Earth's Special Forces is a mod for the original Half-Life's engine (not Half-Life 2's Source) that transforms Valve's shooter into a massive arena for Dragonball Z battles.
It's a third-person fighting game with a few different modes (you can team up for deathmatches, etc). Being a mod it's a constant work-in-progress, and comes with a warning that "there is a learning curve so newbies beware", but if that doesn't deter you, the mod can be downloaded below.
Earth's Special Forces mod for Half-Life [ModDB]
For years now, there have been rumors and reports of a now-cancelled Half-Life 2 episode called Half-Life 2: Return to Ravenholm. The project, an overview of which can be found at the Combine Overwiki, was to be a collaboration between Valve and Dishonored-makers Arkane, and would, presumably, take players back to the creepy, zombie-infested village of Ravenholm. The existence and cancellation of Return to Ravenholm was confirmed by Valve's Marc Laidlaw in January of last year.
The folks at ValveTime have posted what they claim to be some new unearthed prototype screenshots from the long-cancelled project. They've compiled them into the video above, as well. For clarity's sake: These screens are old, and no one has any reason to think the project has been un-cancelled or anything like that.
Seeing as how the images come from an unconfirmed (by us) source and the game apparently never got very far into development, I'd suggest taking them with a grain of salt. I've reached out to both Arkane and Valve to ask about their authenticity, and will update if I hear back. Still... absorption? Interesting.
It wouldn't be an article about Half-Life unless I closed with some sort of Half-Life 3 joke, so… no, you know what? This one time I'm not gonna do it.
New Images of Half-life 2: Episode 4 / Return to Ravenholm [ValveTime, thanks Glenn]
This footage is taken from something called Half-Life Alpha, a demo of Valve's classic shooter playable in 1997, a year before the game would eventually be released.
As you'll quickly see, most of this is actually a tech demo. Which might explain why there's a Macross Pod hiding in a stairwell.
Update - Ah, the video was captured from a leak of the demo itself. Want to try it out yourself? Have at it.
Half-Life Alpha v 0.52 (9/4/97) - Tech Demo Gameplay [MarphitimusBlackimus, via PC Gamer]
Fresh off their success with The Walking Dead series, as well as experience with half a dozen other properties that belong to someone else, developers Telltale have told Red Bull (the website of... the drink) what their dream projects are.
And they're about the same as anyone else's dream projects.
"Coming from LucasArts we always felt we could do a great Star Wars story game," Telltale's CEO and co-founder Dan Connors says. "We also love the idea of building out a deeper story to a great game franchise, something like Half Life Stories or Halo Stories."
I'm pretty sure Halo's story is already deep enough, thanks, but it'd be hilarious to see someone try and make a narrative-driven adventure game out of Half-Life. The Adventures of Lamarr & Barney...
The Walking Dead: Bringing the World's Smartest Zombie Series to Life [Red Bull]
Boom.
Boom.
What's that sound? The coffee on my desk is shaking.
Boom.
Boom.
Oh god, look at that. At the window. It's a super ambitious Jurassic Park game made using Valve's source engine. Stay perfectly still, and it won't be able to see us.
The game/mod, called Jurassic Life, is a collaboration between a group of volunteers. They're sure to note that the video demo above is still very much a work in progress. I've seen the source engine do a lot of the interior stuff they've got going on here, but the jungles are something else.
Half the time I was playing Far Cry 3, I was sort of wishing there were dinosaurs. Jurassic Life looks like it'll satisfy that desire. The team is looking for a coder/programmer and another modeler, so if you've got some experience in those areas, head over to their site and help them make this grand-looking thing into a reality.
Jurassic Life [via Cinemablend]
Photography student David A. Reeves likes video games and movies with guns in them. So he's found an awesome way to combine all three, crafting intricate little silhouettes of game and movie scenes out of paper then taking photos of them.
If you think the results look a lot like Limbo, that's cool, he's got several images based on the atmospheric platformer. But his settings for Half-Life, Thief, Dark Souls and Aliens are pretty great too.
You can see more images, as well as some neat "making of" shots, below.
David Allen Reeves [Tumblr, thanks Crimegoat!]
Sadly, it won't make the holiday shopping season, but toy company NECA's replica Half-Life 2 gravity gun will be available for purchase next Spring.
It's 1:1 scale, and as you can see from the prototype below, lights up as well. Since this is the same company behind the replica Portal guns, you could probably expect some sound effects as well.
1:1 Half-Life Gravity Gun Coming From NECA In 2013 [TNI]
We chatted with film director Guillermo del Toro at the New York Comic-Con earlier this year, and he told us one of his dream jobs would be to make a movie with Valve.
