It is a glorious day. After years of delays, speculation and anticipation, Valve have officially announced Half Life 3. Gordon Freeman has been absent from gaming for far too long, but he’s finally returning. We all knew it was coming, but until now we’ve had no information and not even a single screenshot to gawp at, but overnight that has all changed. Read on for all the details.
So far we know that the game will feature 2 player co-op. After the tragic events of Episode 2, Gordon and Alyx team up to take on the Combine together, and this time both characters will be playable for the duration of the campaign. Alyx will remain a loyal sidekick controlled by AI if you want to play singleplayer as per the previous games, but I suppose it’s nice to have the option. What with Left 4 Dead and Portal series having strong co-op features, it’ll be interesting to see how they put this into the next Half Life game.
There’s also an entirely new engine. Source 2.0 features state-of-the-art physics just as its predecessor did, only this time it will support fully destructible environments, the likes of which hasn’t been seen outside of the legendary Battlefield series. See a sneaky Combine hiding behind a wall? Point the gravity gun at it and tear it down!
So yes, the iconic Gravity Gun is back, and its had a few upgrades. Now, as well as being a handy tool for manipulating objects and solving puzzles, it will also speak to you and tell you about environmental hazards, and offer tips of how to proceed with a certain puzzle if you get stuck. Fanboys rejoice, as it’ll be voiced by Valve’s true heroine Ellen McClaine (the voice of GlaDOS).
That’s not all! The writers at Valve have been hard at work developing a multitude of story paths and endings. Throughout the game there will be moments where you must choose an action, and whatever you pick will have unforeseen consequences later. The infamous gnome from Episode 2 is back, and we’re told he can play a pivotal role in one of these choices, but Valve were understandably tight-lipped about this for fear of spoilers. We’ll let you know as soon as we know more…
Hundreds of eager fans turned up to see what Gabe had to say
Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve held a press conference earlier today to unveil the big news. “We know you’ve been waiting a long time, but it’s finally time to reveal our next game…I think you all know what it is!” Gabe was trembling at the knees and took a swig of whiskey before explaining that yes, Valve have been developing Half Life 3 for a numbers of years now. After the room erupted in cheers and applause, he then dropped the bombshell that Half Life 3 is set to be a downloadable Nintendo Wii exclusive. “We were brainstorming with the team and it just hit me like a brick to the face…MOTION CONTROLS!” It was at this point the cheers abruptly ceased, a confused fan at the back of the room started to weep and the press conference quickly came to a close as everyone was ushered out of the building.
Several years have passed since the end of Episode 2, and in a dramatic flashback sequence its revealed that Gordon and Alyx went on a post-traumatic passionate love affair which led to 3 kids and a marriage, all the while running from Combine Advisors and Dr Breen (now reincarnated as a Super-Strider). This entire sequence ends suddenly when Gordon is awoken in a run-down apartment in Moscow with Combine troopers bursting in through the windows – after years on the run, they’ve finally been discovered and now must fight for their lives by escaping to Antarctica where a new portal has opened and must be closed before Combine reinforcements arrive to wipe out Earth once and for all!
Under the ever watchful eye of the G-man, whose identity is finally revealed to be Gordon and Alyx’s time-traveling alien son from the future, the pair will embark on an epic journey of love, betrayal and revenge climaxing with a huge world-changing battle to the death. Who will win? Will Gordon ever speak? Does Lamarr hold the key to everything? What day is it today? These are burning questions and the answers are finally coming!
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
The Trials franchise is surely the most successful game to ever start out life as a Flash browser game. I remember playing the original game on Miniclip back in the day, and I have played every single iteration since. The game’s core concept is simple – you control a trials bike, and must navigate it across a series of increasingly difficult obstacle courses on a 2D pane. It’s the perfect pick-up-and-play game, because it’s easy to get the basics, but insanely difficult to master.
Fighter Ace was a free-to-play Second World War dogfighting game. You just logged in, spawned in a big sky with about 20 or 30 other people and shot the shit out of each other. It taught me that the Japanese Zero was one of the greatest fighter planes of WW2. Sure, it was lightly armoured and went down easily with just a few direct hits, but it was so manoeuvrable, so fast and agile that it could take on pretty much any other plane and come out on top.
The following took place in 2012, in the beta version of the DayZ mod for ARMA 2. It recounts the story of how I survived the zombie apocalypse by eating 87 cans of baked beans.
Chernarus is not a welcoming place any more. The lush green fields are now infested with hordes of shambling undead. And if the zombies don’t kill you, other wanderers surely will. Being alone is risky, but trusting the wrong person could cost you your life. In this harsh new world, you won’t get far without friends.
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