The Left 4 Dead community has been left confused and amused by the appearance of a purple-coloured fifth protagonist to the game's fan-authored wiki.

"Purple Francis" was recently added to the encyclopaedic fan resource in quite some detail. While drive-by vandalism of wiki pages is common, the character was an unusually committed creation, spread across dozens of the site's pages. It was enough for the matter to quickly get noticed and blow up on Twitter:

Wiki entries detailed a fictional backstory and development history for the character - including his removal by Valve from retail copies of the game due to negative feedback, since Purple Francis was "just a recolouring of Francis" turned... purple.

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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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The irrepressible Left 4 Dead 2 gets its first major DLC in eight years today.

The Last Stand is an update for Left 4 Dead 2 "created by the community, for the community", that arrives eight years after the Cold Stream DLC came out in 2012.

It includes over 20 new survival arenas, four new scavenge arenas and a campaign based on The Lighthouse survival map. There are also 30 new achievements, melee weapons, animations, dialogue and competitive balance adjustments. Here's the official trailer:

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Valve will release a new update for Left 4 Dead 2, almost 11 years after its co-operative zombie shooter was first unleashed.

The Last Stand does not yet have a release date - the finer details are still on their way, Valve has said in an official blog post - but the update is very real.

It is, as Left 4 Dead 2 fans will likely know, a community-made effort (this isn't the first time Valve has approved community content for a long-dormant game and released it under an official guise).

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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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