Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.

While the Half-Life series has a lot of iconic moments, from the lab accident that started it all to learning why we don't go to Ravenholm, none stand out for me as much as leading the resistance to retake City 17 near the end of Half-Life 2.

Gordon's journey does a great job of making you want to get back at the Combine from the very beginning. They're jerks. They hit you with sticks. They make you pick up trash that isn't even yours. Much of the first few hours of the game are spent showing you how bleak and oppressive life has become for humanity since the invasion, with Breen's smug face proclaiming it a paradise. And then you get little glimmers of hope as you're reunited with Barney and start discovering pockets of resistance.

This all culminates when you return to City 17 as the fabled "Anticitizen One", the Combine's most wanted. You've become more than a scientist thrown into extraordinary circumstances at this point, more than a bearded videogame protagonist with a gun. You're an inspirational figure. Alongside you, facing the same daunting odds, are ragtag freedom fighters in weathered jackets and fingerless gloves showing that, for all our faults, we humans refuse to go down fighting when you try to take over our cities with flying knife robots and giant tripod walkers.

As I fought brutally through the streets I felt proud of my resistance comrades. They didn't have plot armor or a gravity gun but they followed me into danger anyway. When I took down a stalker with a rocket launcher, they cheered and surged ahead to press the hard-won advantage. And while at this rate we may never see how the war ends, we won the battle. We at least showed the Combine that Earth doesn't bow to brain bugs without giving them a black eye.

I look forward to bumping into some of these brave men and women around a fire barrel again in the upcoming prequel, even knowing some of them won't survive what's coming. Gordon became a symbol, but they were the real heroes.

Well, OK, that’s not exactly true. Gordon was still the real hero. But they helped!

It's Half-Life 2's 15th Birthday today! On November 16th, 2004 Valve released one of PC Gaming’s most celebrated games, the hotly-anticipated Half-Life 2 would go on to become the foundation of a generation of games and famous mods. The continued adventures of Gordon Freeman were a hallmark First-Person Shooter with a physics-based engine that encouraged you to play with the world around you. (It also launched the pale lighting and muddy tones aesthetic that defined that era of games.) Without Half-Life 2 and its Source Engine, we wouldn’t have a lot of landmark games: Team Fortress 2, Portal, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, and Insurgency, to name a few.

Half-Life 2 also heralded the launch of Steam’s new look and new role as a storefront for Valve’s games. No longer just a service for multiplayer and updates, Steam has since grown into the primary platform for PC Gamers around the world and an industry juggernaut. To many, the success of Steam has wholly eclipsed the Valve games that launched it.

Half-Life 2 has not dimmed in popularity, though. If you’re looking to get back into it, can I recommend the popular combat enhancement Half-Life 2: MMod? It’s quite good and just updated last month. There’s also long-thought-dead mod Logistique, which re-emerged this year after eight years in torpor and updated just yesterday.

Two quick notes: While it cannot consume alcohol at all, I would like to say that in theory Half-Life 2 can legally purchase and consume alcohol in the Central African Republic. That said, it should be ready to vote and smoke in time for the 2024 United States Federal Election.

On a personal note, I can still remember anxiously pre-ordering the collector’s edition of HL2 months before it released. The Source Engine tech demos and trailers were impressive, but at the time there really was no knowing whether the game would be everything it promised to be: Both cutting edge and easily modded, both innovative and traditional. It’s fascinating to look back now and see the game that inspired a generation of PC gamers and game developers turn 15.

🥳🎂🎈🎉!

Valve has finally vanquished a few more bugs in Half-Life 2. We might never get to play the conclusion, but at least we can rest easy knowing that NPCs can blink once again. 

Half-Life 2's NPC have been stuck in this nightmare since 2014, when Steam switched to the SteamPipe content distribution system. The change caused problems for a lot of Source mods and games, but the absence of blinking was definitely the most eerie. 

Despite the visibility of the bug and the mountain of threads bringing it up year after year, Valve seemed content to let its NPCs stare for eternity. Unofficial patches solved the issue, but now Valve's finally put out an official fix. An update went out yesterday and deals with a few other lingering issues. 

