Since it'll never actually happen, Martin Latta has gone and given the world the next best thing: unofficial LEGO Half-Life 2.
It's not the first custom LEGO we've seen around these parts, we know. But in building the Combine's colossal Strider, and nailing every detail about it, Latta does enough to stand out from the crowd.
While you're taking it all in, you should also check out the Combine Transport he built last year (as well as some Crysis stuff), also viewable from his Flickr page.
Half-Life [thire5 @ Flickr, via The Brothers Brick]
A bunch of folk seem to have become convinced that Valve would be revealing something at E3 next month. Each and every rumour about Valve does of course involve Half-Life 3/Episode 3, and this one was no different. The long-awaited next slice of Gordonery would finally be shown at E3, whispers claimed. People became excited, but they shouldn’t have done. Valve will not> be revealing a Half-Like game at E3. They won’t be showing off their other known project,
Oh, I do regret writing this post now. “News: there won’t be any news.” HOT SCOOPS Y’ALL.
Where were you all last week? I turned up and no one was here, honest! What’s that? No, I’m not crossing my fingers behind my back, and you definitely didn’t see him heading off on holiday. What nonsense. Anyway, to make up for it, here’s an extra-long edition of Mod News to cover the past two weeks. This time: Crash Bandicoot, a Warcraft III art mod, a surprising number of trailers and a bizarre remake of Deus Ex…
Between all the running and riding in little boats and more running you end up covering quite a lot of ground in Half-Life 2! What makes this somewhat unique, though, is that you do it all in immediate succession.
There's no cutscenes where you jump in a helicopter and reappear 1,000 miles away, or hitch a ride on a tank for a few days. Every area you enter leads on from the one you just left, meaning it's possible to draw up a map of the entire game.
Like this one! You lose most (well, all) of Half-Life 2's beauty, but that's more than made up for by the sheer scale of the thing.
That, and the dawning realisation that you end up spending the majority of the game going the wrong way.
You can expand the map into a readable size by clicking on it, but to get the full thing you can hit the link below.
HL2_overview [unleashthedog, via PC Gamer]
More sites should interview mod-makers, I feel. If one of this week’s picks is anything to go by, they can have some interesting things to say. Modding might not usually be quite as huge a process as making a full-on indie game, but as a modder you face your own unique problems, ones we don’t always get to hear about. Maybe we should take note of that at RPS. Either way, read on for this week’s roundup.
In the week of Portal 2′s release, it seems apt that Valve’s games should dominate the mod scene’s output. While the range of titles you can mod these days is impressive, and so many of the tools are easy to learn, I’ve still yet to come across a moddable engine that’s quite as intuitive and flexible as Source. I can’t wait to see what people can do with Portal 2 when we’re able to mod that. It’s going to be very interesting to see the results. Onwards, then…
Steam today represents a billion-dollar operation staffed by hundreds. But has the platform's meteoric rise restricted Valve's capacity to actually create games?
We haven't had a proper Valve-bred IP since The Orange Box games Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode 2 arrived more than three years ago.
Brad Wardell - leader of Stardock, the company behind Steam rival Impulse - drew on personal experience to argue that yes, Steam's success has "definitely had an effect" on Valve as a game maker.
"Even though Valve is in Seattle, where you can get developers everywhere, [Steam's] had an effect on their own development schedule. There's not been a new Half-Life in a long time; a lot of people have complained about that," Wardell explained to IndustryGamers.
"[Valve has] had their own challenges getting new titles out the door, and a big part of that I'm sure is the same problems we've had. When one of your groups is so ridiculously profitable, every business instinct you have is to throw all your best people at it, because that's what's making the money. That's just sound business. At the end of the day, again you have decide if that's what you want to do.
"Steam and Valve - of the companies out there I would say we're the most similar. Obviously they're bigger and far more successful than our games unit is, but culturally they're pretty similar. If you were to look at a time-line of games developed in-house by Valve not developed externally and then acquired and you look at before Steam and after Steam, it's definitely had an effect," he added.
"I don't argue that that's a good thing or bad thing, but I do know the effect that's had on us, where I've had to put some of my top developers over the years onto Impulse to make sure it was getting better and better."
Since the 2007 release of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2, Valve has launched Portal, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2 and Alien Swarm. Portal 2 is imminent and DOTA2 (Defense of the Ancients 2) has been announced with a tentative 2011 date.
