Since the release of Black Mesa, modders have been bending and shaping its spruced up Half-Life assets to create Source upgrades of every one of the game's expansions, demos and curios. But mod group Tripmine Studios are attempting to go it alone, Sourcing up Gearbox's Opposing Force expansion entirely from scratch. The name of their project? Operation Black Mesa. Wait, what?

Confusing name aside, it's looking like an accomplished upgrade of Adrian Shephard's adventures through the bowels of Black Mesa. It's certainly looks more muted than the other Black Mesa's visual shock and awe, but the lighting seems to nicely capture the underground claustrophobia of HL1's dated engine.

According to Tripmine's team leader Antonín Žoha, the multiplayer portion of the mod is due to arrive in Q1 2014, and will bring "classic modes like deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag and one brand new game mode for people who are also looking for something new." There's currently no release date for the singleplayer portion.

Despite the wait, you can already vote for Operation Black Mesa on Steam Greenlight. More details are available on the project's ModDB page. Also on ModDB are details of Tripmine's other expansion overhaul, Guard Duty, a Blue Shift remake.

More Operation Black Mesa screenshots below.

There are a few notable things about the Kickstarter campaign for Double Action. Firstly, the final game will be entirely free. It's a spiritual successor to The Specialists - a Half-Life mod with similar John Woo inspired acrobatics to Action Half-Life, but with added bullet time slow-mo for the multiplayer mayhem. Secondly, the pitch video is refreshingly frank about the team's distribution of funds, project scope and disinterest in stretch goals.

Thirdly (and most importantly?), the codename for the game's first version is Boogaloo.



Double Action: Boogaloo is a multiplayer shooter with an emphasis on style. "You fill up your Style Meter by doing stylish things - stunting, brawling, headshots, and so on. When your style meter fills up, your chosen style skill is activated." Diving, sliding and rolling feature heavily as you fight in ridiculously over-the-top slow motion battles.

The team are looking for $18,000 for a summer blitz on the game's development. With no price tag on the game, there's no minimum funding amount to get your hands on it - instead, purely cosmetic items are available at certain tiers.

It's also playable right now. The pre-alpha client is available on the Double Action forums, although, as the post warns, "It is probably crashy and everything is a placeholder. You may find it difficult to use."

Why no stretch goals? According to the Kickstarter page, "Those things would only detract from the game's design and create additional busywork for us." Instead, they're interested in using additional funds to support the game through further development and a Valve engine license.

More game footage below.

After using a Xen relay to slingshot itself across an interdimensional portal known as "the Internet," Black Mesa and its updates to Half-Life 1 continue to influence satellite mods that restore extended chunks of Gordon Freeman's tale. Next in line for Black-Mesa-fying: the Hazard Course, Gordon's optional and educational pit-stop for teaching movement and shooting basics.

Along with the standard face(granite?)-lift to the Hazard Course's bunker-like training areas and twisting pipes, the mod hopes to add a few new characters and areas for that extra bit of distraction as you eternally run late for that silly test chamber appointment. A notable planned addition is the tram station and the brief meeting with a few scientist overseers from the PlayStation 2 version of the game (here's a video), which is a rare opportunity to see one of the lab's normally stuffy pencil-pushers shirk procedure over a liability contract.

The mod just moved into its alpha stage after its team announced the first connection of all playable areas just yesterday. You can track the mod's progress over at Mod DB, and here's a few more screenshots showing off the completed work so far.

Now Black Mesa has fallen through a Source engine resonance cascade and out into the world, modders are piggy-backing off its upgraded assets to fill in the extended family of Gordon Freeman's original adventure. Black Mesa: Insecurity hopes to remake Gearbox's second expansion, Half-Life: Blue Shift, starring everybody's favourite beer-owing security guard Barney Rubble Calhoun.



"Overall what I hope to achieve is an experience similar to Black Mesa's in that the essence of what Blue Shift was remains intact while adding a major facelift and re-imagining to the rest," writes the mod's creator. He admits that this is a small project, being worked on during study breaks, but the team have already created a number of new models to go along with the repurposed Black Mesa files.

More screenshots below. The project's release is still "TBD," but yo can keep up to date with the latest work over at Insecurity's ModDB page.

It's been tested, it's been debated, and it's now available to all: Valve announces the official launch of the Steam Linux client after nearly four months in beta. Expectedly, a sale is going on for all Linux-supported games in Steam's catalog, including Crusader Kings II and Counter-Strike: Source.

The sale lasts until February 21 and takes 50 to 75 percent off the 54 games Linux users can slot into their brand new platform. Team Fortress 2 joins the revelry by automatically awarding a free and tradeable in-game Tux accessory for all Linux mercs jumping into the free-to-play shooter before May 1. Prepare for an avalanche of crates, Ubuntuans.

Grab the Steam Linux client and browse the full list of discounted titles on the sale page. Welcome to Steam, Linux gamers.

The Steam pages for Valve classics Half-Life and Counter-Strike have been updated with small, penguin-shaped icons. No, they aren't unsubtle emblems of a secret flightless waterfowl cabal, but they do signify newly added Linux support for both FPS games as part of Valve's compatibility push.

