Tag: Half-Life

The best FPS games – the top 17 shooters of all time

We just chose the best 15 first-person shooters.

Once they were a vehicle for tech innovation, then everyone’s favorite storytelling medium. When we all got online, shooters were there to show us why that was exciting. Whenever the newspapers needed a moral panic, shooters were happy to provide one. 

Perhaps more than any other genre, a list of the best shooters tells a story about the medium and what we wanted from it at the time. It’s shapeshifted into something athletes can devote their lives to and fill arenas through their talents, but it’s also been there to ask us uncomfortable questions about what we see on the news. At this point, its library is so rich that it can even parody itself from years past, and to great effect. 

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That makes picking just 17 of them a hard task. So we didn’t – instead we built a vast learning AI, made it play every FPS released since the dawn of time, and provide us an empirical ranking of their quality. 

Okay, that was a lie. Look, we just chose the best 17 shooters, ok? Get off our backs. That does mean just one game from each series though – otherwise you’d be about to read a lot of Quake and Half-Life entries.

Half-Life 2: Ravenholm — here’s more than an hour of footage from Arkane’s canceled spinoff

Dishonored, but with headcrabs.

In an alternate timeline, Ravenholm is a  Half-Life 2 spinoff from Arkane Studios that we can gleefully download off of Steam. Sadly, real life is terrible, and the project never actually came out. Thankfully, we can finally see what it looks like in motion.

Noclip, a YouTube channel that produces excellent video game documentaries, got ahold of some footage of Ravenholm. More than an hour of it, in fact. Anyone familiar with Dishonored or Deathloop, Arkane’s other games, will probably recognize the studio’s sneaky style. It’s not what you typically expect from one of the best shooters of all time, but very cool nonetheless.

Watch the lengthy documentary on Ravenholm below. Definitely make some time for this if you have even a passing interest in Half-Life 2.

It’s certainly not lacking the gloomy vibes that the original Ravenholm section of Half-Life 2 had. The shambling undead zombies look slightly out of place, but those are undoubtedly placeholder models of some sort.

According to Polygon, there were several names for Ravenholm while it was in development. At one point, it was called Half-Life 2: Episode 4, and later Return to Ravenholm. The ‘final’ name probably works best, though.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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Valve updates Half-Life 2 with a slick new UI

Rise and shine, Mr. Freeman.

For the first time in many years, Half-Life 2  is getting a substantial update,

On Tuesday, well-known Source Engine aficionado  Gabe Follower  discovered a peculiar interface change to Half-Life 2, which almost certainly exists to make the  classic first-person shooter  easier to manage on the Steam Deck. It’s not every day that an 18-year-old game gets updates, after all.

Here is how you enable Half-Life 2’s  UI update on a desktop PC.

  1. Install Half-Life 2  (duh)
  2. Right-click Half-Life 2’s  icon on Steam and select “properties” 
  3. Go to the betas tab
  4. Select “beta updates” from the dropdown menu
  5. In the general tab, enter “-gamepadui” into the launch options field

Bang, you’re done! Half-life 2  should now open with a brand new UI which you can look at in action below.

Bang, you’re done! Half-life 2  should now open with a brand new UI which you can look at in action below.

Valve reportedly isn’t working on  another mainline Half-Life  game, so this update is all we will get for now. Still, it looks pretty intuitive and very console-like. 

Everyone assumes this sneaky update exists to make Half-Life 2  easier to play on the Steam Deck, which makes sense considering the device is  coming out very soon. It’s chuckle-worthy that Valve is tweaking such an old game in preparation for new hardware, especially since the company said there’ll be  no Steam Deck exclusives.

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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Best alien games – virtual extraterrestrials we love to shoot, escape, and trade with

The very best close encounters to be had with otherworldly visitors.

