A few days ago, Cliff Bleszinski (he of Unreal and GOW fame) wrote a nice piece about micro-transactions in the gaming industry.

And then a today, I saw this piece by Rory Cellan-Jones on the BBC about games and the Freemium business model and couldn’t help but wonder:

Could Half-Life 3 be a Freemium game?

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Well, it’s been discussed many times before but it finally looks to be happening on a professional scale: A Half-Life (or portal) movie!

I’ll probably be the one Half-Life fan to say that I think it’s a bad idea and here’s why…

You know how a movie is never as good as a book (well almost always never)? I think the same will happen here. Yes, the movie will be fantastic but not if you played Half-Life near when it first came out.

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I have a couple of favourite sci-fi authors; Iain M. Banks and Alistair Reynolds. I have bought their last few books in hardback because not only do hardback books make me feel intellectual, they are also available quite a bit earlier than the paperback version.

The problem is that I need to be in the right mood and it looks like the paperback version of one of the books is about to be released and I haven’t even touched the hardback yet.

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Here is another HL3 Question. Seeing a pattern? Think I know something you don’t?

Anyway, assuming you have a regular PC and not some fancy, screaming fast machine, if HL3 was released next week would you play it straight away on a lower graphical setting or wait until you had a machine that could run it properly?

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There’s lots of talk about the Steambox and other Valve related stuff but let’s not forget HL3 – not that I thought you had!

In case you didn’t know there’s a Twitter account called IsHL3OutYet to let you know. Not that you would actually need it as I am sure everybody and their cat will hear about it within 1 minute of the official announcement.

Anyway, do you think it will be released this year? I’m not sure but obviously I hope so. My biggest concern is that I will need to buy new hardware to run it, which is going to be a serious problem for me.

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Back in 2006 I wrote an article entitled Cultural Influence of Stories and mods which discussed how some nationalities of science fiction writers tend to have general, underlying themes throughout their work.

I am resurrecting the idea for today’s poll question.

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In case you don’t know, Kickstarter is a website that allows people to raise money for projects. Elite Dangerous is a good example. it’s been on the news a bit recently.

“Donators” get special “rewards” for pledging different amounts of money. It’s actually a really clever idea, or it was right at the beginning.

With so many people looking to get your money that “Special” feeling has been lost.

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Unless you’ve been trapped in Xen, then I’m sure you heard the news that Disney has bought the Star Wars franchise from George Lucas.

Some like the idea and others hate it. Perhaps Mr. Lucas added some caveats about IP cross over or some other points related to keeping the SW universe pure etc. I’m not a huge fan of Star Wars but it would be cool to have some new movies to watch.

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So, let’s be clear, from this moment forward, and probably some time in the past, I will be calling the next game in the HL series: Half-Life 3.

I think we all agree it’s not going to be an episode any more.

Onto the poll question. My working life is a little different to what it was 20 years ago and I no longer have the opportunity to take days off when I want it – basically, I work when I am told to.

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