There aren't many games that mix heavy-handed literature with first-person shooting. BioShock is one example that springs to mind. Not so much Half-Life 2, but someone is in the midst of creatin?g a mod for Valve's iconic FPS that seems to take cues from the classics.

ModDB user GRÆMAMËTH is currently working on "Goethe's Last Laugh," a full-conversion modification for Half-Life 2 that, from the images alone, looks wonderfully bizar?re. Oh, hell. I don't think I could ??do it justice, so here's what the creator has to say about the project (after you've checked out the footage below, of course):

In the abstract, it’s a working class power fantasy about addiction a?nd revolution...

Take control of Jackson Ian Faust,?? a 300 year old, self destructive, misanthropic vampire, and investigate the many unusual phenomenon of G??ondolas city, a fictional civilization set on the sinking monster island of Duciano.

No mention of a Mephistopheles-inspired gravity gun

It's still in development at the moment, with no release date yet. However, you can keep an eye on progress from the ModDB page linked above, or follow it on Itch.io. This one d?efinitely seems too good to miss out on, especially with its proposed themes.

Now, I've never read Faust, so I can't say how certain this Half-Life 2 mod will match up with the original text. But I do know that it must have inspired the project, g??iven that it's titled after the play's author, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and has you play as someone literally called Faust.

?It's also where we get the term "Faustian" from, to refer to any kind of deal or barter that leads to dire consequences. I'm hoping there'll be some of that in GRÆMAMËTH's mod. If not, at least we get to play as a cynical vampire that's three centur?ies old. That's always dope. Do people say "dope" these days?

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Skibidi Toilet could be headed for the silver screen. Paramount Pictures president Adam Goodman recently told Variety about ongoing talks to bring the extremely successful YouTube and TikTok series to TV or the big screen, with Transformers director Michael Bay in the picture.

Though the two are actively pursuing the project, they are yet to get the formal greenlight to begin pre-production on any actual adaptation. In the Variety podcast Strictly Business, Goodman said: “We are absolutely in talks right now, both on the television side and the earliest conversations right now on the film side,�said Goodman. “But it’s not a be-all, end-all for us.�/p>

On the business side of things, this attempt at expansion might make sense. At over 65 billion cumulative views, Skibidi Toilet is arguably the most successful series in the history of YouTube, a phenomenon big enough to dwarf Baby Shark, Despacito, and Gangnam Style many times over. In a time where brand recognition plays a role of extreme importance, anything Skibidi Toilet-related could prove a hit right out of the gate, but it's n??ot that simple.

Adapting Skibidi Toilet might prove tricky

Though Skibidi Toilet tells a mostly very straightforward tale of wacky a war between an army of human h?eads with toilets for bodies and one of human bodies with pieces of tech for heads, a peculiar system of moving pieces exists within.

The toilet heads from Skibidi Toilet have become so popular that they're already an indelible part of Internet imagery. Still, unlike most popular series out there, these designs aren't entirely original. Most of what you see in Skibidi Toilet episodes are pre-existing models from Half-Life 2 that have been made available via Garry's Mod and brought into movie form via Source Filmmaker.

Skibidi Toilet series creator DaFuq!?Boom! gets to make these videos, and serious bucks out of them, because Valve is just really cool about letting other kids play with ??its toys. That, however, doesn't necessarily translate to the ?company lending the rights to their intellectual property to a studio or production company that's not even directly adapting Valve's works.

Invisible Narratives, the independent company that Bay runs with Goodman, is already involved with Skibidi Toilet's toyline. On the collaboration, Goodman says: "I will say that Michael and Jeffrey Beecroft, who's his longtime production designer and a colleague of his that's worked with him on all of his movies, have been working very closely with Alexey to really professionalize the kind of back engine of this, to make sure, if we ever decide to go film or television, that this is kind of lifted beyond just the resources that creators have on the internet." That seems to indicate some things are indeed moving, but we're yet to learn of Valve's essential thoughts regarding any sort of Skibidi Toilet adaptation.

If you don't care about the legal implications and just want to learn more about the bizarre story of Skibidi Toilet, I'm happy to let you know that we've even employed the efforts of Half-Life series writer Marc Laid??law to look into it all with us.

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It's a shame Arkane Studios' Ravenholm was cancelled. That would have definitely filled the large Half-Life hole us fans have felt for some time. However, a modding team has been on the case with a custom? story that lets us experience the creepy mining town some more.

From the people that brought us the Raising the Bar project �an overhaul of Half-Life 2 that breathes new life into the iconic FPS �comes Raising the Bar: Salvation. In this mod, we fill the s?hoes of Father Grigori, the pastor of Ravenholm who watches over Gordon Freeman in the official game, as he continues his story.

We get to trek back through the abandoned location, in which the devout man intends to burn the entire place down. You can download the mod here. The above video says you'll also need to install the Division 2.1 file from the Raising the Bar: Redux mod in order for Salvation to work.

