Yesterday, Valve unveiled a new compatibility ratings system for Steam Deck, intended to give users a clear indication of how well specific Steam games will run on the upcoming portable gaming PC. And now, a new beta update for Half-Life 2 has been discovered, seemingly released to ensure the seminal FPS meets the requirements needed to earn Steam Deck's top-tier Verified compatibility badge.

Half-Life 2's new beta branch update, as detailed by Valve watcher Tyler McVicker on his YouTube channel, reportedly covers a surprising amount of ground, not only making adjustments to the way the UI and resolution are handled in-game - primarily to ensure the FPS classic fits Steam Deck's aspect ratio and remains legible at its relatively diminutive size - but addressing some long-standing bugs as well.

Details on the latter are limited, but McVicker does highlight a few of the beta update's new UI and resolution scaling features. Perhaps most pertinent to Steam Deck, Half-Life 2's HUD is now unlocked and can scale "perfectly" to whatever aspect ratio it's being played on. Additionally, there's ultra-wide support, plus an FOV increase up to 110.

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Team Fortress 2, it's fair to say, is getting on a bit. The 14-year-old game remains incredibly popular on Steam, but over the past year it's hit the headlines for the wrong reasons, with bot problems that show no sign of disappearing. (Although we got to witness players conga-ing their way past the bots, at least.)

In any case, it seems the community has finally taken it upon themselves to give Team Fortress 2 a refresh, as a group of modders called Amper Software has started recreating the game in Garry's Mod spiritual successor s&box. The reason for this: they wondered what Team Fortress 2 would look like in Valve's newest engine, Source 2.

"Ever since Source 2 was first mentioned publicly as an engine that Valve was working on, a lot of people in the Team Fortress 2 community have started asking the question: if Valve ever ports TF2 to Source 2, what would it look like? How different gameplay would be? And would TF2 even feel the same?," the team explained in a blog post. "...s&box, the spiritual successor of Garry's Mod made on the Source 2 engine, has been released as part of a dev preview to a group of community members, including ourselves. It, pretty much, like Garry's Mod itself, allows you to build whatever you want using the toolset that it provides. So we've decided to not lose that chance."

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Valve has reportedly sanctioned the release of Half-Life 2: Remastered Collection, a passion-project mod that "completely overhauls" the seminal shooter.

As noted by SteamDB (thanks, PCGN), the collection comes from Filip Victor and is "not Valve related", but Tyler McVicker - who focuses on news about Valve and Steam - reports that the remaster has "Valve's consent".

It's apparently the next iteration of the fantastic mod Half-Life 2: Update, a "completely free and extensive community-developed update for Half-Life 2 featuring beautiful lighting, countless bug fixes, and a brand new Community Commentary Mode". It's available to anyone who owns Half-Life 2 on PC and offers "countless" bug fixes in "one free standalone download".

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It's no secret that Team Fortress 2 has a bit of a bot problem, but the game also has a community that really enjoys mid-match shenanigans - and the two combined today in one of the funniest posts about TF2 bots I've seen so far.

Reddit user 2Noel posted footage of an Attack/Defend match in which Blu team was pitted against a bunch of bots - normally not great news for those wanting to keep their heads on their shoulders. Yet the team decided to try a different tactic to just charging into battle, instead choosing to conga their way out of spawn and onto the control points. And surprisingly, it worked. Stay tuned for the satisfying bot slaughter at the end of the match:

The question you're probably asking right now is: why didn't the bots shoot the Blu team members? The answer, it seems, is that the bots are programmed to avoid shooting players who are using taunts and emotes. If you look closely at the video, you'll notice that players not engaged in the conga line (such as poor old atomdotdat) are instantly sniped by the bots, while the dancers remain unharmed.

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Valve's 2007 shooter Team Fortress 2 just broke its all-time concurrent players count.

According to Steam's official stats, the multiplayer FPS hit a peak of 151,253 concurrent players on Steam on Friday night.

The previous high was 147,360 concurrent players in December. At the time of this article's publication, Team Fortress 2 had 141,741 concurrent players on Steam.

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A movie version of Portal is back on track, Star Trek and Lost director J.J. Abrams has said, nearly a decade after we first heard of its existence.

The project still sounds far-off, and there's no word on what has been holding up development - but the wheels now seem to be turning.

"We actually do have a script that's being written for the Portal movie now at [Warner Bros.]," Abrams said today (thanks, IGN) "We're really excited about the take and the pitch, so it feels like that thing's finally on the rails.

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Another week, another set of attention-grabbing headlines in video games. Join Eurogamer news editor Tom Phillips, Eurogamer reporter Emma Kent and me in the video below as we run through the news that matters. Bong!

We start with the PlayStation 5's first big update, which comes five months after the console came out. This update finally lets you move games to USB storage - a feature the PS5 really should have had at launch. We chat about why this improvement is so important, but also discuss the state of the console itself as it approaches half a year out in the wild. Is the PS5 where it needs to be? Is it already playing catch-up in terms of features with Microsoft's Xbox Series X? And what do we want next from PS5?

Elsewhere, we chat about Nintendo's latest indie showcase (there's a lot of Fez talk, sorry!), before moving on to the ever-eventful world of Cyberpunk 2077. (Emma's report on what could be DLC for that game is well worth a read.) Can CD Projekt turn Cyberpunk around? The company has vowed to stick with it, at least.

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It's been nearly a year since the bot situation in Team Fortress 2 escalated to a point where Valve had to get involved, but despite those efforts to curb the infestation, the problem has not gone away. Along with bots using game-ruining hacks, bots in casual servers are continuing to use racist usernames and spam voice chat with loud noises. There are now reports that bots are increasingly being used to advertise bots and bot immunity - and disturbingly, that some claim to offer links to child sexual abuse images.

Eurogamer has seen screenshots of bots using Team Fortress 2's chat function to advertise links to ecommerce platforms such as Shoppy, where bot hosters have found ways to monetise their disruptive efforts. Along with offering the option to rent bots, stores are offering the option to purchase "bot immunity" to allow the player to be ignored by that particular brand of bots. It's basically a virtual protection racket.

This seems to have been an issue for the past few months, as posts about bot immunity first appeared three months ago, but reports of these adverts are continue to pop up on Reddit.

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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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