Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw of his decision to publish the plot of Episode 3 as fanfiction. “I was living on an island, totally cut off from my friends and creative community of the last couple decades, I was completely out of touch and had nobody to talk me out of it. It just seemed like a fun thing to do… until I did it.”
Laidlaw first discovered that community in the mid 90s, in the office of Valve, where Gabe Newell and team were already hard at work on Half-Life. “I’d seen bits and pieces of the levels they were working on, but as soon as I heard the name, I just got this amazing buzz,” Laidlaw says. “I could see the whole world they were aiming at somehow, and I felt it was a collective vision. This is one reason it’s so weird to me when people try to attribute authorship to me that I’ve never felt. It was all there when I got there, in embryo.”
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RPS Game Club, a kind of monthly book club for games where we pick a game to play each month, write some cool things about it, and have a big all liveblog discussion with you lot, our readers, at the end of it. It’s a project I’ve been wanting to get off the ground for some time now, and finally, the Treehouse Game Club doors have been busted open… and there’s some toe-tapping guitar music coming from inside? That’s right, we’re playing Hi-Fi Rush as our first RPS Game Club game, and we hope you’ll join us on this month-long musical journey.
, so we’re seeing some big discounts on previously-released options that bring them into newfound relevance. Such is the case with the Ryzen 7 7700X, the middle child of the Zen 4 lineup and an absolutely beastly performer when it comes to gaming thanks to its full-fat eight-core, one-CCD design. This chip launched at $399 but is now $100 cheaper thanks to a discount code at Newegg, where you can pick up the 7700X for $298.99 when you use code <strong>BTSCP2655</strong> at the checkout.</p><p><a href=)
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 as the organisation have announced that qualifications begin today for their Olympics Esports Series 2023. The IOC say “the four day-festival will showcase the very best of virtual sports,” featuring esports titans such as Just Dance and Zwift.</p><p><a href=)
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npckc for their work on 
Cyberpunk 2077 finally works… on the Steam Deck, I mean (it’s worked elsewhere for a while now.) The open-world RPG has always been playable on the portable machine, but it’s now Steam Deck verified – meaning Valve have tested it and used their almighty wisdom to determine it’ll run without a hitch.
Apex Legends. This news comes from a 
Final Fantasy 16 is looking fab according to the latest round of previews, but that doesn’t do us much good if it doesn’t come to PC. The JRPG sequel is a six-month exclusive on PlayStation 5 and the PC version doesn’t have a release date.
Sons Of The Forest is doing extremely well, selling 2 million copies in 24 hours. There have been a handful of gripes from players, though, and one of them just got resolved in the latest hotfix. You can now add hotkeys to weapons in your inventory.
Final Fantasy 16 were released last year, some questions were asked about its predominantly white cast. Those questions were answered by producer Naoki Yoshida in