The holiest shotgun-wielder around

What makes this slightly intriguing is its approach to combat. The team has said that resources are a bit more scarce, and players will only have a limited amount of supplies. With just a shotgun, custom mines, and a Duke Nukem-style kic?k, it becomes more ??about picking one's battles.

Father Grigori was definitely one of the most interesting characters in Half-Life 2. While only in th??e one section of the game, and not always visible on-screen, his presence is often felt by the player, as gunfire and manic laughs are heard in the distance.

He's part of what makes the Ravenholm chapter such a standout. While we may never know what happens to Gordon Freeman in any future Half-Life installments, Salvation at least fills in some of the side narrativ??e. And isn't that just as important?

The post Salvation i??s a Half-Life 2 mod that puts you in?? the shoes of Father Grigori appeared first on Destructoid.

Turning 20 this year, Half-Life 2 is held aloft as one of the greatest first-person shooters ever made. While the 2004 game still holds? up visually, a team of modders has been hard at work giving Val??ve's classic a bit of a spit-shine.

At CES 2024, the Half-Life 2 RTX Remix project released a new trailer, showing the work that's so far gone into the Nvidia-powered graphical improvement. In this instance, we g??et to see what Ravenholm looks like in all its shiny glory.

It's an impressive mod, with the compari??sons in the video showing the differ??ence between the OG game and the RTX remix. We get a glimpse of all that lovely ray tracing, DLSS 3.5 image upscaling, and remastered assets. Ooh...ahh, etc.

Such moody lighting

Ravenholm is one of the most notorious sections in Half-Life 2. Something of a gear shift, this par?t of the story turns the game into a cr??eepy horror that takes place in an abandoned mining town. It's where we meet Father Grigori and also get to see the destructive power of the gravity gun when you add in a rusty saw blade.

As for when the RTX project will be available, there doesn't seem to be a release date yet. However, according to the Nvidia website, the open beta for the RTX Remix toolkit begins January 22. Maybe that's when we'll get to play it, or at least get an update on when this boosted version of HL2 will be available.

In the meantime, there's Portal RTX to check out if you want to go ??"ooh" and "ahh" at a diff??erent Valve game for a bit.

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It's so easy to modify Half-Life 2 that it's no won??der Valve's 2004 magnum opus is still part of the gaming scene. However, if you just want the game to look prettier, you can soon run it through Nvidia's RTX Remix tech.

Over on the Nvidia GeForce YouTube channel, you can see a teaser for a revamped version of the iconic Half-Life 2. Side-by-side comparisons show what the OG release looks like when compa?red to the upcoming remastered version.

//youtu.be/aM_gzfAMdNs

The Half-Life 2 RTX Remix project actually comes to us via the modding community itself. The description under the trailer says it's being helmed by "four of Half-Life 2’s top mod teams, now known as Orbifold Studios." Currently, there doesn't appear to be a rel??ease date for it.

Ooh, it's so shiny!

The original Half-Life 2 (now fast approaching its 19th birthday) still holds up today. However, a "remixed" version of the classi?c FPS could bring a visual boost?? that could breathe new life into it.

The fan-made project will boast full ray tracing for that added dose of lighting goodness, DLSS 3 for graphical upscaling, and?? a bunch of other tech things that sound fancy.

Nvidia released its RTX Remix as a way for modders to give that certain je ne sais quoi to games that support such modern visual technologies. However, we've also seen it been used to pretty up even older games, like the original Tomb Raider.

You can check out more details on the upcoming Half-Life 2 RTX Remix project by going to Nvidia's website.

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Look, we all want a third installment in Valve's iconic Half-Life series. But the sad truth is, it's almost certainly never going to happen. As such, we're stuck with the first two (as well as the VR game Alyx). But that's a good thing, because Half-Life 1 and 2 are exemplary first-person shooters. So loved is the series, that fans continue to tweak and mod Half-Life and Half-Life 2 to their own ends.

Take Team Vestige over on ModDB (via PCGamesN), which has taken the legendary sci-fi FPS and turned it into a horror experience. Called "Disrepair," this mod for Half-Life 2 sees the player slip into the hazard suit of a Combine worker who's been sent to investigate and ph?otograph the radioactive anomalies that have cropped up around the Black Mesa facility.

//youtu.be/QX-DsNWBp6g

What ensues is a short but creepy experience, not too dissimilar to the likes of Slender: The Eight Pages. The player is tasked with photographing several pieces of artifacts around the infected building, while ominous sounds drill into their ears. It also has a slight SCP vibe about it, in that internet-u?rban-myth kind of way. You can see YouTube user Farawaygaming diving into "Despair" above.

Take that, Ravenholm!

When you think of Half-Life, you probably don't think of the word "horror." While the games do have their more unsettling moments (the Ravenholm section in HL2 springs to ?mind), it's not a franchise known for scares.

That's why this Half-Life 2 mod, and others like it, are so interesting. They take something that has a very distinctive aesthetic about it and turn it into something that's fairly unsettling. With the tunnel vision-style lighting, black and white graphics, and the eerie tones of this darker side of Black Mesa, Team Vestige is just one of many reasons people keep returning to the Half-Life games after all these years.