Valve recently released a Linux version of Steam and has since been retrofitting older games to run on the open-source OS. It's a neat affirmation of the company's goal to broaden the choices for PC gamers, but not everyone is convinced—id Software's John Carmack believes Linux is a useful tool but bad for business.

The faux movie poster that five minutes and Photoshop made.

Gabe Newell and director J.J. Abrams conversed on stage this morning at the D.I.C.E. (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) summit in Las Vegas. After a back-and-forth about player agency and storytelling (via Polygon's live blog), Newell revealed that the duo had been "recapitulating a series of conversations going on," and that they're now ready to "do more than talk": Newell suggested "either a Portal movie or a Half-Life movie," and Abrams said he'd like to make a game with Valve.

Abrams is the currently reigning king of big franchise sci-fi filmmaking, taking his throne in the director's chair of both the Star Trek and Star Wars series. He's also known for producing Fringe, Cloverfield, and the maddening tale that was Lost.

In 2010, Newell told us that if Valve were to make a Half-Life movie, it wouldn't hand over control to any Hollywood studio, saying:

"There was a whole bunch of meetings with people from Hollywood. Directors down there wanted to make a Half-Life movie and stuff, so they’d bring in a writer or some talent agency would bring in writers, and they would pitch us on their story. And their stories were just so bad. I mean, brutally, the worst. Not understanding what made the game a good game, or what made the property an interesting thing for people to be a fan of.

"That’s when we started saying 'Wow, the best thing we could ever do is to just not do this as a movie, or we’d have to make it ourselves.'"

There are no details on Newell and Abrams' project—be it game, film, or both—outside of the tease that they're talking. But they're talking, so how about some fun speculation? Who would you cast as Chell? Alyx Vance? Gordon Freeman? We love Bryan Cranston for the latter role, but he may have aged beyond Freeman. Is Hugh Laurie still a favorite?

Frankly, I'm not sure the Dragonball Z anime series appeals to everyone. It takes a special kind of patience to sit through half a season of two muscle-ridden warriors just taunting each other before commencing the clubbing. Thankfully, the upcoming Earth's Special Forces mod skips the drawl and cuts to the brawls between Goku, Vegeta, Frieza, and other characters from the show. The twist? Its stunning visuals are all built on Goldsource, the same engine used for Half-Life.

Earth's Special Forces isn't new. Its development team has worked on and released various alpha versions of the frenetic fighter for nearly a decade, but its not-so-New-Year's trailer shows off the most recent efforts of pushing the aged Goldsource engine to its absolute limit. Floored reactions are proof enough: "I absolutely cannot believe this is the Goldsource engine. Unbelievable," reads one comment on Reddit. "On what engine is this running? CryEngine 3?" asks another.

As for what you actually do in Earth's Special Forces, the mod's website explains it thus: "Select your favorite character and fly, power up, transform, melee, and beam your enemies into pulp. Each character is given signature moves and abilities to compliment different style of play. Some are stronger in hand-to-hand combat, others are better with energy attacks. Play in three different game modes: deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the Dragonballs."

Not many games offer a mode where you blow up half the planet while chasing after euphemistically named spheres, but Earth's Special Forces pulls it off in gorgeous style. You can grab an older and less-glossy alpha version here to check it out, though it carries significant bugs and non-working bots.

Black Mesa's overhaul of Gordon Freeman's educational field trip is a lovingly crafted tribute to the FPS classic, but it's still not entirely done. Although the team is working on the concluding Xen areas, certain earlier parts took cuts to stay on schedule. A notable example is the Surface Tension chapter which abruptly cuts off after a one-man assault on the dam section. Luckily, one gamer took it upon himself to design and restore missing levels with the Surface Tension Uncut mod.

Modder TextFAMGUY1's three levels cover Surface Tension's second half, including a tangle with a tank, flying alien manta ray things, and a lot more zappy noises. Like the majority of Black Mesa, the mod's level design incorporates new buildings and altered layouts while keeping the core pacing right on track with the 1998 original.

It's unknown if the Black Mesa team will go back at some point and release official updates to the shortened levels, but TextFAMGUY1's effort is here now, so head to Mod DB to download it, and keep an eye out for more of TextFAMGUY1's work—he's planning a retouch of the On a Rail chapter next.

Thanks, RPS.

Some 15 years ago, a little company called Valve was hard at work on a shooter you may have heard of called Half-Life. We came across this footage, courtesy of YouTuber MarphitimusBlackimus, peeling back the pan-dimensional curtain on the classic-to-be as it existed about a year before landing on store shelves.

Yeah, store shelves. Remember those? Good times...

From the entire room devoted solely to showing off colored lighting to the impressive (for the time) skeletal animations of the derp-faced MPs, it might be one of the most entertaining and intriguing nine minutes you watch today. So pop open a Surge, crank up some Hanson, and point your crosshairs down memory lane. Just watch out for the vortigaunts and... whatever that thing with a whole bunch of eyes for a face was called.