HL2world have found a way to enable multiplayer in Half-Life 2 that's built into the retail version.

Out of the ashes of an evil alien occupation, mankind?s tattered remnants attempt to form an ineffective resistance against their technocratic masters. The endless source of inspiration for their efforts is one man, a four-eyed physicist that stuck it to the aliens and corporate forces of evil once before, armed with nothing more than determination, ingenuity, and?. a crowbar. Read the Half-life 2 review at GameConnect

Half-Life 2 Files reports recently, one of our members here, alerted me of a pirated warez version of Half-Life 2, apparently released via the Bittorent network. I immediately, forwarded this to Gabe Newell of VALVe Software.

The Halo 2 Autoupdate is a small piece of software which will improve the functionality of Halo 2, most notably in the following areas:

Matchmaking: Some players have experienced irritating delays while waiting for a game to be found while in Quickmatch and Optimatch. This is caused by a combination of factors, including connection speed and other detailed nuances of matchmaking. We have isolated the cause and applied a solution to the autoupdate which should normalize that wait time.

Half-Life 2 benchmarking demos used by HardOCP for benchmarking.

It seems ATI's benchmarks were flawed pretty badly.
The Tech Lounge and [H]ardOCP have some different numbers to show you.

As for calling one video card a ?winner? over the other, it just does not seem feasible and would likely be irresponsible to do so. ATI?s X800 series has not thrashed NVIDIA?s 6800 series silicon as many expected. Half Life 2 simply plays great on video cards from both NVIDIA and ATI. So let?s make this clear

GameConnect has new screenshots of the upcoming game Painkiller: Battle out of Hell. They show you the 9 latest screenshots of the Lab level. View them here.

The Halo for Windows v1.06 Hotfix addresses a rare crash bug that could occur if a malicious individual (hacker) purposely imitates a game server and sends invalid data to clients who try to browse the server list. This hot-fix changes the version number of Halo for Windows and the Halo for Windows Dedicated Server to v1.06 from v1.05.

id Software has issued an updated Software Development Kit for DOOM 3, their recent sci-fi first-person shooter. This version 2 release brings the promised support for vehicles, bug fixes and more, and it now comes in Win32 and Linux incarnations.

Thanks to Voodoo Extreme for the heads up!

There's a nasty Half-Life 2 bug out there that is stopping people from playing this seminal shooter. Valve's Erik Johnson sent out this to help those folks:

For people that are running into the bug on startup that looks like:

Fido over at The Inquirer reports HALF LIFE 2 is finally with us and we've had sight of some benchmarks of ATI products with the long-awaited game.

Today, November 16th, is the official release of Valve's greatest game ever, Half-Life 2. Though we've all been waiting impatiently for the game, the early release didn't happen like we all had hoped. Well that's life I guess, we can't expect much, other than we're still breathing and enjoying the sun (for those of us who do leave our homes).

Half-Life 2 is available now for purchase and to play. Those who pre-purchased their copy via Steam may access the game by restarting Steam, then double-clicking on the Half-Life 2 icon in their Steam Games directory. To purchase your copy via Steam, get Steam now.

GameSpot and IGN PC have thrown up their reviews of Half-Life 2! Here's a snip.

I wanted to make this review short and sweet, but it's hard to stop writing, even when excluding facts that could potentially contaminate an exceptionally well thought-out gaming experience. There's just so much to say. Half-Life 2 is, simply put, the best single-player shooter ever released for the PC. It does so many things right in so many ways that it might be possible to write a thesis on the topic of Half-Life 2 compared to other single player shooters.

Epic Games has released the latest patch for Unreal Tournament 2004 to upgrade their futuristic multiplayer first-person shooter to version 3339. This release applies more gameplay tweaks, bug fixes, and other changes as detailed in the release notes, and it's accompanied by an updated version 1.1 of the Editor's Choice Edition bonus pack for new users (the patch already includes the bonus pack changes).

If you have purchased a copy of Half-Life 2, we are sorry you are still waiting to play. This is not Valve's choice. Vivendi is insisting that the game has not yet been released, and has threatened that Valve would be in violation of its contract if we activate the Half-Life 2 Steam authentication servers at this time.

GameSpot have thrown up a great article called The Final Hours of Half-Life 2 ! It's pretty long at 25 pages but well worth the read! Here's a snip.

At this point, we're standing around, saying, 'Do you have anything to do? Well, I don't have anything to do,'" Newell says as he walks the halls of Valve. It's September 30, 2004, and Half-Life 2 is nearly done. A release candidate was sent to Vivendi on September 15. Now Valve is working to fix the final bugs that were found in that version. There is other good news as well: Valve is beginning to sense that Vivendi may end up shipping the game this year, mostly due to intense pressure from retailers who think Half-Life 2 could become the best-selling PC game of all time.

The playable demo of BloodRayne 2 has been released, allowing the first chance to sample the upcoming third-person horror action sequel by Terminal Reality. This demo "features 1 level of play--the Mansion. Your objective is to discover who is the Cult of Kagan and put an end to their ring leader, Dariel Zerenski."

In order to enter the following cheats you will have to activate the console by modifying game shortcut. Right-click on the Half-Life 2 icon on your desktop, select Properties and a new screen should pop up. Add the " -console" parameter (without the quotes) at the end of the target field so it looks similar to this:

A new version of Direcpll.dll file is available for download! This file is recommended to properly run AquaMark3 with some newer graphics hardware. It fixes problems like black screens, exceptions/access violations and incorrect clock speed detection.