Half life was one of the best first person shooters ever made. It’s going on 4 (or is it 5?) years old at this point and it’s still the number one online game, which is amazing when you think about it. Shortly after it was released the developers (Valve) announced they would be producing a commercial ‘Team Fortresses 2’ game, which they proceeded to show at several E3 expositions, but to this day they’ve never released anything aside from repackaging of the original Half Life and various Mods sold in shrinkwrap. So everyone was surprised when they announced a couple of weeks ago that not only had they been working on a sequel, it was almost finished and would be in stores no later than this fall.

Shweeet!

I’m trying not to get too excited about it since Unreal 2 and Unreal Tournament 2 were both big disapointments, but damn I hope they do it right. More than any other developer, Valve ‘gets’ online gaming. They’ve done a fantastic job encouraging the developer communities and the breadth and depth of the mods available for their engine are testimony to that. To this day I miss playing Frontline Forces (sadly now defunct), and I am occasionally tempted to reinstall Half Life so I can play mods like Day of Defeat and Firearms, but the damned engine is getting so creaky – if you look at the maps with a critical eye you realize just how low polygon they are and you can see the limitations on texture resolution and size. It just looks, well, bad, compared to the Quake III engine or Battlefield 1942, and I can’t bring myself to get it running again.

Anyway what got me going on this topic is these screenshots I