• Fixed a hitch when saving games
• Fixed SteamVR running when entering the settings menu
• Fixed missing sounds on combine soldiers
• Fixed NPCs not blinking

Half-Life 2: Episode One and Two, Lost Coast and Half-Life: Source have also been updated.

I just started a new game to see for myself, and both the G-Man and the NPCs on the train have full control over their eyelids again. Revolutionary! I'm sure they're very relieved.

Cheers, RPS. 

The Half-Life 2 modding scene is alive, well and doing some exceptionally silly things. Hosted by Map Labs on Mod DB, Half-Life Abridged is the fifth and most recent in a series of themed HL2 mapping contests, challenging entrants to quickly produce a single level based around a specific theme. This time, it was based around the concept of boiling down an entire chapter of Half-Life (1 or 2) into a single bite-sized level, perfect for the Free Man on the go.

Breaking all prior records for Half-Life 2 jams, there were twenty-five entries in total, all bundled up and ready to play here. Many put tongue firmly in cheek, like Intrasslad by "Salamancer", which re-imagines the entire Nova Prospekt chapter of Half-Life 2 as a trip to Ikea, and replaces Alyx Vance with a lamp. It also won first place in the contest.

Also notable is HWY 17 by "ThatsRidonkulous", which takes the 'abridged' concept perhaps too literally by squashing down the entirety of Highway 17 into a single bridge, breaking all of space and time in the process. Does that make it an Einstein-Rosen bridge, then?

Fun fact: It is never wrong to use theoretical physics jokes in a Half-Life article.

While some play it straight, a bunch of the levels are elaborate jokes. Anomalous Materials by "iiboharz" and "Jackathan" is an easter-egg and secret-laden romp that abridges Half-Life 1's first chapter. Gordon slept in today, and there's only six minutes until he's fired. Get suited up and to the test chamber ASAP, even if the world does seem to be conspiring to slow you down.

Lastly, a personal favourite is Father Grigori's Wild Ride by "RockyB", squishing Ravenholm down into a deeply unsafe haunted house fairground ride. Comfortably sitting in your mine-cart, you can kick back and relax as an animatronic Father Grigori gives you a tour of the headcrab-laden town. You'll occasionally need to use your gravity gun to switch what track you're on, and decapitate some zombies with saw-blades, though. Please keep all limbs inside the car at all times..

Many of these maps have rough edges, on account of being developed with a time limit for a competition, but they're still some of the funniest and most creative levels I've seen for the game. This collection is well worth a look.

Getting all this set up is, thankfully, pretty quick and easy. You don't even need to own Half-Life 2, but you probably should, or you won't get half the gags.

Step 1: Pop open Steam, check the Tools section of your games library and download  Source SDK Base 2013 Single Player.

Step 2: Right click on it in your Steam library, click Properties, Betas, and select the 'upcoming' branch.

Step 3: Download Map Lab #5: Abridged from Mod DB.

Step 4: Unpack it to your Steam\steamapps\sourcemods directory.

Step 5: Restart Steam and look for 'Abridged' in your game library. Have fun!

Those mysterious wizards at Valve are up to something, and it may be related to Half-Life. What exactly is going on isn't clear, but based on recent updates to existing Valve games, it has something to do with the Citadel. In the video below, Valve News Network's Tyler McVicker explains what the community has unearthed in a recent low-level engine update to Dota 2.

Initially, Citadel appeared to refer to a level in the still-unannounced Half-Life VR project, but McVicker says that it eventually became apparent that it's an entirely separate Source 2 project. What it might actually be is anybody's guess, but it "has a lot of things related to stealth, AI pathfinding, and a top-view minimap," and according to McVicker is definitely not the "flagship" VR game Valve teased earlier this year. 

Interesting, right? Of course, as McVicker is careful to say, there's no confirmation this is a new Half-Life game, or that it's even a shooter. Since the Citadel project appears to be using a similar Source 2 build as Dota 2, chances are pretty good it's a top-down tactics game.

But Source 2 can do a lot of things, and there's really no telling what Citadel is going to look like—yet. Is there still room in the world for a new Half-Life? I'm going to go ahead and guess "yes."

Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.  

