Tag Archives: Half-Life 2

It may have taken five years, but Valve has finally patched an issue which prevented Half-Life 2’s non-playable characters from blinking.  As spotted by Rock Paper Shotgun, it seemed it was the Steampipe update five years ago that prevented characters from blinking in Half-Life 2, affecting all Source-based games in …

Before Dunwall, there was City 17. Before The Last Of Us’s overrun sewer colony, there were Route Kanal’s resistance outposts. Before Elizabeth DeWitt came Alyx Vance, and before Andrew Ryan there was Wallace Breen. Thousands of words have been devoted already to explaining how great Half-Life 2 is to play, …

A decade after Half-Life 2’s release, the masses are still obsessed with the release date/announcement/vaguest hint of existence of its currently-nebulous sequel. This is no mere case of fans chasing down leaks, scouring LinkedIn profiles, and hanging on the odd hint dropped in a developer interview. The search for Half-Life …

We can argue whether video games are art until the cows come home from the Diablo cow level, but you’d be hard pressed to deny that they’ve at least inspired some lovely artwork. Case in point, the work of Melissa Smith, whose splash paintings of iconic video game characters are …

Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing Romeo and Juliet. Jack and Rose. Conan O’Brian and the Tonight Show. Tragic love stories have gripped us throughout history, making our hearts ache and excuses about something in our eyes flow. Video games have embraced the tradition with ready joysticks, giving way to such …

This year was the first that I stood in a snowstorm in the middle of June. Behind me, mountains loomed in the distance; ahead stood a giant, castle-like structure of the sort I’d only ever seen in travel brochures. And everywhere I looked, snow. Granted, this scene wasn’t actually real, …

If it exists, Valve’s rumoured Steam Box console could change gaming for the better as drastically as the PS1 did. But it could also just tank. I explained all of this at length in a recent feature called Valve’s Steam Box: Why it would change gaming as drastically as the …