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Ah, Half-Life 2. For many, Valve's follow-up to the influential 1998 FPS is the developer's magnum opus. It still holds up today and is often held aloft as one of the greatest shooters of all time. Much of it comes down to its tight combat, intri?guing story, and dystopian setting.

But what was life like for the people of City 17 before the Combine came and wrecked everything? Before the famed Seven-Hour War would see humanity become enslaved? Well, that's what YouTuber Radiation Hazard wondered. In a recent video of theirs (and using beta footage from the game), they showed what Half-Life 2 loo?ked like long before Gordon Freeman came into the picture.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi_KQ725AAI

The result is what you would ??expect. With no war and no Combine, the city and its surroundings are as they should be. No damaged structures. No wreckage. No enslaved humans.

Maybe we'll go to Ravenholm now

Even Ravenholm (where the game turns into a horror experience) looks positive?ly tranquil before everything went to shit. True, Radiation Hazard's video only shows the mining town in the daylight, but it's still a stark contrast to see this abandoned and dilapidated locale actually looking habitable.

However, it still feels a little bit...eerie. Maybe it's the fact that Half-Life 2's setting is largely industrial, including almost brutalist buildings, or the fact that even in a non-Combine ??inhabited city, there a??re still no people milling about, but it still looks quite oppressive.

It kind of shows Valve's skills in being able to invoke a mood. Even without the carnage, corpses, and graffiti, Half-Life 2 ??still looks like a place that one probably wouldn't want to visit. Which makes sense. The game probably wouldn't feel right if Freeman had to defend an idyllic fishing village?? from the Combine.

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And it won't cost you an arm or a leg

What happens when you combine the world's most popular toy brand with one of the most influential first-person shooters of all time? That's right, you get LEGO Half-Life 2. If you ever wondered what it'd be like to take on the Combine or seek the Vortigaunt's help as one of the Danish? company's little plastic figures, wonder no more.

The mod is available on the Steam workshop (thanks, PCGamesN) and comes from user Not Dave or Daniel. It's described as a "full conversion" project that basically swaps out major Half-Life 2 characters for LEGO figurines. It seems the modder is aiming to eventually replace all the characters in the game, but the images so far ??????????????????????????show that a few have already been done.

[caption id="attachment_391138" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Image via Not Dave or Daniel/Steam.[/caption]

Fans of HL2 will recognize the LEGO facsimiles of Dr. Kleiner, Alyx V??ance, Father Grigori, and even the mute protagonist himself, Gordon Freeman. The mod is available to download for free now, and it sounds like there are going to be some updates in the future.

So are we gonna talk about..?

Look, it's nearly impossible to talk about Half-Life without mentioning the whereabouts of the long-awaited third entry. It's been 16 years since Episode Two, and it's safe to assume that a new game in the series is not happening. In fact, back in 2017, ex-Valve writer Marc Laidlaw basically gave away what was likely to be the plot of Half-Life 3, perhaps in a?n attempt to appease fans?? who were still waiting.

It's just not coming. We have to accept that. But at least the games that are out are still getting a lot of love. Between the ray tracing version of Half-Life and this LEGO?? mod, Black Mesa and its inhabitants remain in the gaming consciousness.

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Maybe it should be called Eighth-Life instead of Half-Life...

We've pretty much had to accept the fact that Half-Life 3 is never going to happen. That's... fine, I guess? We still have the original two games, plus Alyx for those of you who have a VR headset. O??ver the years, fans have been challenging themselves to finish the Valve FPS series in eye-waterin?gly quick times, and there's a new one that puts a number of runs to shame.

Recently, the YouTube channel SourceRuns (via PCGamesN) uploaded a Half-Life 2 speedrun, specifically of Episode Two, that clocks in at a staggering 9:46. Completed by speedru?nners jorik and qv2b, the run is the culmination of 196 segmented pieces, which have been spliced together to produce this insanely quick time. It's definitely worth a watch.

//youtu.be/j2N0FJ0dhAw

Once the game starts, you'll see just how?? much both players are able?? to skip past huge chunks of the game using exploits. In fact, much of the actual run itself takes place during the final battle at White Forest. Here, the action really slows down as Gordon Freeman defends the area from a Strider attack. Evidently, players haven't found a way to jump past this part that doesn't involve doing the actual fight.

However, at the time of writing, jorik and qv2b's video has not been featured on speedrun.com. This could be because they use a modded version of Episode Two, which removes the cutscenes, thereby reducing the time automatic??ally. However, qv2b is second on the leaderboard, having achieved a time of 31:12:850 a year ago.

Half-Life 2 is easily one of the most influential FPS games of all time, almost surpassing the impact of its 1998 predecessor. To see people zooming through the game, (and its expansions), in unbelievably quick fashion shows how skil?led some have become at guiding our mute scientist hero.

