Half-Life is back, and that's all anyone is talking about. But spare a thought for that other old Valve game, Team Fortress 2.

A cursory glance at the Team Fortress 2 community reveals it's resigned to defeat after a recent report confirmed Valve has pretty much downed tools on the team-based shooter.

In the video below, Valve News Network reports on an interview with veteran Valve employee Greg Coomer, who said "hardly anyone" is working on Team Fortress 2. According to Coomer, Valve is "just going to try and not shut it down or anything". Here's the quote:

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Five of the Best is a weekly series about things you probably don't pay attention to when playing a game. Things like backpacks, zip wires, hands - we've had an eclectic bunch so far.

They sound insignificant but they provide essential flavour to a game, and you'll find they're welded to your memories of them. Try thinking about the best hands in games, for example - do any surface? Give it a moment: I bet a few appear. Hold onto that feeling - I want you to use it below.

Let's try another, let's try today's: Five of the Best...

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Stress levels faced by top-level esports players are equal to those experienced by professional athletes.

That's according to a new study from the University of Chichester, which looked at the psychological impact of major esports contests on those taking part.

The study, titled Identifying Stressors and Coping Strategies of Elite Esports Competitors, will be published in the International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations.

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Like Doc Brown, I once hit my head and saw the future. I didn't come round in the bathroom having the idea for the Flux Capacitor, but I did bonk my noggin pretty hard in the office games room and sit back, dazed but delighted with what had just happened.

I was playing the Budget Cuts demo on Valve's room-scale VR. Budget Cuts is a game about infiltrating an office that's patrolled with deadly robots. Because of the room-scale VR, you're really there: your actual body is your in-game body. This means that the robots are the same size as you - which is terrifying - and it also means that when you have to duck your head through a missing panel in the floor to look into the room below, you really have to do it. Except that while the game floor might be missing a panel, the real floor isn't. Bonk. I did it. Chris Bratt, who had also played the demo, had done it. A day later, so moved by what I'd played I brought in a friend to try it out. They did it too. We all hit our heads and we all saw the future.

More than just the future of video games, I really felt like I had seen the future of one series in particular. I still think this. I still think that Budget Cuts is essentially the closest I've ever gotten to playing Half-Life 3. It's not set in the Half-Life universe, although its mixture of horrific technology and the banal and bureaucratic is not a million miles away. It wasn't made by a Valve team, although I gather the people who made it did end up working on the final game at Valve as incubees. Instead, it channels that magical thing that Half-Life has always done.

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UPDATE 19/11/19: After 12 long years of waiting, and enough "3"-based memes to fill an entire internet, it's finally official - there's a new Half-Life game on the way. As previously rumoured, it's called Half-Life: Alyx and Valve describes it as the company's "flagship VR game".

Half-Life: Alyx will be given the full reveal treatment this Thursday, 21st November, at 6pm in the UK/10am Pacific Time. Valve hasn't said where yet, but it seems reasonable to assume it'll pop up on Twitter and will be plastered all over the front page of Steam.

ORIGINAL STORY 18/11/19: A formal announcement of Valve's long-in-development Half-Life VR project looks finally on the horizon.

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When you get to the end of a hard-fought round in Left 4 Dead 2, you're usually crawling towards a rugged red door. Maybe there's only two of your zombie-slaying quartet left... your health bars stripped away by the horde, your eyesight drained of colour, signalling that one more knockdown equals permadeath. If you're lucky, you push through the pain and make it into the safe room on borrowed time, grab some ammo and shoot the charging zombies to carve a safe route for the rest of your team.

That's unless you're playing Funny Doors. Funny Doors dictates that if you get into the safe room before a fellow survivor, in spite of earning those precious 25 points for letting them live to see the next round, you must hammer the E button to open and close the safe room door as they approach, turning the final moments of each round into one hilarious test of strength.

Left 4 Dead 2's safe room doors have a serious heft to them, and as such, each swing animation creates a tiny window of opportunity for the survivor to get past your self-flagellating trap as they howl at you on comms. Usually, they'll get pummeled by a charger and you'll have to head out and save them. It's an evil habit. Barbaric, you could say, but it's one of many peculiar bits of communal context that have ensured this game has become a weekly inevitability where many modern titles have failed to hold our attention.

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Video games are a small window into Chinese life, but they're a window nonetheless, and video games themselves, in China, are huge. China accounts for more than half of the entire planet's PC gaming revenue. In fact, despite it being smaller than mobile gaming there, China's PC gaming market alone made over $15bn in 2018; more than half the entire amount of revenue made in the US gaming industry overall, including consoles, mobile, the lot. Going by the numbers of analyst firm Niko Partners, as of 2018 there were a total of about 630 million gamers in China - a little over 8 percent of humans on the planet.

Huge. But we know there are lots of people in China, and we know lots of them play games. What's really interesting is that these people are playing games in what is, on paper, the most aggressively censored system around. I suspect this sort of thing is why economists love visiting China, even if doing so is a risk: everything is a case study.

Games are no different. Under Chinese law, video games can't contain anything that "threatens China's national unity, sovereignty, or territorial integrity". They can't harm "the nation's reputation, security or interests". They can't promote cults, or "superstitions". They can't "incite obscenity, drug use, violence or gambling" - although loot boxes are, of course, fine (in fact Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad reckons a Chinese game may have invented them as far back as 2003) - and they can't include anything that "harms public ethics" or China's "culture and traditions". They also can't include any "other content" that might violate China's constitution or law, whatever that may be, and they have to be published in China by a Chinese company.

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Techland's four-and-a-half year-old zombie kill 'em-up Dying Light is getting a surprise crossover with Valve's 10 year-old zombie kill 'em-up Left 4 Dead 2.

The announcement was made over at the Dying Light Twitter page alongside an image showing Left 4 Dead 2-style weapons raised and ready for action.

It's a surprise crossover, but a welcome one - and it's worth remembering both games remain popular on Steam, where they're in the top 100 games by current player count.

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Valve has fixed NPCs not blinking in Half-Life 2, its 15-year-old shooter that may never see a sequel.

That's not all. Valve has also fixed missing sounds on Combine soldiers, fixed a hitch when saving games, and fixed SteamVR running when entering the settings menu.

The update is for Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, and Half-Life: Source. So, all the Half-Life 2s!

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Earlier this year, the first major investigation into corruption in Australian esports revealed allegations of professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players rigging matches.

Last month, Kotaku Australia reported six Australians had been arrested in connection with the investigation, but were later released "pending further inquiries".

Now, an ABC News report has revealed an Australian Overwatch Contenders team has found itself under fire also.

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