Half-Life 2 News

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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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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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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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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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