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Wake up, Mr. Freeman

Half-Life 3 has become a bit of a running gag in the video game industry. With either perpetual delays or work never being started, the fate of the series is completely unknown at this point. We basically could throw out ludicrous ideas and be at? the same general position that Valve is.

Half-Life 2 writer Marc Laidlaw recently had an interview with Arcade Attack where he talks about what his plans would have been for any sequels and how he would foresee the eventual Half-Life 3 to take place. Seeing as the man is no longer working at Valve, don't take any of this to be official plans.

When questioned about whether or not Half-Life 3 would ever see a release, Laidlaw pretty bluntly put it as, "No idea." I bet even if you were Gabe Newell you wouldn't have a clue. Following up that statement, Laidlaw did confirm he had ideas for an Episode 3.

"They [the episodes] were all supposed to take the series to a point where I could step away from it and leave it to the next generation. I had hoped for a reset between HL2 and HL3 that was as dramatic as the shift between HL1 and HL2," Laidlaw states. "I honestly don’t know if anyone else shared this goal, but it seemed important to me to give ultimate freedom to whoever inherited the series, with my own personal s??et of loose ends tied up to my satisfaction."

As for any plot specifics for Half-Life 3, Laidlaw claims, "I never thought as far ahead as HL3, unless you were to say that HL3 and Episode 3 were the same thing. I will say that I expected ev??ery installment would end without resolution, forever and ever…"

There had been a rumor going around that Episode 3 would have ended Gordon Freeman's story arc. Apparently that rumor is false. As Laidlaw puts it, "My intention was that Ep3 would simply tie up the plot threads that were particular to HL2. But it would still end like HL1 and HL2, with Gordon in an indeterminate space, on hold, waiting for the ne?xt game to begin. So one cliff??hanger after another."

As it sounds, we likely would still be waiting for some form of Half-Life had the series not be unceremoniously shelved. I suppose Portal counts, as Valve fit it into the same universe, but we're six years after the release of Portal 2, so even that series isn't pro?viding any k??ind of closure.

It seems that whatever happens with Half-Life, Gordon Freeman is never going to be at peace.

Marc Laidlaw (Valve) – Interview [Arcade Attack]

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Ravenholm is really popular

Before vanishing into the ether and becoming gaming's longest running gag, Half-Life 2 was actually supposed to get more than just one final episode. While we've only ever known the name of Arcane Studios Return to Ravenholm, some new images hav??e surfaced from a project that Junction Point Studios was working on. While there is no official title, these screenshots show a snow covered Ravenholm. In ot?her words, Alyx lied to you when she said, "We don't go to Ravenholm."

As for what these images pertain to, the head of Junction Point, Warren Spector (Deus Ex, Epic Mickey), has briefly spoken about this before. In an interview with Game Informer a few years ago, Spector detailed how his team was working on a new weapon? called the Magnet Gun. The reason their episode never got finished was due to Junction Point striking a deal with Disney, a studio Spector always wanted to work with.

"So we were trying to flesh out a specific part of the world of Half-Life and we created a new tool. A thing we elegantly called the Magnet Gun, which I still wish they would do something with," Spector states in his interview. "We came up with so many cool ways to use a magnet gun that were completely different from anything [Valve] had done and was really freeform in its use. I still think it'd be cool, but when the deal with Disney really started to bear fruit, I just cou????????????????????????????ldn't say no to Disney. I'd always wanted to work there, so we never completed the work with Valve."

Due to the wonders of the internet, you can actually tinker around with the prototype map files. As posted on ValveTime.net, you can read through a thread that explains what each map contains and how it may have pieced together to create a final product. If nothing else, I hope some prospective modder takes these files and glues them together. It would be neat to play what could have been, much like you can with the leaked Half-Life 2 beta.

Images of Junction Point's cancelled Half-Life 2 episode reveal a snowy Ravenholm [Eurogamer]

The post New images surface from one of Half-Life 2’s cancelled episodes appeared first on Destructoid.

Potential VR spin-off

Gabe Newell recently held an AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit and people were obviously drooling at the chance to question the existence of Half-Life 3. While that was deftly avoided by Gaben, there were some interesting hints dropped about a potential spin-off to the series that could be in the pipeline. When questioned about whether Valve was actively working on any kind of single-player game, Gabe responde??d with, "Yes."

After that, another user further clarified the question by asking whether Valve was working on a new IP that is set within the Half-Life/Portal u?niverse. Gabe also replied with, "Yep." Now, this could mean a numb??er of things, but more than likely, it has to do with the HTC Vive. Gabe did bring up the possibility, later stating, "We think VR is pretty important as a tool for interesting games."

While that could be anything, Valve actively backs the HTC Vive, so that would clearly be its target device. You could also take this to mean that Valve is currently working on two separate projects, one in VR and one as a spin-off. Then again, The Lab is a fully VR tech demo that takes place within Portal, so who is to say what is really going on?

