As they say, better late than never!

A year and a half ago, in late 2010, Michael “DemonStrate” Yanni created a jaw-dropping 9-minute speedrun of the original Portal, titled “Portal Done Pro“. It was the new world-record time for the fastest playthrough of Portal 1, and understandably, it was widely publicized at the time.

But you know what they say: records are made to be broken. And yesterday, PDP’s world record was not only broken, but smashed wide open. Read on!

For a good few months, all we had concerning the upcoming release of Steam (along with Valve’s game library) for the Linux operating system, was the original announcement from April. Since then, there have been a few small developments on the Steam Linux front, but no formal announcement of any sort on Valve’s part.

Well, until now, I suppose!

[UPDATE: And hours later, the second brief downtime period has ended. The wiki is now back online, yet again.]

Just a quick reminder/public service announcement: earlier this week, the Combine OverWiki came back online, following a brief period of downtime caused by a domain name registration issue.

The wiki is now completely operational again (and still being actively maintained, with far better quality content than any other Half-Life wiki has to offer), so check it out and, why not, consider becoming an editor!

On a related note, the wiki’s admins plan to switch to a far better hosting system some time later this year. And once that’s done, the sky’s the limit!

After being delayed for nearly half a month, the 2012 edition of the Steam Summer Sale is finally upon us. Your wallet is now shaking in fear.

A surprise, sure – but a very pleasant one indeed!

Valve have just announced that the Source Filmmaker is now in full-on open beta, available “for free, to everyone“. Yes, that means absolutely everyone with a Steam account. It can be downloaded from the Steam Store, here. It’s a fairly bulky program, though, so make sure you have a fair bit of free space on your hard-drive before you download and install it.

The SFM itself has received a brand new update, which includes session files for “Meet the Engineer”, the third TF2 Meet the Team short film. This means that the onslaught of “Meet the Heavy” parodies is about to come to an end, and an even greater influx of “Meet the Engineer” variations are about to flood the Internet. May God have mercy on our souls.

The Source Filmmaker is a cinematic story-telling tool based in the Source engine, originally developed by Valve in 2005. It is now used all of their animated short films and promotional videos. It’s unbelievably versatile, fairly simple, and it synthesizes the entire production pipeline of a modern animation studio, into one simple program, that can be used and operated by any gaming PC. Really, what’s not to like?

In addition, Valve have opened a new section of the Steam Community devoted entirely to the Source Filmmaker. There, you can share, view, discuss, and rate videos made using the SFM. There are already over 870 videos in this Filmmaker community, and it doesn’t show signs of stopping. So why not join in?

Talk about a blitzkrieg reveal!

[UPDATE 2: In addition, Doug Lombardi (Valve’s VP of marketing) has confirmed to us that Valve has no plans to show anything game-related at Gamescom:

We will have the Steam team there to meet with developers and publishers. No game showing planned.

Ouch. Well, there goes my grant money.]

[UPDATE: As it turns out, Gerald Bauser doesn’t work for Gamescom’s organizers, and therefore, the profile in question is illegitimate. Sorry, folks – just another false alarm!]

PlanetPhillip was a website focused on chronicling, uploading, and reviewing custom maps and mods for both the Half-Life series, and the Portal series. Founded on the 23rd of September 2003 (coincidentally, the day of the infamous Half-Life 2 delay), it was far more than just a simple map database. It had many different features, spin-off projects and websites, as well as a number of competitions for writing and level design. It had its own active mini-community, and for many of us, it might have been the first Half-Life site we ever visited.