Goodness me, happy birthday Half-Life! 20 years old today. But are you still as fresh as the day you were born? I’ve been re-playing the game for the first time in many years to find out. And crikey, it’s a bit good.

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To celebrate Half-Life‘s twentieth birthday today [more on that later today -continuity ed.], the Black Mesa gang have made a new trailer showing progress on their commercial Half-Life fan remake’s final chapters, the alien world of Xen. They also say that they’re now planning to add the Xen chapter in 2019, some time from March to the end of June, so that’s three-ish years after the early access debut of its terrestrial chapters. I am pleased with how alive parts look.

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The thing about special Halloween game modes is that they’re fun for a round or two, then the novelty wears off. The thing about Team Fortress 2‘s Halloween mode is that there are 18 of them.

Ok, so only 5 of those are new – but you can also play the 13 previous Halloween events, which would be enough to last you all year if the event didn’t end on November 14th. Valve have turned to their community for the new stuff in Scream Fortress X (not a sex thing), introducing five maps with their own game modes. I’ve spent the morning fuelling ghost ships, resurrecting corpses and running away from skeletons.

It is hot messy nonsense and I’ve enjoyed myself considerably. (more…)

The latest Half-Life mod to resurface, repacked and polished on Steam is Halfquake Trilogy – defining ‘masocore’ well before I Wanna Be The Guy made it a genre. Halfquake is a trilogy of surreal and cruel puzzle-centric mods by Philipp “Muddasheep” Lehner and they’re some of the most interesting maps produced for the original Half-Life. Featuring striking, abstract environments, genuinely clever puzzles, some very stupid ones and enough deathtraps to wear the ink off your quicksave key. They’re worth playing, if just to test the water and your tolerance for pain.

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While Black Mesa may be rebuilding Half-Life‘s world on a slightly more modern foundation, modder James “MrGnang” Cockburn reckons there’s some life in Valve’s old GoldSrc engine yet. Half-Life: Echoes is an impressive mod released last Friday, putting the player in the shoes of a scientist elsewhere in the Black Mesa facility when everything goes to hell. Cue the usual running, gunning, fighting soldiers and weird aliens, all while marvelling at some genuinely impressive architecture that I just hadn’t thought possible. Just be warned – this one pulls no punches.

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Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Team Fortress 2 jumping. It’s a lot like normal TF2, only rather the shooting people the goal is to propel yourself skywards using explosively powered movement techniques on custom designed maps. Yeah, it’s nothing like normal TF2.

Jumpers have tournaments too though. They’ve spent the past month hopping through three separate events in the Beginnings 5 competition. With the competition now over, they’ve settled down again – and left us with some impressive aerial highlights. I’ve gathered the victors’ videos below, and got a couple of the jumpers to sit still long enough to tell me about why they do what they do.

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Then the bus EXPLODED. Hello, this is the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, and we are here to talk about the best game openings and intros. Whether they are cold opens or slow burns, we love a good first impression. (more…)

Ah, the non-player character. Stoic endurer of all our sadistic whims. It s time the monsters on the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, made tribute to these humble little robots, whether they re annoying companions, side characters, or disembodied human heads. Let s talk about some of our favourites. (more…)

There’s a ‘this is the pinnacle of esports’ joke right there on the table, but I’m gonna say straight up that Ready Steady Pan is an absolute mess to spectate. But what a spectacularly daft mess it is.

This is 6v6 Team Fortress 2, where everyone is only allowed to attack with frying pans and food. And urine, for some reason. The community-run “semi-competitive tournament” is nearly done accepting sign-ups for its fourth annual competition, which kicks off at the start of next week. (more…)

Sometimes, things just take time. When an amateur team remake an FPS classic up to AAA standards in a modern engine in their spare time? Yeah, that’ll take a while, but the patience seems to be paying off for fans of Black Mesa. While so so far the ambitious (and Valve-endorsed) Half-Life remake has mostly adhered to the structure of the original, developers Crowbar Collective reckon that they can do better with Xen. While the core concepts and story beats are still present, everything else is being re-designed from the ground up. It’s looking lovely, and nearing completion.

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