a bit and Black Mesa doesn’t feel quite the same, you can now apply some simulated photons to it. Programmer Sultim Tsyrendashiev, the creator of similar mods for Doom, Quake, and Serious Sam, has released a literal glow-up with their Half-Life 1 Ray Traced mod. The mod does exactly what it say on the box by adding path traced illumination and reflections. Hey, you know what? I started up Half-Life a few weeks ago for a…

It’s time to dust off your trusty crowbar and see it in a new light, complete with colorful reflections. A PC mod of the original Half-Life from 1998 that adds realtime path-traced ray tracing to the game is now available, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. First teased by its creator sultim_t (Sultim Tsyrendashiev) over a year ago, the mod pack is now available to download on GitHub to install and play with the original Half-Life on Steam.While a proper remake of Half-Life already exists in the form of Black Mesa, let’s say…