Source 2 is also mentioned in the AMA and Valve seems to be going full force with their new engine. While it has only debuted with DOTA 2, so far, it looks like Valve is not giving up on their technology. "We are are using it as the foundation of som?e unannounced products," Gabe confirmed.

Someone else also brought up the potential movies that Valve was working on with J.J. Abrams. Apparently those are still in the works, so I guess we can look forward to those not su??cking...?maybe.

Hi. I'm Gabe Newell. AMA. [Reddit]

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Protip: Bring a bucket

Watch as the SourceRuns team impressively moonwalks its way through a majority of Half-Life 2: Episode 2. This is a segm??ented speedrun, meaning it is recorded in several takes and put together, as well as assisted with custom scripts. Many wouldn't consider this a true speedrun, but that doesn't take away from the wow factor. 

I love watching a good speedrun. What are some of your favorites? Mine has to be Mega64's Real Life Speedrun or Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!.

Half-Life 2 World Record Speedrun Will Make Your H??ead Spin [NeoGAF]

The post Nauseating Half-Life 2: Episode 2 world record?? speedrun appeared first on Destructoid.

But not Ravenholm... never Ravenholm

For three years, Filip Victor has been working on Half-Life 2: Update, a community-made standalone version of Half-Life 2 that se?eks to "fix up, p?olish, and visually enhance [the game] without ever changing the 2004 original's core gameplay, or time-tested style." Noble endeavor.

There's a brochure explaining the improvements but, in short: better lighting and shadows, high dynamic range, environmental fog, enhanced environment details, and fix?es for bugs "including bad triggers causing scenes and battles to not cue properly, or strange-looking character animations breaking believability and player immersion." Community commentary is in, too.

When Half-Life 2: Update arrives on Steam tomorrow, you'll need a copy of the original game to download and install it. Definitely something to add to my replay list. Maybe yours too.

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A new week, a new challenge

This week's challenge takes place in Half Life 2: Lost Coast, in which I must beat the?? entire level using nothing but the famous crowbar. Freeman is pretty proficient in crowbar combat, but ther??e are some enemies that even the mighty crowbar cannot defeat...

If you'??ve got any ideas for future challenges you'd like me to have a go at, feel free to leave them? in the comments!

The post Crowbar in Half-Life 2: Lost Coast – Challenge Scot appeared first on Destructoid.

Watch the record-breaking run in full

You know it's a good speedrun when it gets me to let out an audible "Whaaat?" I lost count. Believe me when I say that this record-breaking Half-Life 2 run by the SourceRuns Team is a ?good ?one. Actually, I'm probably vastly underselling it here.

You wouldn't think a time of 1:27:51 would be possible in a game like this, but they always seem to find a way. To achieve that time, the run took multiple team members playing in 200 segments across 600 days. It's tough to fathom not only the knowledge needed to be able to pull this off, but the sheer ability required to exe??cute on it.

Check out the YouTube descripti??on for a bunch of relevant links.

[Via PCGMedia -- Thanks, T3HM0RR0W]

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Now with even more terrifying headcrabs

Oculus Rift promises a richer, more immersive game experience, so pairing it with the monumental Half-Life 2 is a no brainier, right? Valve's Joe Ludwig has done just that, adding Occulus Rift support to the game.

The Oculus Rift beta is currently only available through the SteamPipe beta (Valve's new content distribution system). Ludwig says the current beta is "a bit more raw than [Team Fortress 2] was when it shipped" in March, citing a dim H??UD and a faulty zoom UI. Hopefully these issues will get addressed before Oculus Rift support comes via an official patch in a few weeks.

With Half-Life 2 checked off the Oculus support wishlist, how about getting some cool space sims on boar??d?

Half-Life 2 (official) Rift support [Oculus Developer Forums]

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He's even holding the alien farty thing!

Gaming Heads latest in their Valve toy line-up is the one and only Gordon Freeman from the Half-Life series. The 1/4 scale figure comes in at 20 inches tall, and features the voiceless hero with hi??s iconic crowbar and the alien farty thing.

The statue is incredibly detailed, so of course that means Gordon won't be cheap. The regular edition will cost you $319.99, and only 1,000 pieces are being produced. The exclusive edition costs $339.99, includes a swappable MP-7?? bonus weapon, and will be limited to 500 pieces.

Gaming Heads announces Gordon Freeman statue [Tomopop]

Dat ass

The post This is one incredible Gordon Freeman statue appeared first on Destructoid.

_{Hamish Todd is a game designer and journalist. His article on Castlevania's medusa heads just made the longlist for the games journalism prize. You can find out about his game, Music of the Spheres, here.}

Some of the most fun I've ever had playing videogames has been with the Half-Life series. The games are most famous for their scripted sequences, but there are a lot of other clever pieces of design in them. Today, I'm going to look at a bunch of great Half-Life setpie?ces all themed around one entity: the barnacle.

The barnacle can do? horror, action, and even comedy. It can assist you and puzzle you. To do all that, an object needs to have some ?pretty fundamental stuff in its design.

