Half-Life 2 News

Gabe Newell is sending a garden gnome into outer space

In what is undoubtedly the most pleasantly bizarre press release we have received this year, Valve founder Gabe Newell has announced plans to launch an actual garden gnome into space. Working with Rocket Lab, Newell plans to donate one dollar to the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit at New Zealand's Starship Children's Hospital for every viewer who tunes in for the launch.

Newell has spent most of this year in Auckland, New Zealand, and this charity event is part of his ongoing efforts to "help the economy and community that sheltered him", according to the press release. It goes on: "Newell would like the good people of New Zealand, global leaders of living in New Zealand, to know that his eccentric attempts at charity are largely harmless and pose no immediate threat to their way of life."

Rocket Lab will be using Electron's Kick Stage to deliver the 150mm titanium garden gnome into orbit. The gnome itself has been manufactured by Wellington's Weta Workshop, the studio behind many of the makeup effects, weapons, and creatures featured in The Lord of the Rings films. The rocket has the ability to reorient itself and leave orbit to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere, leaving Half-Life 2's Gnome Chompski to sail through space on his own.

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How a Half-Life 2 cyberpunk mod became its own game after 13 years

G String wasn't supposed to be a game. The idea stemmed from a series of architectural study maps for Gmod that creator Eya Eyaura then spun into a conversion mod of Half-Life 2. It wasn't supposed to go anywhere, either. After the beta for G String was released, Eyaura wanted to leave it behind but inevitably couldn't. "I was in a bad place," she tells us. "Nothing was happening for me, but I kept getting feedback about G String, so I kept working on it."

Almost 13 years later and G String has just released on Steam, a far cry from the Half-Life 2 conversion mod it once was. The cyberpunk shooter tells the tale of Myo Hyori, a bright teen in a dark future and a metropolis that's on the brink of imploding. There are light environmental puzzles to solve, and a plot to follow through a long campaign. What was once a mod is now a fully fleshed out PC game.

While G String has various cyberpunk themes and undertones, they weren't there at the start. "The whole cyberpunk vibe wasn't intentional," Eyaura says. "Growing up, I never even thought I could make a game, let alone a shooter. It was not an option in my mind. It seemed too difficult. But it came together eventually."

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Half-Life 2 meets Cyberpunk 2077 in this full conversion mod

After 12 years, the incredibly ambitious Half-Life 2 full conversion mod G String has been released. Transforming the classic FPS game into a mix between Cyberpunk 2077 and Blade Runner, the mod promises a large-scale action-adventure game that explores a future destroyed by climate change.

The project, available on Steam, trades Gordon Freeman for Myo Hyori, a Korean teenager living on a planet Earth ruled by the North American Union after environmental destruction has irrevocably altered the Earth's habitat. In her trusty Bortz Bioengineering Biosuit, she explores a huge metropolis, stuck on a world that continues to disintegrate. The rich and privileged live in space colonies, while the rest struggle under an oppressive, anti-religious regime.

Creator Eyaura released a gameplay trailer in December last year, and if you showed it to someone out of context, they'd probably think it's an unreleased Blade Runner RPG game from the early 2000s. The city setting seems to stretch forever amid an orange hue, a pyramid in the distance - a clear visual reference to the Tyrell Corporation - acts as the major point of reference. Another trailer, from July, shows the combat and exploration still resembles Half-Life, though with a good deal more aerial dogfighting, as the offworld sections demonstrate.

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Gordon Freeman is an anti-fascist mass-murderer in Half-Life 2

Gordon Freeman, silent protagonist of the Half-Life series, is an accomplished man, a theoretical physicist working with the best in his field in the Black Mesa Research Facility at the start of the first game. By the end of Half-Life 2, he's added mass-murdering anti-fascist vigilante to his long, strange resume.

In the interest of science, Reddit user TK-576 decided to count the bodies Freeman leaves behind in Valve's FPS game series. The results are that, well, Freeman's got quite a bit of blood on his hands. In the first Half-Life, he performs 526 kills, but in the second, it's up to 751, a cold 637 being Combine scum. Another 199 are in the Half-Life 2 episodes, bringing the total up to 950 for that entire saga. Fan remakes Black Mesa and Black Mesa: Xen were included, scoring 399 and 178, respectively.

One remarkable tidbit is that Freeman kills almost the same amount of people in Half-Life and the Black Mesa games, an incidental testament to their accuracy. A couple of factors made obtaining precise numbers difficult, namely ammo reserves and infinite enemy respawns. Where the option for running away exists, the crew took it, which they believe is in the spirit of the games themselves. "This likely aligns with how the developers intended to depict Freeman anyway: as an ammo-starved survivalist, rather than Rambo," the post reads. "In general, anytime we encountered enemies we could either avoid without taking damage or allow allies like Alyx or Grigori to murder for us, we took the opportunity."

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Play Now For Free - Half-Life Series

Half-Life: Alyx is coming in March, and we are celebrating early by making all games in the Half-Life Series FREE to play for Steam users, from now until the day it launches!

If you already have Steam installed, you can click the following links to start playing now!
Half-Life
Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2: Episode One
Half-Life 2: Episode Two

If you don't have Steam, you can download it here.

Half-Life: Alyx is set before the events of Half-Life 2 and the episodes, but the games share characters and story elements. The Half-Life: Alyx team believes that the best way to enjoy the new game is to play through the old ones, especially Half-Life 2 and the episodes, so we want to make that as easy as possible.