Unless you live in a cave in the mountains and have just returned to civilisation (I used that word reluctantly!) and this is the first website you have checked, you will no doubt have heard all about Pokemon Go.

I have got almost no idea how Pokemon Go exactly works, nor do I want to, so please don’t explain, but here is how I see half-Life Go working.

At various locations around , well, everywhere, are hidden various Half-Life enemies. You job is to kill or avoid them. For example, when you are in 5 metres of a headcrab your phone starts to make that purring sound sound. Upon lifting your phone up and scanning the area, when you are facing the headcrab it jumps and screams at you. The only way to kill it, is to position it at your feet and kick it, making sure the camera sees it happen.

With other enemies, you must use your phone as a gun. In some cases you must run away. There would be ammo caches scattered around the area. For example, if you saw a strider you would know that there is a rocket launcher nearby, as well as some rockets.

Players could locate Easter eggs of extra caches buy looking in groups i.e. the caches only appear if there are two or more “rebels” with 2 metres of each other.

I suppose you could buy extra weapons, ammo or range detection and I assume you can do those things in the Pokemon version.

Anyway, would you play it?

What other Half-Life inspired features would you add?

Firstly, we’ve got a little out of sequence recently. Don was supposed to be this weekend, but he stepped in for Darren, who went last weekend instead of the first one. Anyway, there are no actual events planned and since July has 5 weekends that confuses things even more.

But fear not, Phillip will step unto the breach dear friends, once more (kind of a shaky Shakespeare’s Henry V reference) and will be streaming at least 2, YES, 2 Valve Hammer Editor Practice Sessions which are part of The Level Design Academy series – both Saturday and Sunday morning at around 11:00am Central European Time.

Secondly, Phillip will also be starting a new “Phillip Plays” series.

Drum Roll Please….

The Closure!

Yes, he wanted to the Final Project Diary first but he is just itching to play Leon’s most recent release. He has no doubt that he will spend a fair amount of time shouting at the screen, but that’s normal between him and Leon.

You should double check the Time & Date.Com website for your local time.

All streams will be on the RTSL Twitch Channel and announced on the RTSL Twitter Feed.

If you have any questions about the streams, just ask.

Following Thursday’s What The Headcrab! Special: Hunt Down The Freeman I was contacted by the game’s director and we organised a video interview.

Berkan makes the announcement that a demo mod WILL be released.

Before you do, I want to address a couple of points.

Firstly, a few people have asked me why I am giving so much attention to the project. I feel that crowd funding of projects like this is a really important topic for our community. This has the potential to allow modders to turn into game creators, which in turn could be great for the Half-Life game community.

Secondly, I plan to make a lot more What The Headcrab! Specials and these happen to be the first few produced. They will be on plenty of different topics but all connected to the Half-Life community, so stay tuned for those.

Thirdly, I have the same reservations, doubts and misgivings about the project as you. Some things I really feel are mistakes and others are just false. But, I feel we should try to be open & curious, and simply ignoring this won’t help future creators.

I want to play Half-Life games within the Half-Life story universe with the same “feel” and design format that we have come to love, but we don’t always get what we want. Clearly, Prospekt made us very wary about promises and presentations but I want to remain positive about such projects.

I hope you enjoy the interview. Thanks for watching.

What are your thoughts?

So here is the first in what I hope will be a new regular video, a What The Headcrab! Special.

It’s a little rushed, but that’s the nature of these types of videos.

This one covers a recently announced new Half-Life standalone game called Hunt Down The Freeman.

Watch the video for full details.

What are your thoughts?

Firstly, Darren will be continuing his The Ville Retrospective event and this week it’s the turn of EndVille starting at 1pm UK Time on Saturday (GMT+1).

Secondly, Phillip hopefully will be streaming one his practice mapping sessions, which is part of The Level Design Academy. It’s most likely to be Saturday morning or after Darren’s stream.

Thirdly, Phillip and Don will be streaming the 4th Tutoring session on Sunday at 3pm Central European Time. The topic is “clip brushes and brush entities”.

You should double check the Time & Date.Com website for your local time. Please note the UK is not on GMT during the summer, so use 1pm UK or London time to check the stream time in your time zone.

All streams will be on the RTSL Twitch Channel and announced on the RTSL Twitter Feed.

If you have any questions about the streams, just ask.

I saw a piece of news on the BBC a few days ago about Blizzard suing a company in Germany over a piece of software that they released which allows players to cheat.

Fully understand why Blizzard does this as it adversely affects the playing experience of other users. I’ve never played an MP game but I can see why other people cheating would be really frustrating to those that don’t.

Hello again. Here is another Half-Life News video.

Hope you like it.

Go watch.

Hello July, you Daughter Of A Stalker! Where have you been?

I can finally, wear that yellow bikini around the house I keep talking about (if I receive $1000 Dollars donations this month, I post pics), so it’s definitely starting to get hotter.

My work load eases off from today, so I should be able to do more with the site in the next 5 weeks or so.

So, what have you got planned for this month?

Now that Steam is available on mobile Windows devices I started thinking about all the Half-Life games I had seen on Android, which lead me onto whether I would actually want to play Half-Life games on my mobile (I can’t, I have an iPhone – at least I don’t THINK I can) or a tablet (I can’t, I’m sure this time because I don’t have a tablet! Ha – gotcha.).

I know that desktop usage among non-business users is dropping significantly and mobile and tablet is soaring but there are some things better done on Desktops. I’m not suggesting that games HAVE to be better on desktops but some games work better there, just like some films HAVE to be seen in the cinema to really appreciate them. I’m sure you get what I mean.

The future could easily be VR goggles wirelessly connected to your mobile/tablet – who knows?

I don’t want you to think I am some old fuddy-duddy, I have played games on my mobile but only a couple. Mostly Dumb Ways to Die

I’d love to hear your thoughts on mobile gaming in general and specifically to FPS games like Half-Life.