Black Mesa: So Close I Can Smell It

Black Mesa, the total remake and modernization of the original Half-Life game seems to be getting closer and closer to completion but if previous fan remakes are anything to go by we'll never see it.

Well, OK, maybe we'll never *play* it as you can actually see it right here in glorious internet widescreen! I was mildly interested after seeing screenshots from previous iterations but this trailer really gets my blood running hot... oooh baby.

*fingers crossed* they make their 2009 projected release date (if you can call an entire year a release date).

Steamy News For Gamers

Back in March Valve Corp. announced the upcoming release of Steam Cloud, a series of services that allows gamers using the Steam platform to store game configuration settings in "the cloud". Well it's coming out just in time for the release of Left 4 Dead, Valve's new multiplayer zombie shooter.

This means that if you're like me and rarely use the default keyboard configuration you can upload your settings to the Steam Cloud and grab them any time you like. So if you buy a new PC or your game is really buggy and resets the config each time it crashes (I'm looking DIRECTLY at you Bioshock) or you're on your mate's PC or whatever, you can set everything to what you're comfortable with.

"For some time now, Steam has allowed gamers to log on from any computer in the world and access their applications. This also makes it easy to upgrade a PC without worrying about losing your games," said Gabe Newell, president and co-founder of Valve. "Steam Cloud is a natural extension of the portability Steam affords gamers and developers, and we intend to expand its feature set as it is used in Left 4 Dead and other games coming to Steam."

What would be really great is if games that share a common engine or common settings could import from another game. For example, imagine loading up Left 4 Dead for the first time and a prompt appears asking if you'd like to import your Half-Life 2 control settings.

Mirror's Edge Looks Like It Could Be Very Frustrating

Kotaku has some new in-game footage (below) from this year's parkour-inspired first person shooter runner game Mirror's Edge. Finally something different from the same scene/level we've seen over and over in the past 6 months.

This time the gameplay is centered on running around in a Half-Life-esque indoor area with lots of ladders and platforms and snipers! All I could think of while watching the new footage is how much the gameplay is like Portal... Portal without the portal gun. Basically you enter an area at point A and you've got to figure out how to get to point B before GLaDOS does something nasty to you while acting all innocent.

All similarities aside, I'm still looking forward to this game as it appears to offer something new in a time when all the big games are sequels to games we played on the previous generation platforms.