A lot of things can change during the development of a game. Half-Life is rich with lore, and because of this, things have constantly changed during the series development.

An animator known as Tim Hijlkema recently uploaded an amazing short film that reimagines scenes from a list of 15 popular video games, including Half-Life, Left 4 Dead and even spin-off Source mod The Stanley Parable.

“One 4 Nine” is a community created Left 4 Dead campaign made by Kevin “keved” Edwards.

It was originally released for Left 4 Dead in 2010, however it received a significant update in July this year. Since One 4 Nine’s initial release, it has been subject to critical acclaim, receiving a hefty 9.6/10 on ModDB and being elected as a “Featured Campaign” by Valve for it’s outstanding quality.

TAITO, a Japanese publisher specialized in Arcade games teamed up with Valve to bring their highly successful co-op zombie shooter “Left 4 Dead” to Japanese arcades!

“Left 4 Dead: Survivors”, previously known as “Project Z”, will feature familiar environments from both Left 4 Dead 1 and 2, and introduces four all-new survivors.

The four new characters in “Left 4 Dead: Survivors” (Image Source: Polygon)

You ever notice how just as the community starts to drop down into the dumps, something comes completely out of left field and gives us something to talk about again? Funny how that happens with Valve…

This is an editorial by Lilgreenman which discusses the involvement of humour and comedic elements in Valve’s more recent games. All views expressed in this article are his own.

With all the noise Valve makes about Team Fortress 2 being “The world’s number 1 hat simulator”, their creative staff seem to have neglected a grounding in hat-based literature. Specifically, it seems they’ve never picked up a copy of the best selling hat-based book of all time (eat it, Oliver Sacks!), Dr. Seuss’ 1957 classic The Cat in the Hat.

Spoilers ahead for those who haven’t read C-I-T-H: The moral of the book is related to the two young protagonists by the titular feline, after he helps them clean up after a rowdy playtime session; “It’s fun to have fun, but you have to know how.” Which brings me, in my roundabout way, to my point. Valve’s top writers – internet comedy alumni Erik Wolpaw, Chet Faliszek and Jay Pinkerton – don’t seem to know how to have fun.

Last month, it was announced that Overkill’s PAYDAY: The Heist and Valve’s Left 4 Dead would come together, through a sort of crossover. Not in the form of a full game, but rather, in the form of some sort of DLC release – much like how the Potato Fools’ Day cross-game events played out (but with none of the glyph hunting and potato farming).

Well, it turns out that Valve and Overkill are not kidding around, as a teaser trailer has just been released for PAYDAY: No Mercy.

Despite what Valve plans or doesn’t plan to do regarding the next Half-Life, or how long they plan on developing it, there’s no denying that they’ve dropped the ball when it comes to communicating with the Half-Life community, and the gaming community at large. As a result, they may have inflicted a fatal injury upon the franchise and its community. There’s better ways to ensure a lengthy development time than acting like the franchise in question doesn’t exist, and occasionally annoying your fanbase by blatantly trolling them.

Whenever Half-Life 3 does come out, we’re all pretty sure it’s going to be monumental. I wouldn’t expect any less from a Half-Life game that’s been in development for nearly a decade. But I think we can all agree that Valve isn’t doing this right. At all. So what can we do? Can we even do anything at all? Well, there might be something. Let’s see what it is…

Gaming Heads, the merchandiser which has recently signed a deal with Valve to produce Valve universe-related merchandise, has just announced the first in their line of L4D2 based statues: The Tank.

This faithfully recreated statue of the Tank looks excellent, cast in high-quality poly-stone and featuring luminous eyes. Pre-orders are now live, so if you want one, hurry, cause there’s only 750 units worldwide, and they are released in Q1 2011.

The standard version of the Tank statue has a price of $299.99, while the “Exclusive” version (which is highly limited at only 300 units worldwide), which also features a to scale Pump Action Shotgun has a price of $324.99.

It is a bit pricey, but it looks really awesome!

For more info, head over to the official Gaming Heads website: www.gamingheads.com

Valve continues their awesome L4D2 support with Week 15. This week’s Xbox 360 mutation is the encore mutation “Four Swordsmen of the Apocalypse”, which features all 4 Survivors facing constant streams of Special Infected with nothing but Katana’s, and this week’s PC mutation is also an encore mutation. “Versus Survival” is essentially the classic Survival gamemode, except the Special Infected are controlled by players. The voting breakdown for the two platforms was: