Yesterday, Valve unveiled a new compatibility ratings system for Steam Deck, intended to give users a clear indication of how well specific Steam games will run on the upcoming portable gaming PC. And now, a new beta update for Half-Life 2 has been discovered, seemingly released to ensure the seminal FPS meets the requirements needed to earn Steam Deck's top-tier Verified compatibility badge.

Half-Life 2's new beta branch update, as detailed by Valve watcher Tyler McVicker on his YouTube channel, reportedly covers a surprising amount of ground, not only making adjustments to the way the UI and resolution are handled in-game - primarily to ensure the FPS classic fits Steam Deck's aspect ratio and remains legible at its relatively diminutive size - but addressing some long-standing bugs as well.

Details on the latter are limited, but McVicker does highlight a few of the beta update's new UI and resolution scaling features. Perhaps most pertinent to Steam Deck, Half-Life 2's HUD is now unlocked and can scale "perfectly" to whatever aspect ratio it's being played on. Additionally, there's ultra-wide support, plus an FOV increase up to 110.

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Team Fortress 2, it's fair to say, is getting on a bit. The 14-year-old game remains incredibly popular on Steam, but over the past year it's hit the headlines for the wrong reasons, with bot problems that show no sign of disappearing. (Although we got to witness players conga-ing their way past the bots, at least.)

In any case, it seems the community has finally taken it upon themselves to give Team Fortress 2 a refresh, as a group of modders called Amper Software has started recreating the game in Garry's Mod spiritual successor s&box. The reason for this: they wondered what Team Fortress 2 would look like in Valve's newest engine, Source 2.

"Ever since Source 2 was first mentioned publicly as an engine that Valve was working on, a lot of people in the Team Fortress 2 community have started asking the question: if Valve ever ports TF2 to Source 2, what would it look like? How different gameplay would be? And would TF2 even feel the same?," the team explained in a blog post. "...s&box, the spiritual successor of Garry's Mod made on the Source 2 engine, has been released as part of a dev preview to a group of community members, including ourselves. It, pretty much, like Garry's Mod itself, allows you to build whatever you want using the toolset that it provides. So we've decided to not lose that chance."

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Left 4 Dead 2's iconic survivor line-up is embarking on another undead adventure, this time appearing as playable characters in developer Rebellion's Zombie Army 4: Dead War.

Coach, Ellis, Nick, and Rochelle - who debuted in Valve's seminal co-operative FPS sequel all the way back in 2009 (and who finally returned to action in 2020's official The Last Stand update) - come to Zombie Army 4 as part of Rebellion's free Left 4 Dead Character Pack 2, available now on all platforms. They follow the original Left 4 Dead's cast, who joined Zombie Army 4 as playable characters earlier this year.

The new group's arrival coincides with Zombie Army 4's Season 3 finale, which wraps up its current storyline in new campaign mission Return to Hell. "Our intrepid squad [are thrust] back into the underworld," teases Rebellion, "but this time it is a haunted manifestation of Schweiger's mind which they must survive in order to free him from Baron Umbra."

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Valve has reportedly sanctioned the release of Half-Life 2: Remastered Collection, a passion-project mod that "completely overhauls" the seminal shooter.

As noted by SteamDB (thanks, PCGN), the collection comes from Filip Victor and is "not Valve related", but Tyler McVicker - who focuses on news about Valve and Steam - reports that the remaster has "Valve's consent".

It's apparently the next iteration of the fantastic mod Half-Life 2: Update, a "completely free and extensive community-developed update for Half-Life 2 featuring beautiful lighting, countless bug fixes, and a brand new Community Commentary Mode". It's available to anyone who owns Half-Life 2 on PC and offers "countless" bug fixes in "one free standalone download".

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It's no secret that Team Fortress 2 has a bit of a bot problem, but the game also has a community that really enjoys mid-match shenanigans - and the two combined today in one of the funniest posts about TF2 bots I've seen so far.

Reddit user 2Noel posted footage of an Attack/Defend match in which Blu team was pitted against a bunch of bots - normally not great news for those wanting to keep their heads on their shoulders. Yet the team decided to try a different tactic to just charging into battle, instead choosing to conga their way out of spawn and onto the control points. And surprisingly, it worked. Stay tuned for the satisfying bot slaughter at the end of the match:

The question you're probably asking right now is: why didn't the bots shoot the Blu team members? The answer, it seems, is that the bots are programmed to avoid shooting players who are using taunts and emotes. If you look closely at the video, you'll notice that players not engaged in the conga line (such as poor old atomdotdat) are instantly sniped by the bots, while the dancers remain unharmed.

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Valve's 2007 shooter Team Fortress 2 just broke its all-time concurrent players count.

According to Steam's official stats, the multiplayer FPS hit a peak of 151,253 concurrent players on Steam on Friday night.

The previous high was 147,360 concurrent players in December. At the time of this article's publication, Team Fortress 2 had 141,741 concurrent players on Steam.

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Kim Swift, lead designer on Portal, has joined Xbox Game Studios to work on its publishing programme.

Xbox announced the hire today via a Twitter post which mentioned Swift's role would be to "accelerate our innovation and collaborate with independent studios to build games for the cloud".

Swift is most famous for her stint at Valve, which began when her portal-based game demo Narbacular Drop impressed Valve bosses and she was roped on board.

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A movie version of Portal is back on track, Star Trek and Lost director J.J. Abrams has said, nearly a decade after we first heard of its existence.

The project still sounds far-off, and there's no word on what has been holding up development - but the wheels now seem to be turning.

"We actually do have a script that's being written for the Portal movie now at [Warner Bros.]," Abrams said today (thanks, IGN) "We're really excited about the take and the pitch, so it feels like that thing's finally on the rails.

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Another week, another set of attention-grabbing headlines in video games. Join Eurogamer news editor Tom Phillips, Eurogamer reporter Emma Kent and me in the video below as we run through the news that matters. Bong!

We start with the PlayStation 5's first big update, which comes five months after the console came out. This update finally lets you move games to USB storage - a feature the PS5 really should have had at launch. We chat about why this improvement is so important, but also discuss the state of the console itself as it approaches half a year out in the wild. Is the PS5 where it needs to be? Is it already playing catch-up in terms of features with Microsoft's Xbox Series X? And what do we want next from PS5?

Elsewhere, we chat about Nintendo's latest indie showcase (there's a lot of Fez talk, sorry!), before moving on to the ever-eventful world of Cyberpunk 2077. (Emma's report on what could be DLC for that game is well worth a read.) Can CD Projekt turn Cyberpunk around? The company has vowed to stick with it, at least.

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It's been nearly a year since the bot situation in Team Fortress 2 escalated to a point where Valve had to get involved, but despite those efforts to curb the infestation, the problem has not gone away. Along with bots using game-ruining hacks, bots in casual servers are continuing to use racist usernames and spam voice chat with loud noises. There are now reports that bots are increasingly being used to advertise bots and bot immunity - and disturbingly, that some claim to offer links to child sexual abuse images.

Eurogamer has seen screenshots of bots using Team Fortress 2's chat function to advertise links to ecommerce platforms such as Shoppy, where bot hosters have found ways to monetise their disruptive efforts. Along with offering the option to rent bots, stores are offering the option to purchase "bot immunity" to allow the player to be ignored by that particular brand of bots. It's basically a virtual protection racket.

This seems to have been an issue for the past few months, as posts about bot immunity first appeared three months ago, but reports of these adverts are continue to pop up on Reddit.

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