Valve recently announced ‘The Hatless Update‘ on the Team Fortress 2 Blog, bringing a slew of new changes to the game. The changes include a new Coaching System, Voting System, Dynamic Model Loading and more. Another blog post soon followed giving an official announcement to the Portal 2 Pin that has been circulating the game since November of last year. Hit the jump for a more in-depth look.

Many of us were heartbroken upon hearing the news of Kelly Bailey’s departure from Valve, but many of us were also confident that his spiritual successor Mike Morasky would indeed be a spiritual successor, as his previous work in Team Fortress 2, Portal and Left 4 Dead speaks for itself. GamesRadar recently interviewed Morasky about the music in Portal 2, and while Morasky had lots to say on the subject, he also threw in some new and old samples of songs to listen to. This article is definitely a feast for eyes and ears alike, and be sure to hit the jump for a brief lowdown.

The Gold Source (GoldSRC) mod ‘Half-Life Gold‘ is a mod that aims to bring back the “good, old Half-Life 1 of 1998 with better graphic elements”. The mod is split into two parts, ‘Half-Life Gold Singleplayer’ and ‘Half-Life Gold Death Match’, the former of which (the single-player component) was just released. Go and play it now, if you want your nostalgia tickled!

An official trailer for the upcoming fan-film ‘Half-Life: Portal to Black Mesa’ recently went up on YouTube. It’s brilliant! According to the description, Portal to Black Mesa is a “short live action parody inspired by the Half-Life video games series”.

Did you know that the free-to-play MMORPG Vindictus, developed by devCAT, (and published by Nexon, creators of Counter-Strike Online) runs on the Source Engine? One might then be (un)surprised to see the MMO suddenly get invaded by iconic characters from Valve, including the Headcrab, Crowbar and others.

Over at PixelJoint.com, a user by the name of ‘robotwo‘ posted a handful of screenshots for his development of Half-Life on the Master System, a console released by Sega back in 1985.

The game is indeed an actual playable game, and according to robotwo it has taken around 6,000 lines of code just to create the four rooms shown in his post. Gordon may look a bit chubby, but robotwo explains that he wanted to keep him as readable as possible on such a small scale (due to the limitations of the Sega Master System).

Also while any further details are bare, be sure to check out his undertaking.

The team over a the Team Fortress blog (no pun intended) recently published three posts on their blog, the first of which reveals the final result for the charity drive towards the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan a month ago. According to the blog, a total of USD$430,543.65 was raised for the cause, all coming from the purchases of a handful of limited-edition Japanese-themed hats (of which all of the proceedings went towards the American Red Cross).

IndustryGamers.com recently published an interview with Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock, one of the major competitors to Steam (especially since GameStop’s acquisition of their digital distribution platform Impulse, Stardock’s digital distribution platform, earlier this year). He discusses how he came to his decision regarding GameStop’s acquisition, but also give an explanation to the reason behind the (apparent) ongoing Half-Life delay. Hit the jump to find out more, or read the interview for yourself.

The folks over at Operation Black Mesa, a Source-remake of Half-Life: Opposing Force, recently published a bunch of new media for the mod. According to the latest blog post posted by DragonNOR on the their ModDB page, this media release is more ‘modest’ compared to the mountain of screenshots, videos and sounds that the previous one entailed. Nevertheless, it was still as interesting as the last, packing in more fantastic concept art, detailed weapon renders and beautiful in-game screenshots.

Earlier today Garry Newman, creator of Garry’s Mod, sent out the following tweet:

Anyone unable to shade polygon normals?

Newman uses his Twitter account to communicate with players of Garry’s Mod, and while this tweet in particular may seem nothing other than normal, it wasn’t. It was a trap for people who have pirated Garry’s Mod.