Look at those games again:
What happened to Half-Life 2: Episode 3, Valve? And more importantly, is there a Half-Life 3? There are few announcement platforms on the scale E3 this summer. Is it Valve's turn this year? Maybe, just maybe.
Video: Half-Life 2: Episode 2 - the last Valve thoroughbred.
Garry Newman set a trap within Garry's Mod to expose people pirating his work.
"Anyone unable to shade polygon normals?" asked Newman on Twitter.
Hours later he added: "Just enabled this error in GMod today. It happens when you pirated it. Having fun watching people complain."
A search for "unable to shade polygon normals" turns up plenty of results on Google.
There are even pirates asking for help dealing with the error on the official Garry's Mod forum.
The best part about the pirate-catching error code is that the naughty user's Steam ID is posted within it. When they reproduce the code on a forum asking for help, Newman can cross-check the code against legitimate purchases and hoof the pirates out.
Garry's Mod, a physics sandbox, started as a Half-Life 2 mod. The $10 download now works with most Source-powered Valve games, allowing the objects and characters of the world to be spawned, manipulated and played with.
It looks more organic than robotic.
The four legs march under the barrel chest of the robot, snapping up two at a time in perfect precision. But when Boston Dynamic's creation, BigDog, is pushed, or it walks across ice, it suddenly looks very much alive as it stumbles to correct itself, and succeeds.
Designed to be the robotic replacement for pack animals or small vehicles, this future day robotic mule almost resembles the product of video games like Metal Gear Solid, Half-Life 2 or Portal.
Video of the quadruped robot first hit in 2008 and last month the company behind the design got an order for a super fast version and a human-like two-legged robot leading readers to liken their look to works of fantasy and fiction.
But robotics design company Boston Dynamics says the design similarities are purely coincidental. Their U.S. military funded robots are products of pure functionality, aesthetics doesn't enter into their creations.
"We did not do any aesthetic design on BigDog," said Marc Raibert, former MIT professor and founder of Boston Dynamics. "We talk about getting a designer to work on (the military version of BigDog), but have not done anything about it. We sometimes use artists to create concept sketches when developing new ideas for robots, but the robot designers do not use the sketches when doing the designs."
When people see his company's robots in action and think Transformers or robots from video games it's because of their own imagination, not his company's designs.
"I think much of what a person sees when viewing a robot comes from what is already in the person's head," he said. "Like a Robot Rorshach test."
Raibert says that the company has been in touch with some high-end car designers about the Legged Squad Support System, the follow up to BigDog destined for military use, but that they haven't hired anyone yet.
"We are working on LS3, which is the follow-on to BigDog and closer to fielding," he said. "It might get skins to help keep the dirt and water out. Right now we are focused on functionality. We might make a cosmetic pass later, but there are quite a few constraints just based on functionality, such as packing everything in and retaining mobility."
I asked Raibert if his company plans, during the final stages of design, to change the look of the robots meant for military use. Would he want to design them to instill a sense of fear in those that see them, or perhaps to help an operator form some sort of bond with the bots.
No, Raibert says, instead the company's focus is on "mobility, reliability, ease of use, range, load carriage, etc."
Raibert says his designers aren't even that worried about the uncanny valley. The notion of the uncanny valley first came up in robot design and later became a concern in video game graphics. The theory is that the more robots look and act like humans, the more revulsion real humans will feel toward them.
While Boston Dynamics is working on two robots that will take on the form of humans, PETMAN and the military-funded Atlas, the designers don't seem too worried about that valley.
"We sometimes talk about uncanny valley with respect to them, though the focus in our discussions is on their behavior and the quality of their motion, rather than on the exact robot shape and coverings," Raibert said.
And what of those first soldier destined to work alongside these bulking, four-legged and two-legged robots? Is it possible that a robot design could fail simply because the people who will work with them must are repulsed by them?
Raibert says his company hasn't done any studies to look into the possible effects of the uncanny valley on soldiers in the field, but he thinks Atlas, Cheetah and LS3's usefulness will outweigh any aesthetic issues.
"I think if the robots we built help soldiers and marines carry heavy stuff, so they don't have to carry it themselves, they will think LS3 or BigDog is a beautiful thing, no matter what it looks like," Raibert said. "Same for any other function that helps them with their jobs. For all I know, they may like it better if it is ugly, like the family mutt."
Well Played is an internationally syndicated weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.