The gravity gun, for all its usefulness in Half-Life 2, can only pick up non-organic objects. But when it passes through the confiscation field in the Citadel, it isn't destroyed like the rest of your weapons. It becomes supercharged. The tool that could do everything except that one thing now does that one thing, too. And it's a glorious, cathartic moment. Instead of just picking up objects you can pick up people, and it's a blast, yanking surprised soldiers off the ground, pulling them wriggling through the air, their limbs violently jerking and flopping in a way that makes Darth Vader's Force Choke look like a gentle embrace. And then you can blast those Combine ragdolls around the room, send them spinning and slamming into each other. In a corridor packed with Combine you can rip a soldier from his spot and send him pinwheeling back through the rest. It's the gravity gun's final form and it made the perfect tool, surprisingly, even better.

What made the gravity gun so cool in Half-Life 2 wasn't just that it could lift stuff—it was all the different things that could be accomplished by lifting stuff. When it first fell into our hands we played catch with Dog, which wasn't just a cool sequence but functioned as a sneaky tutorial. We learned how to pick up, throw, and catch, we increased our bond with the eager robotic companion, and we discovered how to defeat rollermines, an enemy we wouldn't encounter until much later in the game. The first time one came tumbling down the road at us, we'd already been trained to handle them without even realizing it. That's just cool.

And there was more. Physics puzzles began presenting themselves, solvable using the gravity gun. We could weigh down one end of a board and turn it into a ramp. We could knock wrecked cars out of the way. We could clear barricades from the far side of a door, letting us access new areas. We could even yank ammo and health kits right into our hands from across the room. With each chapter, the gravity gun felt more and more useful.

It was a weapon too, a deadly one, and often served as protection from other weapons. We could yank a metal radiator off a wall and use it as cover from gunfire, then fling it into the soldier firing at us. When a grenade landed at our feet we could scoop it up and launch at whoever threw it (or drop our own grenade, then fling it, turning the gravity gun into a cannon). An orb fired from a Combine pulse rifle could be snatched from the air and spit back, disintegrating a handful of soldiers—and once again teaching us another use for the future, in solving orb-based puzzles.

It was a tool, a brilliant weapon, and protective shield, and by the end of the game it felt like Valve had given it as many uses in Half-Life 2 as was humanly possible. Then they gave it another use. They turned it from orange to blue.

Project Borealis is a fan-made Half-Life 2: Episode 3 based on the Epistle 3 script posted by former Valve writer Marc Laidlaw. It's been in development since 2017, and today the team showcased the first footage of some new maps, along with a shootout with some creepy homunculi still awaiting their textures. 

The update explores the level design process, showing off a chilly cave's development from a section of a script to an in-game map that's had its first art pass. We also get to see some of the progress the team's made with the episode's physics, and it's going to be switching to the new Unreal Chaos Physics system and AMD's FEM deformation tool when they're released, but they've already been doing a lot of experimenting with PhysX.

The gravity gun has received a pretty significant upgrade. Instead of just picking up individual objects, it will be able to gather up lots of them, and the demo lets Gordon create a huge floating mass made up from hundreds of objects. I look forward to summoning tornadoes. 

OK, that's pretty cool, but that's got nothing on this adorable headcrab. It's fluffy! Because it's cold! Let's hope we can pet the headcrab. Expect to see familiar but slightly different alien nasties in Antarctica, and some new stuff, too, including a vehicle to help us get around the frozen wasteland. 

The team's also been working on the audio design, using Steam Audio to handle reverb, occlusion and spacialisation, and new art has been designed that interprets the low resolution models from Half-Life 2 and creates more detailed versions of them that still look authentic. That process starts with creating concept art for things like Combine panels, and a bunch of new concept art has been added to the official site. 

"This update is the result of a significant evolution in the team over the last year," says project manager Florian Häsler. "We refined our development workflows and adopted a new approach to structuring the work ahead of us. This has brought about great work, some of which we’re showcasing in this update; the team is developing some exciting tech, using modern technology to explore our gameplay options. We can’t wait to hear what the community thinks about our progress and direction."

Laidlaw's synopsis sent Freeman, or "Freemont", off to Antarctica, where he ends up on the Aperture Science ship, the Borealis. There are some problems with reality getting a bit wobbly, culminating in a big fight on a ship that's speeding across time and space. You can read the whole thing here. It's pretty wild. 

