“It’ll be easy,” I thought to myself, when it was suggested someone do a nice, timely little post on the new-ish Steam Points system, and the various new goodies on offer through it. “Sure, no problem,” I said, when Matt refused to write it because he thought Steam Points were “pointless”, and I was the only other writer on the call with Graham. Matt was being negative, I figured, and I’d show him the error of his ways with my happy-go-lucky, anything-goes, good times attitude. I’d breeze onto the Steam store, have a browse of what points-purchasable things were on offer, and do a quickie piece highlighting some of the most chuckleworthy.

Well, turns out Matt was right, and I was not.

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Since the moment Half-Life: Alyx launched in VR, folks have been trying to detach it from its headset requirements. To be fair, I get it – that the first Half-Life game in a decade would be restricted to expensive tech felt a little demoralising. But this weekend, one modder brought that dream closer to reality by quietly releasing Pancake Base, a mod that aims to make Alyx play just like its older siblings by giving our leading lady the sturdy, first-person arms of Half-Life 2‘s Gordon Freeman.

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Earlier this week, Alice O pointed out the work of Graham Dunning, an artist who creates improvised dance music in Half-Life by replacing the game’s audio with clips from 90s rave tracks and sample CDs. Now, Twitch isn’t known for being the greatest music-streaming platform about, so this weekend Dunning released Panopticon – a moody album of experimental noise arranged in Valve’s seminal 1998 shooter.

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I’ve just watched an experimental dance music gig created by an artist playing Half-Life. Graham Dunning has replaced every single sound in Valve’s shooter with samples he says come “from 90s rave tracks and sample CDs”, giving Gordon Freeman drums for feet, making sentry turrets loop vocal samples, turning ambient sounds into pounding loops, blasting drum breaks out guns, and all that. So he creates improvised music just by playing the game. He performed for two hours today on Twitch and it is: so good. Come see today’s show!

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Kick the tires, whistle at the paint job, spin the keys on your finger like a revolver and then shoot the car with the little laser of unlocking. It’s time to get back on the road. What’s that? Entire country in a state of unprecedented lockdown? I see. Well, lucky for you, we concern ourselves here only with pretend cars, the indoor joy of fictional journeys on virtual roads. Here, my housebound friends, are the 9 best road trips in PC games. Seatbelts on, please.

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Hard to imagine worse things to eat while in VR. Do you really want sticky fingers clutching your index controllers, melon juice splashing over your expensive electronics? It’s probably for the best, then, that the one watermelon in Half-Life: Alyx is impossible to find in normal play – a sweet, tantalising snack tucked away only for those brave enough to break out the cheats.

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As with many other events in the year of Covid-19, Now Play This—the yearly exhibition on experimental game design—transitioned to a virtual space last weekend. Although not every planned part of the exhibition could be shown off in the new format, they still appeared to get up to some neat stuff that you can now watch back yourself. Game designer Gareth Damian Martin took players on a photography hiking trip in No Man’s Sky while Robert Yang leads a tour of Half-Life by way of the Sven Co-op mod.

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Half Life‘s introduction is famously slow. Long tram rides and lengthy speeches from co-workers preparing Gordon Freeman for an experiment that would destroy the world. An atmospheric start, for sure, but it’s a pain for folks trying to beat the game as quickly as possible. For one speedrunner, though, those dead minutes aren’t an obstacle – they’re the perfect opportunity to start practising for a record-breaking Star Wars run.

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If Black Mesa actually getting finished left you lost without a fan-made refresh of an old Half-Life to cheer on, rejoice: the new hotness is bringing Half-Life 2 into Half-Life: Alyx. Several modders are already showing off their progress in bringing Gordon’s adventure to Alyx’s shiny new VR game, though it’s all hella far from finished. Hey, we all need something to believe in. Come check out these two projects.

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It’s taken 13 years, but we finally have a new Half-Life game. It may not be the long-awaited Half-Life 3, but as you’ve probably seen from our Half-Life: Alyx review, Valve’s first foray into virtual reality shows they’re a developer that are still very much at the top of their game. But Half-Life: Alyx isn’t just the work of a talented team of developers. It’s a game that’s ultimately been shaped by the people who have played it – the hundreds, if not thousands of playtesters who helped Valve turn their most famous FPS game into a VR sensation.

To find out more about how Half-Life: Alyx came into being, I sat down with Valve’s Robin Walker and Jim Hughes a week before the game’s big release day. We talk about everything from revisiting the Half-Life series and the challenges of bringing it to virtual reality, to what this means for Half-Life 3 as well as just whose idea was it to have headcrabs jumping directly at your face. Some of the answers you’ll have seen appear on the site over the past week, such as how playtesters became obsessed with collecting every last thing in sight to everyone assuming they were playing as Gordon Freeman until Alyx was finally given a voice, but there’s plenty more to discover here as we lay out our chat with Robin and Jim in full. Enjoy.

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