We've been waiting for Black Mesa for a long, loooong while now—the hugely ambitious fan-made mod has an uncertain fate, but eight years after beginning work, the team is still working on the game.

The folks behind Black Mesa have released these images to Facebook to coincide with a new interview over at Polygon, where project leader Carlos Montero once again talks about the long, agonizing process of making the mod/game/thing.

Check out these screens—it's still not entirely clear how well the game actually works (particularly based on the gameplay footage that surfaced a little while back), but it sure is fun to see scenes from Half-Life looking so purdy:

Pandemic is a Half-Life 2 movie made by anklove. While it's got its fair share of effects, this isn't some attempt at a blockbuster action flick. Instead, it does what Eastern European movies do best: turn the screws on a desolate, bleak landscape.

So, yeah, this isn't a feel-good project. At the end of four minutes you'll probably want to go play Half-Life 2 again, sure, but you'll also probably want to go find someone special and give them a hug. Maybe in a green, sunny park.

[thanks Tim!]

We featured the work of LEGO builder ORRANGE back in 2009, with his brilliant take on Half-Life, but a recent playthrough of the game has got him returning to the universe to take more pictures.

So thanks, Half-Life 2. And thanks ORRANGE, for reminding us all that a world in which these sets and minifigs aren't commercially available is a cold, dark place.

ORRANGE. [Flickr, via VGN]

This is shark week! All week, all the time, all sharks. There are even sharks in your Half-Life 3 answers. Aw, crap. Really? Yes, really.

During an interview with Valve's Gabe Newell, Spike TV asked if there was anything he wanted to say about Half-Life 3. To which Newell responded, "I hate sharks." That's not really a response—it's more like a dodge. No, it is a dodge.

Half-Life 2 came out in 2004, and I guess that means Half-Life 3 (or, for that matter, Episode 3) isn't done yet? Perhaps Valve is waiting for the next generation of consoles to roll out Half-Life 3—that makes the most sense. Perhaps Half-Life 3 is gonna need, dare I say, a bigger boat!

Valve [GTTV]

Mad Catz revealed yesterday the company's latest, fanciest keyboard to date: the S.T.R.I.K.E. 7. It's...certainly something, but that's not why we're here today. Today, we're here for shits and giggles.

A trailer put out by Mad Catz for the upcoming peripheral shows its weird little app screen with predictable stuff like World of Warcraft and PhotoShop. But what's that lurking at the 0:22 mark? Is that a Half-Life 3 logo?

Oh Mad Catz. So trollish. And also so very, very wrong. By the time Half-Life 3 comes out, we - and I mean humanity, not just you and I, dear reader - won't be using keyboards. We'll be beams of light, transmitting pure emotions across infinite universes. Even the ones full of giant babies with holes in their heads.

S.T.R.I.K.E. 7 Keyboard Release Video [YouTube, via NeoGAF]

Were it not for the core Half-Life series itself, Black Mesa: Source - a fan-made remake of the original Half-Life - might well be the longest-running tease in video games today.

Having been in development for around eight years now, and still not out, you'd be forgiven for thinking the project was never going to come out.

That said, this clip - submitted to fansite ValveTime by an "anonymous reader" - claims to show over three minutes of gameplay footage from the mod, showcasing not only its visuals, but a few changes as well, like an iron sight for the .357 Magnum (which replaces the gun's standard "zoom").

Nobody has any idea how old the footage is, so for all we know it could be from 2008. Or 2012. Or the distant future, where humans toil for our alien overlords in vast underground salt mines, and Black Mesa: Source still isn't out.

And by that I of course mean silliest. Do you ever just randomly talk to the games you play? Poke fun at characters playfully? That's essentially what BlackLightAttack does with his 60 Second Let's Play series.

60 Second Let's Play: Half-Life 2 [YouTube]

If there's one man who knows from originality in video games, it's Viktor Antonov. He's the man responsible for the oppressive, beautiful art design of City 17 in Valve's masterpiece Half-Life 2. One of the main reasons that I'm excited about the upcoming Dishonored is that Antonov will be art director. Just check out this gallery of the man's work. He's a true original.

But Antonov is generally unhappy with the current state of video games. In an interview at Eurogamer, he laments: "It's been a poor, poor five years for fiction in the video game industry."

Antonov's observations mostly revolve around the fact that there are so few new ideas for games, and that so many games look the same. He sees the fact that the closest touchstone for this year's Dishonored is BioShock, a game from 2007 that doesn't actually have all that much in common with Dishonored, as cause for concern.

"I'm not a harsh critic of games," Antonov insisted. "I'm extremely happy of where technology has gone. But artists and art directors should make their own life a little bit harder by pushing management to take more artistic risks, and use the technology to a better, higher level. That's what I've been doing and suffering by - I've been spending as much time creating, as convincing the people who are financing games how important it is.

"We were always waiting for the next generation of great worlds or great graphics. Well, great graphics came; the worlds that came with these graphics are not up to the level of the graphics.

"Graphics used to be an excuse 10 years ago, that we can't make great worlds. Right now, we have a lot of New Yorks, we have a lot of war games. Please everybody," he pleaded, "let's do more science-fiction and more crazy worlds out there."

Antonov advises that developers stop trying to make games that are all things at once. "Now a game is trying to pack too many games - narration, music, contemplation, shooting - that they lose the experience." Instead, he suggests, developers should make more specialized games that pick one thing to do and do it well.

Read the rest of the article, which talks in-depth about the process behind Dishonored's city of Dunwall, at Eurogamer.

"It's been a poor, poor five years for fiction in the video game industry" [Eurogamer]

...well, yeah. You can't unsee it.

And I thought fast zombies were bad. Fast squirrel zombies with headcrabs on their chins that screamed as they crawled down post-apocalyptic trees would be about the worst thing ever.

Animal pictures of the week: 8 June 2012 [The Telegraph, thanks John!]

Artist Drew Northcott brings us "Vincent Van Gordon", a Van Gogh inspired portrait of everyone's favorite headcrab killing physicist.

According to Northcott, there might be character similarity between Freeman and Van Gogh. He adds, "There's certainly a physical resemblance anyhow." That's certainly better than Freeman mailing his ear to a prostitute.

Vincent Van Gordon - half life [Deviant Art via GameFreaks]