This video shows you how Half-Life 2 introduces the barnacle. A lot is communicated by this loud, eye-catching animation (captured by Daniel Holden). It's good because i??t lets you find out that barn??acles are dangerous without you having to endanger yourself -- if you were just walking along and got unwittingly picked up and killed by this unfamiliar thing, it'd feel unfair and time-wasting.

“Many of our scripted sequences were designed to give the player gameplay clues as well as provide moments of sheer terror” ~Ken Birdwell in Half-Life’s post-mortem

So we've been shown by that animation that the barnacles are unmoving ceiling-dwellers that reel up and eat things that touch their thin, dangling ton?gue. We'll later find out:

• If you touch the tongue, you'll be pulled into its mouth unless you kill the barnacle first.
• While you're being pulled up, you can look and shoot, but you can't move.
• Barnacles have low health.
• Barnacles will reel in and try to eat literally anything. This is a double-edged sword: they can go for you and your allies, but also your enemies, which works to your advantage. Unfortunately, AI in Half-Life is pretty complex, so you're unlikely to be able to manipulate a moving enemy into getting caught (it's easier to just shoot it). A barnacle can lend a nice ripple to a shooting arena, though.

Real animals

Half-Life's barnacles have some things in common with real animals. This isn't necessarily because Valve was mimicking nature. It's just that "things which make a videogame ene??my effective" and "things which will help an animal survive" can sometimes be the same, so ingenious examples of both will converge.

Jonathan Wojcik alerted me to the fact that the Half-Life barnacles' hunting method of dangling a sticky thread and eating the animals that get stuck to it is a method that has b??een encountered in nature. It's utilized by some spiders, and by?? the beautiful “fungus gnat” larvae you see in the video above.

Real barnacles were probably a direct inspiration for the appearance of Half-Life barnacles. Real barn??acles have an extremely long, prehensile appendage coming out of t??hem -- but unlike the barnacles we're talking about in this article, that appendage is NOT a tongue!

Half-Life 1

Barnacles have the ability to cordon off danger zones, and that's used well in this area. These barnacles encoura?ge you to take a certain path, and present you with harsh but delicate limitations during a fight. They're also a warning that you're entering a room which is more dangerous than it looks...

In the middle of this pi?cture, on top of the box, you can see some shotgun shells which you'll instantly want to jump to when you enter the room (going down via the sloping path is obviously an unappealing option). But when you get onto the box, the wood you're standing on collapse??s, leaving you no way back out of the room -- and then a pair of aliens teleport onto the slopes and start running up and down them, shooting at you! It's a uniquely constrained battle, and it gets particularly crazy if you happen to run into a barnacle and have to continue shooting while ascending.

Here's another setpiece. This screenshot was taken while looking directly up. The four greyish lines comin??g out of the ceiling are barnacle tongues hanging around you.

Barnacles don't move, so they're easy to sh?oot at -- unless YOU are moving in some complex way. In this scene, the player is standing on a platform that is descending and rotating, a mathematically interesting movement that creates a cage. Aim at a barnacle, and your cross-hairs will curve around and move outward due to the motion.

It is possible for you to pull a lever and stop the platf??orm moving. The barnacles here gently encourage you to start making use of that lever.

Another room, another way of using barnacles. When a barnacle catches you it pulls you up, which is pretty bad because you're going to??ward its mouth -- but it's not so bad if it means being pulled away ??from the mouth of something else!

In this water tank, you'll fight the first "ichthyosaur," an underwater enemy [not pictured]. There are half a dozen barnacles dangling their tongues in the water. During the underwater fight, while fleeing the aquat??ic creature, you might touch a barnacle tongue either accidentally or on purpose. Being hois??ted out of the attacking ichthyosaur's reach by a barnacle will provide a strange kind of momentary relief. The ceiling is quite high, giving you lots of time to turn around and smack the barnacle before it tries to eat you.

This is our final thing from the original Half-Life. This setpiece again shows how the immobility of the barnacle makes it useful. Note, by the way, that an unmoving enemy in a game is usually called an "obstacle" -- one example would be bottomless pits in platformers. Barnacles basically do the same jobs as bottomless pits: they carve out "areas that you don't want to go." Barnacles are much neater in 3D tha??n pits though, as the above diagram of the "treadmill" setpiece shows us.

FYI: jumping onto a treadmill is a jarring and stressful experience, because of the abrupt changes in sideways and forward velocity. In Half-Life, and in real life, you're likely to fall off the treadmill if you're not a little smart about it. You do not want to fall off a treadmill! If you fall off one in real life, the floor will punish you painfully. If you fall off one in Half-Life, these barnacles do the same thing.

Think about pits again -- imagine if there were no barnacles here, but instead there were pits on the ground that you'd fall into if you came off the treadmill. It would have the same effec?t, but the pits would have to take up? a lot of floorspace. The barnacle performs the same function in an efficiently smaller space.

Before we look to the Half-Life sequels, here's a scene from Blue Shift. One of the cutest aspects of the barnacle is how you can use them as a way of elevating yourself to a higher place, if you remember to kill them when you get to the top. Several setpieces from different Half-Life series entries u??se t?his. The above picture is my favorite example of an "elevator-barnacle."

