"Valve marketing boss Doug Lombardi said that the next installment in the Half-Life franchise would not be showing up at E3 2008, shooting down rumors that began circulating the Internet yesterday.

But, he said that a "playable Left 4 Dead will be on display in a Valve-hosted suite."

Half-Life 2: Episode 2 launched relatively recently (October 2007), but the franchise's loyal fanbase is already ready for more.

In the absence of Episode 3, Left 4 Dead will be Valve's focus at E3. The g..."

"At a conference on Steam and the future of PC gaming at its Seattle headquarters today, Valve announced that it would be introducing a new feature to its digital distribution platform that allows remote storage of all game data for Steam games.

Steam already allows you to play any games in your Steam library from any PC. Steam Cloud will extend that service to game data - examples given were a progress save from Half-Life, or your keyboard bindings and option settings from Team Fortress 2...."

"Natural Selection (a Half-Life 1 RTS+FPS hybride modification) was first launched on October 31, 2002 with version 1.0, it is up to version 3.2 as of now and has seen a lot of changes over the years. All this time there has never been an officially supported map pack. Sure a lot of servers had custom map packs, but these were not officially supported.


Now finally after all these years there is a community member (Brent 'Stix&Stonz' Mitchell) who took the step into realising a fan map pack."

"The Northern Illinois University campus is still reeling from Thursday’s rampage shooting by an apparently deranged 27-year-old man.

But that hasn’t stopped anti-game violence activist Jack Thompson from threatening NIU with a lawsuit. Over video games."

"With his Friday appearance on Fox News, Miami attorney Jack Thompson has managed to once again introduce the video game violence issue into the aftermath of a tragedy.

In the past, some observers have referred to Thompson’s media tactics as massacre chasing. Frankly, it’s hard to disagree. Beyond that, one has to ask - given that NIU shooter, Stephen Kazmierczak, was 27-years-old - why are video games an issue at all?"

"Seeing that Jack went out of his way to email me this morning to point out that he was "right" about the shooting being spurred by Counter-Strike, I thought it was probably worth another round of Dissecting Jack's Lies.

Hit a jump for his confusing quotes and how accurate they were:

1: "We find from brain scan studies out of Harvard that if you get started playing, for example, violent video games you can more likely copy-cat the behaviors in the games".
Verdict: False
Evidence: Whil..."

"We’ve all played a game where someone other than the main character has a huge role in the game, usually an unsung role. The problem is that these characters are absolutely vital to not only the enjoyment of the game but in pushing the story further along and quite often even saving the main character a time or two. Well it's time these silent saviors get recognized, so here's the top 5 best supporting characters. They were picked based on personality, in-game presence, and over-all abilit..."