Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>
Remember that time Valve made a cover version of another developer’s game?
Left 4 Dead and Evolve creators Turtle Rock Studios have announced a new co-op first-person shooter. Ish. A bit. They’ve announced they’re making one. The mysterious game will be fantasy-ish and, y’know, you’ll shoot enemies with your pals and oh, it’ll be free-to-play. While Evolve switched to free-to-play a year after launching but this new game will be designed as F2P from the start, which should work out better for it – and us. We shouldn’t expect this new game until 2018 at the earliest but I’m glad to know they’re still doing their co-op thing. … [visit site to read more]
What use are Saturday morning cartoons? Who’s even around to see those? Mate, what I need is Monday morning cartoons. Some short fun cartoons around 10 on my first day back at work sounds just the ticket. So come on, let’s enjoy the 2016 Saxxy Award finalists and winners. Valve unveiled this year’s finest Source engine machinima on Friday night after I’d already flicked a match into the RPS treehouse and walked away growling “See you in hell!” as it exploded behind me (I didn’t look, obvs – I felt the heat), which means they’re handily here for me today as I sit on the floor amongst ashes. … [visit site to read more]
Turtle Rock are moving on from Evolve, their hunters vs monsters multiplayer game on which development recently ceased. Before starting something new, though, here’s a brief return to something old – their Valve-published masterpiece, Left 4 Dead [official site]. Via the Turtle Rock forums, studio co-founder Chris Ashton has uploaded Dam It, a campaign that, in a loose narrative sense, falls in between Dead Air and Blood Harvest. It’s not entirely finished, with some features not working correctly, but if you have a copy of the original game, you can download and play it right now. … [visit site to read more]
The makers of Black Mesa [official site] have announced plans to add the final section of their Half-Life remake, Xen, in summer 2017. They explain that it’s taking so long because they’re really fleshing out that alien world.
I do admire the confidence to declare you’re making Xen bigger, given how unpopular that section is with some players. They might be happier to hear you’ve decided Gordon Freeman’s muteness is because he’s really three dogs crammed into an HEV suit, so you’re replacing his pain sound effects with barks and yelps. But no, the Black Mesa gang are determined to make Xen proper good. … [visit site to read more]
Team Fortress 2‘s [official site] annual Hallowe’en festivities are upon us and, although there are nowhere near as many of them as Simpsons Treehouse Of Horror episodes, the Roman numerals are still contriving to make Alice feel hideously old. So that’s something!
So what’s the haps this Hallowe’en-tide? … [visit site to read more]
Marc Laidlaw posted a fascinating blog entry from a younger version of Laidlaw about the development of Half-Life from the narrative perspective. By “a younger version” I mean that it comes from his own hand but via a file timestamped the day after Half-Life was shipped and is thus far closer to the game’s… ground zero? than the Laidlaw of now.
Happy 20th birthday, Valve! Yesterday. Happy 20th yesterday. Sorry, I only just saw the Facebook notification. On August 24th, 1996, ex-Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington made a beautiful baby who was mighty eye-opening.
In the dreamy game of “What if…?” one curious hypothetical is: what if Valve never existed? There can’t be many companies who’ve had nearly as much impact. Steam (eventually) revolutionised digital distribution, changing the entire landscape of PC gaming. Half-Life was seminal; its mod scene was legendary. That’d be plenty, but Valve have made a load of other really good video games too.
You might have noticed all your friends’ avatars and profile pictures turning into comic book drawings or impressionistic paintings over the last few weeks. That’s because of Prisma, a photo editing app for iOS and Android that let’s you apply a couple of dozen filters to images you feed it. The app goes further than simply messing with the hue like Instagram does, using a process similar to Google Deep Dream to warp and twist photographs – without shoving fucked up dogs in every corner.
I spent last night feeding it game screenshots, to find out what No Man’s Sky, Half-Life 2, SimCity and more would look like if their artists abandoned realism.
Every Monday, Brendan heads to the frontlines of early access and writes about his heroic battles there. This week, he repeatedly fires upon his own team in multiplayer shooter Day of Infamy.>
In an age of Overwatches and hyper-CoDs it s easy to forget that every first-person shooter was once set inside a single trench of World War II. Returning to this battlefield might seem like a terrible idea to some who ve served their time in the hellish artillery bombardments of yesteryear. But I never played Day of Defeat, the Half-Life mod upon which this new WWII outing is based. So fumbling with grenades in the mud and snow of the Western front is something I was happy to do. I even tried my hand at commanding the other men. Which obviously resulted in everyone being disintegrated into thousands of tiny pieces.