World War Z developer Saber Interactive has dipped its toe into quite a few series, including Halo and Quake, and it looks like it also tried to add Half-Life to the list, asking Valve if it could remake Half-Life 2.  

"After we did Halo Anniversary and Halo 2 Anniversary, as part of the Master Chief Collection, I reached out to Gabe Newell personally, because I knew him from a past life, and I said I want to remake Half-Life 2," Saber's CEO Matthew Karch told Game Watcher. "That's all I want to do. I won't charge you anything for it. I'll do it for rev-share and doesn't even need to be a big rev-share. I just really want to do because I love that game so much."

Newell declined the offer and told Karch that, in the event a Half-Life 2 remake was on the cards, it would be developed internally. That's not been Valve's position previously, with the first Half-Life getting the remake treatment, and even a Xen expansion, in the form of Black Mesa. The difference is that it started out as a mod, though the distinction has been blurred by it being sold on Steam Early Access. 

While Newell's response isn't an indication that Valve has any plans to remake Half-Life 2, modders have made plenty of demos, Unreal recreations and even a Half-Life 2 remake for the original Half-Life. 

Predicting what Valve is and isn't going to do is a losing game, even with reliable information, so I'm giving myself a 1 percent chance of getting this completely right. 

Valve is going to reveal the specs of its VR headset, the Valve Index, very soon, and we have good reason to believe it'll reveal some VR games along with it—one of which is rumored to be a Half-Life game.

Valve told me on April 1 that it was "targeting May 1st for pre orders and a full announcement" of the Valve Index. That plan may have changed (especially because the Borderlands 3 gameplay reveal is also happening this week), but the announcement will probably happen soon, because Valve also told me that it wants to start shipping hardware in June. I've asked Valve if this Wednesday is still the big day, and will update this post if I hear back.

We also know for sure that Valve has been working on three VR games, which Gabe Newell described as full-sized games (as opposed to tech demo-like projects such as The Lab) in February 2017. "We think we can make three big VR games," Newell said at the time. "We think that we know enough now to do that, and we're going to find out if that’s the case. We're pretty sure that all the other game developers are going to learn positive or negative lessons from what we do, which is sort of where we have to be right now."

Valve didn't tell me whether or not it's going to announce any of those games when pre-orders for the Index open up, but that seems like the obvious move. I'd be surprised if one or more weren't bundled with the headset to drive sales.

Now for the Half-Life part of it: In November of last year, a source told UploadVR that one of the three upcoming Valve VR games is a Half-Life prequel. At the same time, UploadVR's sources confirmed that leaked images of the Valve Index were the real deal, and that turned out to be true. The photos from November 2018 look just like the actual hardware that was revealed earlier this month.

Additionally, Valve News Network reported in March that "hlvr" and references to a shotgun appear in a Dota 2 update. Valve game files are full of references to other games, and that doesn't always mean anything, but it does strengthen the credibility of UploadVR's report from last year.

To recap, here's what we know for sure:

• Valve is going to reveal the specs of the Valve Index soon, possibly on Wednesday.
• Valve plans to start taking pre-orders at the same time as the announcement.
• Valve plans to start shipping the headsets in June.
• Valve has been developing three "big" VR games for at least a couple years.

And here's what we're speculating about:

• Valve will probably announce one or more of its VR games with the Index specs.
• One or more games may be bundled with the Index.
• One of the games is rumored to be a Half-Life game, though not Half-Life 3.

As always with Valve, there's a small chance it does what all signs suggest it's going to do, and a much bigger chance it throws us a curveball at 5 pm on a Friday evening—but I'm certain that I'm at least partially right about all this. 

We'll be keeping an eye on the Valve Index Steam page this Wednesday to see if anything happens, whether it includes Half-Life or not.

The Mobility Mod adds wall-running straight out of Titanfall 2 to Half-Life 2. With it, you can even kill enemies by jumping on their heads. 

While a version of the Mobility Mod has been around for a while now, the modder behind it has now released a v2 that is also compatible with both of Half-Life 2's episodic follow-ups. Among the changes are new melee controls, so you can perform rocket-boosted surge attacks and multi-target crowbar slashes. Using the surge attack in the air will even let you fly, at least for a moment.

You can download v2 of the Mobility Mod from ModDB.

Thanks, DSOGaming.