The player ?has to cross this gap, but they can't jump the whole thing. They have to hurl themselves at the tongue of the barnacle, which will then hoist them up so they can dismount on the other end.

Why is this the best elevator-barnacle? I like that it involves a jump arc. Also, suppose we made the gap five times wider -- the strategy of jumping toward the tongue would still work, pr??ovided the tongue was long enough. We could make the gap five hundre?d times wider if we wanted!

Now noti??ce the pipe on the left. You actually don't have to use the barnacle to get across thi?s room -- you can just walk across that pipe to get to the same place... although doing so is more roundabout and way more boring. Why did the designers add an extra boring solution to this puzzle? Well, it’s there in case the player (reasonably) assumes they just have to kill the barnacle, and does so... rendering themselves incapable of safely jumping the gap.

Some pretty cool things there in Half-Life 1 then. Now the sequels!

Half-Life 2

Barnacles can be hard to notice. Their body is hidden on the ceiling (nobody ever looks at the ceiling), and they have no movement for you?? to look out for. And their "danger zone" is so thin. Barnacles can consistently take you ??by surprise.

As you'd expect for a surprising enemy, there are lots of barnacle-infused horror scenes, but I want to show you the scene in the picture above, which is from Half-Life 2's hoverc??raft sequence. Look at the thin lines below the bridge -- they're actually barnacle tongues!

Sorry if you have to squint at that screenshot, but that is actually part of the point of these particular barnacles. The player drives under these bridges with great speed, so faint lines in the distance don't stay in the distance for long. This leads to a particularly jarring but funny situation where you can be leisurely speeding along, and suddenly you're suspended in midair while beneath you your hovercraft pootles to a halt. It's a stern warning to reckless drivers, and a novel piece of technology: things aren't usually able to haul you out of your vehicle in driving games!

Here's a great scene from Half-Life 2. The barnacle feature being played with here is "barnacl??es can be manipulated into moving things around for you." But there's quite a lot more to be said about this corr??idor.

The scene is a puzzle: you want to get to the exit. But to get through the room, you have to kill loads of barnacles. Shooting every barnacle individually is a tedious waste of ammo since you only have a pistol. However, there is an explosive barrel around. The “solution” is to carry the expl?osive barrel to a barnacle, let them pick it up, wait until it's been pulled right up close to the ceiling, then shoot the barrel to blow it up. This t?akes out almost every barnacle in the room simultaneously with only two bullets. It's a good puzzle. It gets you to be resourceful and imaginative. It's made more fun by some satisfying animations and cool physics. But the beauty is in the polish.

There's a specific game design tool on show in this scene: an "antepiece." Let's say you're making a game containing a very challenging setpiece, and it requires awareness of some specific pieces of information. One thing game designers can do to help things along is to have a very brief encounter just before the challenging setpiece which clarifies some possibilities within the game. That's what I call an antepiece (a portmanteau of "antechamber" and "setpiece"), and you can find some clear examples of them in Portal, Super Mario Bros., and The Mighty Jill Off. Antepieces are cool because they reward? players for being attentive, a??nd help them get through games quickly and fluently.

This is the exploding-barrel-barnacle puzzle's antepiece. Before you ent??er the barnacle-filled room, you have to move down this hallway. Your path into the hallway is blocked by three [non-explosive] barrels. To get through you must move a barrel, either by pushing it or carrying it. Wherever you place it, it will roll down the slope in front of you and almost certainly get picked up by one of the two barnacles you can see at the end of the ?hall. This clarifies three important facts for the player: 1) you can move barrels 2) the floor here is slippery, and 3) barnacles will try to eat barrels. The two barnacles are easy to avoid, so there's zero challenge in this small place. It contributes to the game purely by helping you with the confrontation around the corner.

One last clever aspect of the exploding-barrel-barnacle room is the second slope, just before the huge barnacle crowd. It makes things both easier and harder. Easier because you can just put the explosive barrel onto the slope and it'll roll toward the barnacles on its own (just like what happened in the antepiece). Harder, because you're at risk of sliding down the slope yourself!

Half-Life 2: Episode 1

This is a terrible picture of a room that explores a clever challenge in a minor way. You? can see some dangerous barnacle tongues dangling down here, but not the vulnerable barnacle bodies. This shows you how a barnacle can hide. It's the only game enemy I've ever seen hide behin?d a ceiling! Here's a crude diagram that will hopefully help you understand the challenge:

There are a couple of ways of killing the hidden barnacle??s. I'm not so interested in ??them; what I want to talk about is the structure that's built up around these barnacles.

This setup presents a problem for the designers: if us players ??were just walking along and we ??came up against a barnacle placed in this irritating way, it might feel unfair. We might wonder “How come the holes in the ceiling convenience my enemies so much?” “How come they get to use this separate upper area I have no access to?” So the designers took steps to make sure it felt fair.

