Half-Life 2 News

If you're not familiar with Noclip (the website, not the documentaries), I have a treat for you. Coded and maintained by creator "Jasper", Noclip.website contains versions of game levels that you can fly around in 3D to take a closer peek at. The site features a heck of a lot of Nintendo games (and some Dark Souls), but Jasper has also shared a bit of toying with Half-Life 2's levels. They've recently stitched together (almost) all of HL2's levels to do a bit of a flythrough showing off how they look all lined up in space together. Surprisingly decent, it turns out.

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Speedrunners will routinely dazzle you with the technical mastery they have over their chosen games. Sometimes, though, you come across a run that flat out breaks your brain. One such is this speedrun of Half-Life 2 that sees players starting on the final level and working their way back to the first. That's easy enough to follow, but they spend parts of it bunny-hopping backwards to gain speed, and it makes me wonder if this is just a speedrun on rewind (it isn't).

The speedrun itself comes in at just over 13 minutes, though it is segmented. A group of 12 speedrunners spent 345 days mastering individual parts of the game that add up to the scored time. Doing it all from finish to start requires a mod, but actually achieving the time takes knowledge of heaps of exploits and the ability to execute them.

I recommend checking out this commentary video from two of the speedrunners involved. The pair explain how they manage to manipulate the map to pass through individual sections, and the various ways they can exploit save files to do things like regaining their health.

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Many of you are by now bathing in twinkling neon ravelights and swooning into the metal arms of Cyberpunk 2077‘s humourless unhunks, who stalk the streets of Night City like animatronic pizza restaurant mascots gone feral. That is fine. There are worse places to find oneself in the labyrinthine hell of video games. Places such as these. Here are 9 neighbourhoods you wouldn’t want to bring up your children in.

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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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