Tag: Half Life

Feature

How videogames are changing the action movie

Something strange happens with the camera at the start of Spectre (2015). The movie opens with a wide view of an elaborate Day of the Dead parade in Mexico City. We’re then shown a villain before focusing on James Bond, who starts to follow this villain. Bond and a woman then go into a hotel and he leaves her by exiting through a window onto the rooftop, where he prepares to shoot his target. It’s a standard set-up for a Bond film, but throughout all of this, the camera doesn’t seem to cut away, not once. The entire opening is…
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Watch speedrunners obliterate Half-Life in 20 minutes 41 seconds

Okay, so you’ve beaten Half-Life like 15 years ago and felt pretty good about yourself. But these guys just beat it in 20 minutes 41 seconds. Well, the word “just” is a bit of an exaggeration. The speedrun, posted on YouTube recently, was the result of four years of “painstaking theorycrafting, execution,” and that crushing feeling that surely comes with playing the same single-player shooter over and over and over. This is commendable because it’s a world-record, and because a game that normally takes 8 hours was completed in less time than it takes me to take shower. (Hey, I…
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Half-Life 2 sure would be good-looking on modern hardware

These crisp and meticulously-rendered screenshots of the train station from Half-Life 2 titillate and tease. Just how gorgeous would Half-Life 3 look on modern hardware? Not like that’s going to happen, but from time to time its good to rub fresh salt in old wounds.  The shots come to us courtesy of digital artist Jeannot “Logithx” van Berlo, who grabbed these images from his very lovely recreation of City 17 and posted them on the Polycount user forum, which is full of game artists pimping their stuff.  What’s scary is he’s claiming that his architectural model will look even more…