<![CDATA[Gizmodo: halflife]]> http://tags.gizmodo.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gizmodo.com.png <![CDATA[Gizmodo: halflife]]> http://gizmodo.com/tag/halflife http://gizmodo.com/tag/halflife <![CDATA[Confirmed: CERN Is Just a Huge Half-Life Level]]> Plenty of people have given CERN and Half-Life's Black Mesa research facility the This Thing Looks Like That Thing treatment, but this tour of the facility's deepest bowels is just too much. Steam geysers? Endless corridors? Rusty valves? Slime growths?

Separate from the LHC itself, CERN's labs are sprawling and fairly old, so it's understandable if they're a little industrio-creepy. Which they are!

But considering the facilities are intended for similar purposes (in theory), and the CERN already employs a real-life Gordon Freeman, the likeness here is just uncanny, as if CERN ripped the models and textures from Valve's FPS and somehow actualized them. (Or, you know, the other way around, which actually makes sense.) Check out the full gallery at: [CERNLove via Reddit]

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<![CDATA[Half-Life Played With Real Guns Is Jack Thompson's Wet Dream]]> I have, and always will, reflexively defend videogames against annoying "murder simulator" rhetoric, but the guys at Waterloo Labs, who have figured out how to use actual firearms to play first person shooters, aren't making my life any easier.

The setup is dead simple, all puns intended: Four accelerometers are stuck to a hard wall, where your FPS is projected in real time. Players shoot said wall, with guns. The intensity of the vibrations in each accelerometer is measured to determine where exactly on the board the bullet impacted, which is fed into the host PC, where the coordinate data is translated into an aimed, ingame shot. It works a lot better than you might expect, not just with bullets, but with shovels, too.

If you belong to the very select demographic of people who own a gun, a projector, some lab equipment, and have access to firing range, as well as some some expertise in DIY building and programming languages, Waterloo Labs (predictable tagline: DIY Projects from the Heart of Texas!) provides instructions so you can build this setup yourself. Note: They haven't totally worked out the bugs in the respawn code yet, so aim carefully. [Waterloo Labs via Slashdot]

UPDATE: Jack Thompson is not impressed! Also, incapable of processing anything that is not completely literal:

John, you're terribly confused. Something that further glamorizes killing humans in virtual reality would not be my wet dream. That would be Strauss Zelnick's wet dream.

I'm the guy who opposes this stuff, who has lobbied against it for ten years, and who has been doing everything I can to stop massacres, not foster them.

So just how would what I oppose give me a wet dream? And why would you use such a gross image?

Well, the answer to both questions is in this answer: You have no earthly idea what you are talking about and you have a Jack Thompson obession.

Please report my response to your idiotic headline. [Ed note: Gladly!]

This is the best.

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<![CDATA[CERN's 'Gordon Freeman' Employee Receives Crowbar, Starts Murdering]]> Do you remember that photo of the Large Hadron Collider that showed an employee looking suspiciously like Half Life's Gordon Freeman? The clowns over at Reddit sent him a crowbar, a headcrab and a book, allowing him to go to town on the alien infestation. The very happy alien infestation, by the looks of that photo. See him in action after the jump. [Reddit via Kotaku]

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<![CDATA[Novint Falcon Force Feedback Controller Gets Valve Support]]> The long-in-development force-feedback PC game device Novint Falcon is a good idea in theory, but without actual support from games there's not a whole lot you can do with it. Good news though, since Valve just announced support with the controller for PC versions of The Orange Box, Counter-Strike: Source, the Half-Life 2 series, Team Fortress 2, Portal and Left 4 Dead. With the pistol grip accessory it'll be fine for every game, but what we really have hopes for is fiddling around with that gravity gun and feeling the force feedback with it. [Novint via Crunchgear]

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<![CDATA[Geiger Counter PC Casemod Looks Good In Places That Can Kill You]]> This Russian Geiger Counter casemod (technically an Ion Detector) won't let you know if you're standing waist deep in nuclear radiation, but flick the power switch and the meter jumps to life, letting you know the relatively weak CPU housed inside is working properly. As for the specs inside the box, there's a 300 MHz CPU, 256MB of RAM and a 4GB Compact Flash card for storage. That's more Pong than Half-Life, but it still looks sharp. Just be sure not to mistake it for your real Geiger counter when you're packing for that vacation trip to Chernobyl. [Modding.ru via Technabob]

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<![CDATA[Trakonya Mutator Force Feedback Device Makes You Pay for Bad Gaming Skills]]> The Trakonya Mutator attaches to a gamer's wrist and will then shock said gamer if they screw up in-game. The device only functions with Unreal Tournament for now, but wider support is in the pipe works; next stop? Half Life—nice. We can think of a ton of games this type of self inflicted punishment would work well with, but for $59, we're going to need wider support than just Unreal Tournament out of the box. Still, couple this with the 3rd Space Vest and you'll be sure to end each gaming session with a flurry of bruises and fond memories. Bliss. [Product Page via Everything USB]

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