Ever since developers got their hands on the Oculus Rift developer kits earlier this year there has been a steady stream of incredible videos appearing on the internet showing what this piece of technology can do for video games, it was only a matter of time before someone would start working on a Half-Life mod that utilised the new kit.

I’ve seen a couple of videos of people playing Half-Life 2 with the Rift but this latest show case by Nathan Andrews has some very important differences that really change the experience from simply playing Half-Life 2 with a Rift, to actually experiencing Rift VR in Half-Life 2.

We’re currently in the process of wrapping up the latest release of Half-Life VR, which will include HL2: episode 1 VR support. This video was made in a single playthrough with my oculus rift dev-kit and razer hydra, I cropped the video to make it easier to view for those who currently don’t have a rift so keep in mind that the vertical field of view is probably twice what is shown in the video when wearing the actual rift.

Interested in giving this a shot? Check out the official web page for the mod here.

As described in our Roundup, due to SteamPipe a lot of Source mods are in a pretty dire state right now. Whilst there is a lot of information on the topic in various places, the aim of this post is to provide a general fix for Half-Life 2, Episode 2 and Portal 1 that you can use to easily patch up the majority of the casualties and get them limping back into action.

Hello and welcome to the freshly relaunched LambdaGeneration.com! I am Darren “Daz” Weekes and I love talking about level design in games, so much so in fact that I’ve been doing it on my youtube channel for over a year now focusing on the Half-Life and Quake series of games. My videos aim to entertain and perhaps educate people on the design process behind game levels, so if you’ve ever had an urge to design your own level for a Half-Life title then hopefully I can provide that first stepping stone into the nebulous space that is game design. That’s quite enough about me because today I have something quite special to share with you…

Two years in development, a jump from the Portal 2 branch of Source to Alien Swarm, and six months of voting by eager fans, this total conversion mod has been given the Greenlight from Valve to go on Steam!

Infra is a self described “gun free exploration game” where your goal isn’t to fight off monsters or some shadowy organization hellbent on world domination. No, you take on the role of a pencil-pushing, structural analyst fighting the war on poor construction…..whilst being trapped beneath a city with a collapsing infrastructure. As you attempt to stay alive, you will explore through the city’s underbelly and solve puzzles that will force you to make a choice: will you restore the city’s structural integrity, or ensure your own survival?

This is a review/critique of Black Mesa: Source (a free fan-made remake of Half-Life), co-written by Mimaz (co-host of the Steamchat Podcast) and Vic (previous lead editor of LambdaGeneration).

Black Mesa is a difficult game to judge.

Update: This article has been updated with further information on the upcoming first release of Black Mesa: Source. Check it all out, within!

You may or may not know that the work I do, especially here, tends to demand some pretty crazy late night hours of me. Consequently, I might sleep in worse than Gordon Freeman himself (after all, we can all imagine why he was late for that faithful experiment).

And sometimes, it so happens that the universe itself will directly conspire against my sleepy ways.

Like now.

UPDATE 3: Facepunch member J*Rod has created an insightful and very informative explanation of how Source 2 might work, based on what we’ve seen in the leaked code. If you can’t read code (or as I like to call it, hieroglyphs), then this is your lucky day.

UPDATE 2: LambdaGen fan 3rrorVirus has made this hilarious little video about this whole Source 2 debacle – check it out!

UPDATE: Facepunch member DevinWatson has compiled a full list of just about every single Source 2 reference in the SFM files. Take a look!

Yeah, it gets better. Waaay better.

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!

At their core, video games are essentially entertainment – designed to be fun. They accomplish these two objectives through all sorts of ways, within the various genres of the gaming world. Most of the games we play are, ostensibly, mere entertainment – created to be fun, enthralling and, perhaps, little else beyond that. But recently, many have contemplated and whether or not video games truly are art. But this debate goes beyond gaming itself: for instance, can we classify the Roundhay Garden Scene as art? While we’re at that, can we classify the Mona Lisa as entertainment? Is all entertainment actually art, or is all art somehow entertainment? It’s a multifaceted argument that might be going on for a very long while. I, personally, am of the conviction that, video games are art. Of course, there are some games that simultaneously represent both entertainment and art (Portal 1, Half-Life 2). There are also some games that lead more towards the art side, but they still maintain the basic framework of a video game. If they didn’t, we’d have a tough time calling them video games.

But in comes something that might shake up the way we look at video games. That something is Dear Esther. Originally designed as a free HL2 mod in 2008, Dear Esther was a terrific, if flawed experiment regarding interactive, non-linear storytelling conveyed through a video game. Almost 4 years later, the same team, plus one master level designer, have returned to remake and reimagine Dear Esther, almost from the ground up, as a independent Source game. That which was primitive is now beautiful, and a whole new audience could be exposed to this interesting creation. But is it more than just an experiment, or, perhaps, is it more than just a video game? Well, read on to find out!

Ever since the birth of the atom bomb, man has been obsessed with his demise at its hands. From “On The Beach” to “Dr. Strangelove”, and from “DEFCON” to “Fallout”, we seem to have a hard-on for the nuclear holocaust. But something that many people seem to be ignoring is the idea of the post-nuclear society. Post-nuclear nation-states, and post-nuclear warfare. It’s a concept that has been neglected by many.

However, these visions are no longer confined to our dreams, or rather, our nightmares. No, now we have Nuclear Dawn. While it first began development long ago, in 2005, as an independent Source mod, its turbulent and troubled development soon led to it being lost in the depths of development hell. Luckily, InterWave Studios bravely journeyed into that sinister dimension, and after a couple more years in development later, it is now a full-fledged commercial Source game. But is it a fearsome bunker-buster, or is it a mere dud? Read on!