geekosystem

The good news for everyone still playing Half-Life 2 because Half-Life 3 hasn't come out? You'll have a whole new way to play the game soon, as Freeman and friends are coming to play on the Oculus Rift headset, with a beta version already available for developers. The bad news, of course, is that this is not Half-Life 3.

When it comes to imposing-yet-oddly-majestic structures in video gaming lore, Half-Life 2's iconic Citadel is at the top of the list. Throughout the game, it's a point of interest, a destination, and as you draw ever closer, it looms above you in the background to taunt you with your own insignificance. But how tall is it, exactly? Well, according to recent calculations by redditor Ness4114, it's 8430.9 feet tall, or around three times taller than Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the current record holder for tallest building on Earth.

Other than a few instances of playful trolling, Valve has been utterly -- painfully -- silent about the future of the Half-Life franchise for years now. The Half-Life 2 episodes, while not exactly you may have wanted, at least provided that I.V. drip fans so desperately needed until it cruelly ended at Episode 2, and on no less than the  largest ever cliffhangers in the series. Now, members of Steam Group "A Call for Communication," who number around 28,000, are planning to play Half-Life 2 this Saturday as a way of half-demanding, half-begging Valve to talk about Half-Life again.

Okay, so it's not Half-Life 3, but it's still cool. This Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator replica was built by Harrison Krix of Volpin Props, who makes all kinds of really sweet props. On his blog, Krix mentions that the project was a big one for him, considering the gravity gun is very intricate and very near and dear to a lot of gamers. I think it's totally clear he nailed it. The lighting effects are awesome, and if you look closely, you'll notice an exquisitely placed layer of grime. If you want it, really, really badly, it's going up for auction at the Child's Play annual charity dinner. Just be warned, Krix's last replica, the Portal gun, went for $14,000.

Garry's Mod, the ever-popular physics sandbox, has become a playground for 2nd degree recursion: Games in your game. For the unfamiliar, Garry's Mod is a modification for Half-Life 2's Source Engine that lets players play around with physics, NPCs, scripts, and pretty much anything else. Now, nearly 7 years after HL2's release, the Garry's Mod community is still using it as a laboratory for their mad science. The Facepunch (Garry's Mod message board) members responsible for this particular experiement are Technicolour and Divran, who thought it would be cool to play other games inside of Garry's Mod and what better way to do that than to emulate a Intel 8080 8-bit microprocessor and then use it to play Space Invaders, inside Garry's mod. Where will they go from there? They have some grand aspirations.