It's almost surprising these measures hadn't already been introduced, but Valve has finally addressed complaints about a swarm of bots invading Team Fortress 2 matches. No, not the ones in Mann versus Machine - racist, hacking, horrible bots.

As highlighted in a report by Kotaku, bots had been flooding servers by spamming the chat with racial and homophobic slurs, and also deploying game-breaking hacks. Players on the TF2 subreddit and Steam forums made dozens of posts to highlight the problem, and in the absence of an official response from Valve, some had even created a "TF2 hacker police" subreddit to document the bots and target them in-game.

Hopefully the vigilante bot squad is no longer needed, however, as Valve has introduced a number of changes aimed to tackle the problem. The patch notes for yesterday's update explain that restrictions will be placed on "certain new accounts" to prevent them using chat in official matchmaking modes, which should make it harder for bots to cause problems before they can be banned. "Work is ongoing" to find further solutions to prevent new and free accounts being used for abusive purposes, but in the meantime, players can now disable text chat and voice chat, and further detail has been added to the Report Player dialog "so players can make informed decisions about who they're reporting".

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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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Valve has added a tribute to Rick May, the voice of the Soldier, inside Team Fortress 2.

May, who was also the voice actor behind Star Fox's Peppy and his iconic "Do a barrel roll" line in Star Fox 64, passed away aged 79 earlier in April after contracting coronavirus. In February of this year May suffered a stroke and entered a nursing home.

Valve's understated patch notes for its Team Fortress 2 update stated: "Added a tribute to Rick May, voice of the Soldier." But players have found this tribute is fairly extensive, with the main menu given over to Soldier, and memorial statues in the maps. Additionally, players have reported that players near these statues will hear various Soldier lines.

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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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Over a decade since it was cancelled, Valve's unreleased Portal prequel, F-Stop has been revived via an unusual source: an indie developer.

F-Stop, which began life as a Valve experiment before it was set to be the next Portal game following the release of the Orange Box in 2007, revolved around taking pictures in the game world, with the pictures then used to create in-game objects. Portals and the Portal gun were nowhere to be seen.

F-Stop was eventually canned and Valve went on to release Portal 2 in April 2011. Gameplay of F-Stop was never officially released, with Valve keeping its cards close to its chest in case it fancied returning to the in-game camera mechanic. But now, over a decade later, an indie developer has said it has permission from Valve itself to show off the F-Stop mechanic using F-Stop's source code - and it released a video revealing how it all works.

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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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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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