Turns out the feeling's mutual.
In an interview with New Rising Media, Valve writer Marc Laidlaw outlined three directors who, for varying reasons, he thinks could all do a great job bringing Gordon Freeman's sci-fi adventures to the big screen.
"If Paul Verhoeven returned to science fiction films, he would do something insane with Half-Life… maybe something objectionably insane, but at least not boring", he says. "Peter Jackson has proved himself an amazing purveyor of faithful adaptations. Guillermo del Toro has the horror vibe that I think a lot of people miss out on when thinking about a Half-Life movie. Half-Life is essentially horror after all. The science in it barely passes as hand-waving, but when a headcrab jumps at your head, it's a precisely engineered jolt. There are probably a lot of good potential directors, but I think most of them are busy pursuing their own visions."
Man, a Paul Verhoeven—he of RoboCop and Total Recall fame—Half-Life movie... what a thing that would be.
Interview With Marc Laidlaw: The Writer Of Half-Life [New Rising Media, via PC Gamer]
Supremely talented custom toy builder Jin Saotome is back with another masterpiece, this time featuring the Half-Life series' most sharply-dressed bad guy, the headcrab zombie.
Standing 7" tall, the headcrab comes off to reveal a zombified skull inside. He's also got a busted-open chest and some great blood detail.
The good news? He's for sale! The bad news? He's up on eBay, so the bids might get a little out of control.
Custom HEADCRAB ZOMBIE Half Life 2 [eBay, via Gamesniped]
Remember when you first finished Half-Life 2: Episode 2? The excitement? The shock? You were ready to set out with Alyx at your side, ready to show those alien bastards who's boss. The trilogy, and with it, the Combine's rule over Earth, would end soon.
Except it didn't. At the time of this writing, almost five years have passed since the supposed release date of the final installment in Gordon Freeman's saga. Half-Life 2: Episode Three was slated to arrive Christmas 2007. It didn't. As the weeks and months went by, confused fans tried to glean whatever information they could from Valve, but, by and large, they were unsuccessful. The company remained silent.
In this Kotaku Timeline, we follow the fans' process of dealing with Valve's silence, cataloging their forays into leaked code, and their communications with the developers. We detail the ways the gaming press interacted with Valve over the years, and list what little has been revealed. In addition, we will keep watch over the game, and take note of any events, good or bad, in the months and years to come.
There were no mentions of the final episode—called Half-Life 3 by some—between 1999, when Valve registered the domain halflife3.com, and 2006. But then, announcements were made, and names were dropped. And so this is where our timeline begins...
GTTV: Episode 3. What do we know about it? What can you tell us?
Gabe: From our point of view there's enough newness in there that we want to sort of spring it on people and say "here's a bunch of things you've never seen before" — we have multiple of those.
GTTV: And that's graphically, or in terms of the gameplay, or...
Gabe: There's stuff that visually hasn't been in games before, and there's certainly a bunch of game elements, on the order of Portal, that have never been done before.
GTTV: So even better than the portal gun?
Gabe: Oh yeah.
GTTV: Really? New gameplay paradigms?
Gabe: Uh-huh. I think that we're really happy with how the Orange Box did, and we'd do an Oranger Box next time, certainly.
Steamcast: Alright, first question: this is one of the most commonly asked questions that we had received and we've tried to format it into something you might be able to answer: you'd kept Episode 3 under incredibly heavy wraps thus far; we'd like to know why have you chosen to adapt such a reclusive approach this time around, as opposed to previous releases. Was it based on the reception you'd received about letting out too much info prior to Episode 2, or just something completely different?
Gabe Newell: I think that what's going on, you know, we're sort of always experimenting, we're always trying out different kinds of things, and that has positive as well as negative consequences for ourselves and for the community—so if you look at our different products, we're trying out these different rhythms. (Ed.: Here Gabe talks about how Valve handles updates for Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead.) Right now, the Half-Life 2 episodes themselves are on a third sort of rhythm, and, you know, we think it makes sense for the product and for what we're trying to do there. The reason that we're not talking about anything is mainly that we don't have anything to say; it's not like we decided we released too much information, it's just that if we had information that we were in a position to deliver to people, we would—and right now we don't have anything to say about it. It really is a consequence of these different rhythms to release schedules we're trying out. (...) So, Ep 3 is sort of victim to our willingness to experiment, and as soon as we have stuff that we're ready to say about Ep 3, we will.
Steamcast: Alright, fair enough.