A new live action Half-Life fan film is in the works.

‘Lambda’ by Dark Pulse Productions follows the story of a character known as Dominic Ryan, a resistance fighter who teams up with Barney Calhoun and Alyx Vance from Half-Life 2 in an attempt to rebel the Combine forces currently dominating the earth. The story itself is supposedly set a few days prior to the events of the game when Gordon Freeman is still in stasis, although it will also tie into the events beyond Gordon’s awakening from Point Insertion, up to The Uprising.

Another year has passed and Half-Life 3 still hasn’t been released.

Not to worry though, thanks to a Reddit user we now have a dedicated website to constantly check the current status of the game’s unforeseen release – HasHalfLife3BeenReleased.com.

Thanks to Bury Shimel, also known as ‘KoreRat’ to the community, you can now follow Dr. Freeman’s endeavours on the social networking site Instagram.

PlanetPhillip has updated his ‘MapTap’ software to make it even easier for you to install and run single-player maps for the Half-Life and Portal series.

The free application, now updated to version 2.5 (release candidate 1), allows anyone to download, install and run hundreds of maps made by the community.

A proposed Russian magazine entitled ‘LambdaPreviews’ is looking for people to help kick-start what could be an interesting community project.

Managed by PivotBot a.k.a ‘John Freeman’ of the VK Half-Life Community, ‘LambdaPreviews’ aims to showcase the works of the Valve community via a free online magazine.

Alex Portman, also know to the community as ‘Deviant Pictures Films’, has just released yet another stunning Source Filmmaker short entitled ‘Protector’.

The video attempts to portray the brutality of the Combines Civil Protection team in an emotional and tense situation, whereby an undisclosed CP sees light in the situation and takes matters into his own hands.

Portman, who initially started out by using Garry’s Mod, has produced a many shorts over the years, all of which have all been well acclaimed by the community.

You can view more of Deviant Pictures’ videos on YouTube.

Update 11th August: Thanks to everyone who emailed in!

If anyone is still interested, we are still looking for contributors to cover the following specific topics:

• Garry’s Mod – Modding news, playthoughs, gamemode/map reviews, comics! etc.
• Portal Series – Modding news, mod/map reviews, community creativity eg.fan-films, artwork etc.
• Left4Dead Series – Official news, modding news, map reviews, community creativity eg.fan-films
• DOTA 2 – Official news, events coverage, community projects

We are also appealing to anyone who is interested in producing video content, such as playthroughs, mod/map/gamemode reviews and video tutorials.

Also, if you are someone who is interested in producing very occasional articles for the site, we are always interested in publishing ‘guest articles’ as opposed to dedicating yourself as a contributor.

Many moons ago, you might remember an article we posted about how Valve had given the Black Mesa team (now known as the Crowbar Collective) the opportunity to sell their mod as a full retail product. Despite announcing that a Source SDK 2013 version of Black Mesa would also be available for free, the announcement was met with mixed criticism. There was an overwhelming amount of support for the team, but there were a number of people who were concerned with what ‘ethical’ implications this choice to go retail might have. Should community made content that has always been available for free suddenly be given the chance to be monetized?

Released last month, The Citizen Returns is the long awaited sequel to 2008’s Episode 2 mod The Citizen. As the name might suggest, we take on the role of just another resistance fighter in the battle against the Combine and the story (which is expanded from an earlier release known as The Citizen II) gives us several different missions to that end.

In case you’ve never heard of it, Opposing Force 2 is a mod that serves as a fan made sequel to the very well received Half-Life expansion, Half-Life: Opposing Force (if that weren’t obvious enough). After several years of development, people have gone through a number of phases where they ask “is this mod dead?” Only to be quelled by the developers themselves who regularly reply to posts on their ModDb page – no one ever seems to read the comments, do they? Unfortunately, the team is no longer able to work regularly on the mod, due to another project that has taken up much of their spare time. But before the internet trolls take to ModDb and other forums, they should know that Opposing Force 2 is in fact far from dead. The team still wants it to see the light of day, so they are commissioning help from the community!