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.

🥳🎂🎈🎉!

Call of Duty: Mobile, the free-to-play version of CoD with two currencies, a battle pass, and a battle royale mode, will be coming out on October 1. And you won't have to play it on your phone or tablet. 

The Android emulator GameLoop promises to have support for mouse-and-keyboard controls and "exclusive key mapping" when Call of Duty: Mobile arrives on October 1. Whether the fact you're using an emulator will be detected by the servers so you can be matched against other player on emulators—as is the case with PUBG Mobile—remains to be seen.

I can't imagine the system requirements will be particularly high, so maybe this will be a valid alternative for the CoD fan stuck on a student laptop or office computer.

Thanks, DSOGaming.

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. 

Casey Viner, one of the men involved in the 2017 swatting incident that prompted police to surround and ultimately shoot and kill a man, has been sentenced to 15 months in prison. A statement issued by the United States Attorney's Office for the District of Kansas (via Polygon) said Viner will serve two years on "supervised release" after his sentence is complete, during which time he will be forbidden from playing online games, and must pay $2,500 in restitution.

Viner initially pleaded not guilty to the charges but changed his plea earlier this year, agreeing to guilty pleas on one count of conspiracy and one count of obstructing justice. He admitted to asking co-defendant Tyler Barriss to swat co-defendant Shane Gaskill following a dispute over a Call of Duty match. Gaskill provided Barriss a false address, however, which led Wichita police to the home of 28-year-old Andrew Finch. Finch stepped onto the front porch of his surrounded house, as demanded by police, and when he made what the District Attorney described as "a move that startled officers," an officer shot and killed him.

"Swatting, and soliciting others to swat someone, are more than foolish," US Attorney Stephen McAllister said. "Such actions are reckless, dangerous and, as this case proves, potentially tragic. Swatting is not a prank, and it is no way to resolve disputes among gamers. Once again, I call upon gamers to self-police their community to ensure that the practice of swatting is ended once and for all."

Barriss, who actually carried out the swat attack by calling police, pleaded guilty to 51 counts and was sentenced to 20 years in prison earlier this year. Gaskill has been placed on "deferred prosecution," which according to a Business Insider report from May will likely see the charges against him dropped if he pays $1,000 restitution and other penalties by the end of 2020. The officer who  killed Finch was not charged, but Finch's family filed a civil suit against the city in 2018.

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.

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

You only need to shoot once in the entire opening level of Unreal, and that's to break the glass on the emergency exit control. Which is not to say it's peaceful. Unreal's first map is its most intense, in spite of the lack of pew-pew action.

It begins with a crash. You come to in a prison cell on a wrecked spaceship, the door open and the other prisoners dead. There's a roar and scream in the distance, and as you step out a robotic voice declares that "Prisoner 849 is escaping." 

You make your way through the rupturing, exploding guts of this prison ship, crawling through vents and hunting for med packs (you start at one-third health thanks to the crash). During all this you hear more screaming in the distance, Unreal's excellent 3D sound doing as much work as its groundbreaking 3D graphics. Then you get to the corridor.

There's a blast door ahead of you, and one behind. But while the one behind you locks itself, the one ahead is jammed inches off the floor. There are voices and swearing from the other side, then flashes as guns go off. All that shooting doesn't help, and when the door finally rises all you see is dismembered body parts and a glimpse of a long-haired alien leaving the scene.

Shortly after that you make it out of the ship, stepping onto an alien world. The sky is bright, with a huge moon hanging low. You're in a canyon that's been carved up by the crash landing, and there's a rabbity alien hopping around at your feet. After all those corridors and vents it's a breathtaking moment of openness, one that later games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 would recreate.

Before long you're shooting aliens, often back in corridors, but Unreal's beginning sets up a tension the rest of the game benefits from. No matter how big the flak cannon you pick up, you still remember what just one alien was capable of. You never underestimate them. At the time of its release Unreal was mostly a revelation for its graphics, but it's this well-paced beginning that's more impressive today.

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.