On this week’s The Drill Down podcast, Uber‘s banned in London, Tesla unveils its Cybertruck, Valve learns to count to three, and a plan to save the web …and much, much more.
Fans of the Half-Life series have been dreaming about the fabled Half-Life 3 for many, many years. So long, in fact, that they gave up and switched from dreaming to joking about it years ago.
But while Half-Life 3 is still just as much of a pipe dream today as it was yesterday, Valve has announced a new game in the series titled Half-Life: Alyx. The game is a full-length virtual reality title, and it’s actually both a prequel and a sequel set after the events of the original game but before the events of Half-Life 2.
An announcement trailer for the game was released today, and you can find it below along with more info.
Like any well-written history book, Dungeons & Dreamers captures your attention from the very beginning. For those of us who are older and remember a time before video games were a major source of entertainment, this book is like going home again. It firmly establishes its roots in tabletop gaming and taking the reader through a step-by-step transformation to the wondrous gaming networks we have today. And if it stopped there, this would still have been a labor of love that justified the long hours spent researching and interviewing. But it’s more than that, it’s an exceptionally detailed accounting of the work of several pioneers in the video gaming industry.
Modern gaming owes much of its entertainment and viability to early roleplaying gamers like Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, who adapted other tabletop games into a more detail rich experience, allowing the player to move about in an unfettered landscape. Many people would come later on that would embrace this concept and take it to the next level. Richard Garriott was one of the first to act upon this, creating a multitude of text based games that eventually led to his massive multiplayer game, Ultima (and its sequels).
This week, Chinese hackers infiltrate U.S. newspaper networks, Twitter also gets hacked, Oreo takes advantage of the Super Bowl blackout, is Netflix‘s full season release schedule the future of television…or a big mistake, will your body be the next unlimited storage device, and if you thought J.J. Abrams hit the motherlode last week for helming both Star Trek and Star Wars franchises, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!
If you pay attention to entertainment news headlines even just a little bit, then you’ve noticed the name J.J. Abrams quite often lately. Whether it’s his upcoming mega-sequel Star Trek Into Darkness, the recent announcement that after Trek he’ll hop over to Star Wars Episode VII, or various other bits that may be reported, it’s a name we see often.
Now Abrams is adding to this run in the spotlight and looking to fortify his status amongst the geeks of this world.
At the D.I.C.E. Summit for video game designers and developers in Las Vegas recently, Abrams and Valve Software co-founder and president Gabe Newell announced that they are working on movie adaptations of two massively popular Valve games, Half-Life and Portal.
Students of the Unusual™ comic cover used with permission of 3BoysProductions
The Mercuri Bros.™ comic cover used with permission of Prodigal Son Press
