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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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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Earlier this month Valve's Gabe Newell announced he - alongside Weta Workshop and Rocket Lab - would be launching a garden gnome into space for charity, with $1 being donated for everyone that watches. And now the time has come to wave goodbye to Gnome Chompski, who is preparing for lift-off early tomorrow, 20th November, in the UK.

The whole affair is, of course, inspired by Half-Life 2: Episode 2's Little Rocket Man achievement - still one of the finest achievements ever created - which required players to carry an otherwise innocuous garden gnome from the start of the game to a rocket ship near its end. This is not, as anyone who's tried it will tell you, an easy task, thanks to the gnome's infuriating tendency to randomly launch out of Episode 2's open-top vehicles, courtesy of some exuberant physics.

Newell's recreation of Gnome Chompski's Episode 2 adventure thankfully skips to the end, and will see the iconic garden ornament - actually a 6-inch titanium recreation of Chompski created by Weta Workshop, in this instance - blast into space at 2.44pm NZT/1.44am in the UK on 20th November, which equates to 8.44pm EST on 19th November.

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Half-Life 2: Episode 2's Little Rocket Man achievement - still one of the finest achievements ever created, if you ask me - is poised to become reality, as Valve's Gabe Newell prepares to launch a garden gnome into space for charity.

Little Rocket Man was a notoriously tricksy achievement to secure, forcing players to carry an entirely innocuous garden gnome - dubbed Gnome Chompski - from the start of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 to a rocket ship toward the end of the game.

It's the stuff of legend, in large part thanks to Chompski's casual disregard for the laws of physics - which would often, infuriatingly, result in the gnome's impromptu high-velocity launch from the back of your open-top vehicle whenever it reached speeds higher than single digits - and Newell will be commemorating it as part of a drive to raise money for the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit of children's hospital Starship, in Auckland, New Zealand.

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We'll never get to play Ravenholm, the cancelled Half-Life spin-off once in the works at Arkane Studios, but we can at least now see a little bit of it in action for ourselves.

The footage comes from The Untold History of Arkane, a fascinating feature length documentary from Noclip which speaks to several of those behind the project and shows extended sections of alpha gameplay.

Arkane, known for its more recent work on the Dishonored series and Prey, worked on the Ravenholm project as a standalone spin-off from Valve's Half-Life series.

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Five of the Best is a weekly series about the small details we rush past when we're playing but which shape a game in our memory for years to come. Details like the way a character jumps or the title screen you load into, or the potions you use and maps you refer back to. We've talked about so many in our Five of the Best series so far. But there are always more.

Five of the Best works like this. Various Eurogamer writers will share their memories in the article and then you - probably outraged we didn't include the thing you're thinking of - can share the thing you're thinking of in the comments below. Your collective memory has never failed to amaze us - don't let that stop now!

Today's Five of the Best is...

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It's been well over a decade since the release of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, and with Half-Life: Alyx - the enormously long-awaited next instalment in Valve's seminal FPS series - mere months away, there are likely more than a few people in need of a story refresher. Luckily, Valve's on the case, and is making all previous series entries free on Steam for a limited time.

Although Half-Life: Alyx unfolds prior to the events of Half-Life 2, many characters and story elements, as Valve explains in a new Steam post, are shared. As such, "The Half-Life: Alyx team believes that the best way to enjoy the new game is to play through the old ones, especially Half-Life 2 and the episodes, so we want to make that as easy as possible."

To that end, all Steam users will be able to download and play Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, and Half-Life 2: Episode 2 for free until Half-Life Alyx launches some time in March. That's not quite everything, however; Valve is also including original Half-Life expansion packs Opposing Force and Blue Shift (both created by Borderlands studio Gearbox back in the day), plus Team Fortress Classic for those hankering for a bit of multiplayer nostalgia.

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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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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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