This Saturday the 28,000 members of this Steam group are planning to play Half-Life 2 together. It's single player, of course, but there's nothing stopping fans from getting together to stroke their chins and nod slowly in mass mutual appreciation for one of the best shooters ever made.

The group hopes that the massive play session will shoot Half-Life 2 up the Steam most-played list and let Valve know how many people are still waiting for Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Valve certainly know this already, and probably receive dozens of emails every day asking "WHERE AM HL3?" but the group hopes to deliver the message in a more appreciative way.

"Instead of focusing efforts in a negative and disrespectful way, we have decided to gain Valve's attention by delivering a basic message: Your oldest and longest running fanbase would like better communication," they say on the Steam group page.

Even if you're not interested in sending Valve a message, any excuse is a good excuse to dip into Half Life 2 again, so why not join in? You can join the Call for Communication to add your weight to their message, or you can boot up and play a little for old times' sake and spend some time with Eli, Alyx and the crew. It's set to kick off at 7PM GMT / 11AM PST this Saturday. Thanks to Brett and Smash for the heads up.

Even though Lego Lord of the Rings has been announced, we reckon they’re fast running out of franchises to render in acrylonitrile butadiene styrene. Lego James Bond is the one we always mention when we see the Traveller’s Tales guys, but so far we’ve had no luck convincing them that squashing a plastic version of Sean Bean with a giant satellite array would be a very good thing.

Flickr user Catsy has completely inspired us to believe that a Lego version of Half-Life would be the way for Lego to go. As Kotaku reported, he/she has created a Lego version of Gordon Freeman using stock Lego bits and bobs, equipped with a customised Overwatch Standard Issue Pulse Rifle made from a Lego tommy gun.

As Catsy notes, Freeman needs a little more smoothing and painting. But between his/her and Orrange Stahl’s attempts at Lego Half-Life, we think there’s more than enough to convince the Danish toy giants to create Lego versions of Freeman, Alyx Vance, The G-Man et al. Who knows, maybe they could even make a game of it.

It's just a man in a T-shirt of course, but there's a Half-Life 3 logo on the front of it and a Valve employee inside it.

Art director and executive producer at UberEnt (the team behind Super Monday Night Combat) posted the photo above on Twitter with the message "All I'm saying is I saw this at a local game developer event worn by a Valve employee," sensibly attaching a #ValveTrolling hashtag. He couldn't get any more info out of Valve's man but he confirms that "I did try to smother my face in his chest on the HL3 logo." This did not help.

A long time ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, Valve announced that they'd release three follow up episodes for Half-Life 2, allowing them to put out shorter stories at a faster clip. The episodes so far have taken longer and longer to develop, and Episode 2 ended up being longer than most modern shooter campaigns. Years on from Episode 2's release, it would make sense for the next game to ditch the episode format and become Half Life 3. Recently, the Cambridge Student asked Gabe Newell whether he considers releasing Half-Life 2 sequels in an episodic form a mistake. "Not yet," he said.

Valve have repeatedly said that they're still committed to the Half Life series. We'll surely see another one one day. WE JUST WANT TO KNOW HOW IT ENDS.

As reported on Gamasutra, a bunch of Valve's writers have been taking part in a roundtable question and answer session at GDC Online.

Read on for some insight from some of the most talented writers in the industry.

Valve might be famous for its use of silent protagonists but according to Mark Laidlaw, one of the writers at Valve, it can be a restrictive on a studio's creativity: "Now that some of Valve's most popular protagonists are silent, there’s no turning back. “At this point we’re fully committed to it and taking it as far as it possibly could go.”

Eric Wolpaw, another writer at Valve, also provided some insight. Referring to Valve's hugely successful free to play game, TF2, he said: “that whole game is us desperately trying to keep our jobs."

“Comedy stuff is tougher because it’s more subjective and it’s really hard to gauge peoples’ reaction," he said. Wolpaw added that sometimes it’s a bit depressing, when people playtest a part in a game that’s supposed to be funny, and there's little reaction. “Pretty much no one that played Portal 2 cracked a smile, but testers still said the game was funny... It’s hard to tell if a joke is failing or not.”

Laidlaw was equally humble when referring to his own work: “We fail all the time, we just don’t advertise it too much...we always want to feel like we’re on the edge and challenging ourselves and growing all the time.”

What's your favourite example of writing in games? Let us know in the comments.

In the fast-paced world of PC gaming, Half-Life 2 may be considered 'getting on a bit', but its fan base still stands strong. No better evidence could be found than this great fan-film, telling the story of a resistance fighter opposing the rule of the Combine.

Found by the guys over at RPS, Singularity Collapse features some spectacular looking props and costumes that perfectly capture the atmosphere of Valve's iconic shooter, as well as some great CGI work using assets from the game itself. Gunfights and aesthetics aside though, it's really the gunship vs buggy chase that makes this a must-see.

The production values of fan films seem to have shot up in recent years, and this Left 4 Dead one is no exception. The second part in an on-going series, the film is well shot and not badly acted. It does seem to fail in capturing the tone of Valve's zombie shooter, feeling more like 'The Walking Dead' with it's sombre mood and snippets of profound dialogue, instead of L4D's all-out Hollywood action/horror blockbuster atmosphere. It's nonetheless a great homage to the games, with a terrific finale and a nice pipe-bomb throw for good measure. You can catch up on the series' first part, but expect to wait a few months for the third instalment.

Whilst not yet in full feature-length form, a fan film is on the way from a group of Dragon Age obsessives. The Dragon Age Malevolence trailer looks more true to BioWare's games than the official upcoming web-series Dragon Age Redemption, mainly due to the copious amounts of blood that is splattered over every cast member.

Moving from the world of reality impersonating games to one where games impersonate reality, there have been some awesome gameplay trailers this week. DICE continue to show off their incredible new Frostbite technology in the third entry in their Battlefield 3 'Fault Line' series, here demonstrating the new close combat mechanics, and an awful lot of very pretty shooting. Then Adhesive Games went and impressed us even more with some video ripped straight from a Hawken multiplayer map. It may be from a small indie team just a few men strong, but Hawken already looks to be one of the most exciting titles of the year (so long as it hits this year - we all have out fingers crossed). But with incredible mech combat, wouldn't incredible mech gear be awesome too? Who wouldn't want a bunch of expensive, pointless peripherals to use when playing Hawken? Razer or Logitech need to get building a mech cockpit controller like the one used for Steel Battalion NOW!



Just a few weeks ago we showed off the trailer for Lego Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Now we have yet another trailer for a Lego game: Pirates of the Caribbean. With the Lego games coming out with far more frequency these days, you'd expect their charm to start to wear thin. But no; this latest trailer is full of Lego sweetness, and the inevitable little joke at the end of this one still brings a smile.

You may or may not know, but back when Half-Life 2: Episode 2 launched, our own Tom Francis set himself a little challenge. When Valve PR master Doug Lombardi told him about the gnome achievement, he became obsessed with it. Tom carried that gnome; carried it across the WHOLE of HL2:E2. Well, the gnome is back, with a great nasty looking chainsaw and the obligatory Invaders Must Die soundtrack.