You actually enter the lower floor by breaking through the ceiling yourself. In other words, you got into this room in the same way the barnacles are getting their tongues into it -- so you have less right to ??feel annoyed at their advantage.

When you've completed this area, you go up a staircase and get to strut, triumphant and risk-free, through the upper room. You can gloat at the barnacles you killed, finish off the ones you missed, and pick up a supply crate or two that you find near them. Most importantly, you are finally given access to this location that was so annoyingly advantageous to your enemies.

Half-Life 2: Episode 2

This is a wordless piece of slapstick comed??y. The feature on show here is "barnacles can take objects out of your hands."

We see a machine that requires a cog. We go and get the cog. When we find the cog, we run excitedly back to the machine .??.. with the cog blocking our view. While we're away, a barnacle tongue has been scripted to descend over the machine. We're not looking where we're going, so it's able to snatch our treasure out of our hands!

When an object is snatched away from you, it doesn't hurt you. It's not a "hostile" act -- it's just a little "mischievou??s." And when showing off a "mischievous" feature, the best structure to set up around it is the structure of a joke.

A joke is more funny if you have some reason to expect the punchline. And an event in a game is more fair if you have some reason to expect it. Valve's people know this: note that there's another barnacle tongue dangling ??over the place where the cog is picked up. This implants in your head the idea that you should watch out for barnacles, so it doesn't feel cheap when the new one comes along.

I should apologize for part of this -- I know that a joke is definitely less funny when someone explains it to you. Let's round this off!

My personal assessments

I've described about a quarter of the barnacle encounters that appear in the Half-Life games. They're not all winners: designers sometimes get lazy ??and just bung a few barnacles into a corridor to make you tiptoe around them. Some exist purely to make a room look more scary or challenging than it really is. So barnacles can be mishandled. But they're still really a cleverly-designed enemy.

Barnacles are fundamentally a great big bluff -- they're actually very unlikely to damage you. When you get caught on a tongue, you're slowly drawn toward a pair of ravenously clamping, sharp jaws. But if you face toward them, you can take them out with a single whack of your crowbar (which never runs out of ammo). At heart, they're "toothless"... and yet, all players will try to avoid barnacle tongues, because those jaws are just terrifying.

Valve is ??successfully having its cake and eating it too with the barnacle. They've made an entity that you want to avoid, and can ther?efore be used to make tense, interesting challenges. But it'll seldom waste anyone's time, because it won’t usually kill them.

Barnacles are extremely simple: they're? just a line going through 3D space. They make no movements, no decisions. They're sensitive to no contexts. There's no timing to their behavior. Some videogame entities need? to be put in specially-set-up environments, but you can always use a barnacle (so long as there's a ceiling in the current environment).

Complex enemies are hard to i?ntroduce to players. Barnacles are effortless to introduce. Once you've been introduced to them, the level ??designers can combine them with other things, like the ichthyosaur, the explosive barrel, the spiral walkway, or the other enemies. It is in combinations of objects that the intellects of designers can shine, because combinations are allowed to be more complicated than enemy behaviors can be on their own.

I see the barnacle as a feat of engineering, rather than a ;feat of artistry. It's not designed to be in one place, present? one challenge, elicit one emoti?on. It's a tool, to be used to construct any situation you like.

Valve is famous for its design processes. Everyone's voice gets heard, and everybody happily works hard for one another's benefit. It's a little utopia. And in all these moments I've spoken about, I feel the harmony of that process comes through in the game: the barnacle was a tool made by o?ne person, as a gift to a bunch of other people. And it provided great he?lp to those people, in all their varied endeavors.

The post Untold riches: The brilliance of Half-Life’s barnacles appeared first on Destructoid.

Aw yeah

Loved NECA's Portal gun replicas? Well you'll have another gun to add to your arsenal come Spring 2013 as the toy company is working on creating Gravity Gun replicas from Half-Life 2. NECA will only be making a limited amount ?of Gravity Guns, but it won't be as limited as a run like the Portal guns were.

Pre-orders haven't opened yet, but those of you attendin??g New York Toy Fair in February will be able to get an early look at the gun.

The post NECA is making Half-Life 2 Gravity Gun replicas appeared first on Destructoid.

A wave of new Half-Life 2: Episode 3 chatter has been triggered for the millionth time this year, now thanks to the Facebook page of fan site Valve Time. The page posted what it claims to be official artwork for the upcoming expansion,? and it has stuck rigidly by the claim. 

The art, which has been dated to ar??ound 2008, mostly centers on Alyx Vance, though there?? are some really trippy images of enemies and environments as well. It's some interesting stuff to look at, in any case. 

Real or not, I wish Valve would just say something about the next Half-Life game. I think we may have a full-scale riot across the entirety of North Amer??ica if this fevered speculation goes on much longer. 

Exclusive Half-Life 2: Episode 3 Concept Art [Facebook]

The post Rumor: Half-Life 2: Episode 3 artwork leaked appeared first on Destructoid.