Alien games have it in them to create a much deeper and more involving sci-fi than movies. Where film sets and actors are bound to budgeting constraints and the amount of grease paint and putty that can be applied to one head, game engines have no such concerns. A bold creative vision that might be too expensive to realize for the big screen always finds a home in gaming. 

And since no-one gets annoyed when theoretical extraterrestrials are the enemies getting blown to bits, they’ve proven a popular foil since the earliest arcade games. Video game futurism has grown more sophisticated since then of course, and our interactions with aliens aren’t always hostile now. In the below games, you’ll find the very best close encounters to be had with otherworldly visitors. 

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Half-Life 3 is reportedly not in active development

Not at this time, anyway.

Half-Life 3  is allegedly not in development at Valve Software.

According to Valve News Network  content creator Tyler McVicker, some sort of real-time strategy title set in the Half-Life  universe for the Steam Deck may be in the works. When it comes to a full-fledge sequel to Half-Life 2, however, things aren’t looking good.

“No. At the current time, there isn’t a major development team working on anything outside of the few pieces of software that are specifically tailored for hardware right now,” McVicker said  on YouTube. “Valve is trying to get the Steam Deck out and, like many people have observed, the Steam Deck has been significantly more successful than originally anticipated, so Valve is throwing a lot at it.”

This information would line up with the fact that  Valve recently had to delay the Steam Deck  due to supply chain issues and being unable to meet demand in time for its original December release date.

“Half-Life 3, Half-Life 2: Episode 3 [or] any kind of traditional mouse and keyboard FPS at Valve is not taking place,” McVicker continues. “If it is, it’s a very small group of people and those individuals will not be seen as value-generating by the higher-ups.”

Not exactly what most of us want to hear, though by this point anything that isn’t a  Counter-Strike: Global Offensive  or  DOTA 2 player is used to this kind of report on Valve. At least  Steam seems to be doing quite well. 

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF.

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An AI imagines what ‘Destiny’, ‘Zelda’, and Hideo Kojima look like with terrifying results

You’ll never look at your favorite video games the same way again.

Ever wonder what your favorite video games would look like through an AI-generated lens? Well, thanks to  ai_curio_bot  from Bearsharktopus Studios, there’s a Twitter bot more than capable of showing you the nightmare-inducing results.

All you have to do is tweet at ai_curio_bot with a specific prompt followed by whatever you would like to see horrifically recreated by the bot. For example, I sent it “botprompt: Link from The Legend of Zelda on an air mattress” because why not.

I doubted that ai_curio_bot could yield anything recognizable from this request, despite the heaps of evidence suggesting otherwise. Several hours later, a rather disturbing notification popped up in my mentions that you can check out below. 

There’s definitely an air mattress in the artwork, but I’m unsure how that twisting eldritch horror qualifies as Link. Is that his blue tunic off to the left? Maybe. I think his hairline is in the center, too. Either way, I wasn’t planning on sleeping tonight anyway — never using a Nintendo Switch again, for that matter.

Naturally, gamers are having a ball with ai_curio_bot. From Destiny’s Traveler to  Hideo Kojima himself, the bot successfully makes me question if humanity officially has too much sway over the universe. Check out some of the, uh, more creative results for yourself below. 

Written by Kyle Campbell on behalf of GLHF. 

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7 video game sequels we’re desperate to see

Yeah, remakes are nice, but imagine getting some long-awaited sequels.

Remakes seem to be the hottest trend in the video game industry at the moment. Classic games like Final Fantasy 7 and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater are being brought back to life with a new lick of paint and modernized controls to allow a whole new generation of players to enjoy them. But what about the games that deserve actual follow-ups instead? Some series have lain dormant for years, while other one-hit wonders have never seen the light of day for decades.

In this article, we’re going to run through some seriously influential games in the hopes of galvanizing some potential revivals. If you haven’t played them, this list should also stoke your interest in some older titles that are well worth going back to, even now. If you’re tired of endless remakes and remasters, here are some of our favorite games that really warrant a modern sequel, with all the trimmings.

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