Hasta La Gadget!

Valve’s Half-Life 2 along with Episodes One and Two are out of beta and available for download on Steam for Linux, the company announced today. While we welcome any Half-Life news, it’s hard to not get disappointed when the number three isn’t involved. Gordon Freeman’s last known appearance uses the new SteamPipe content delivery system and “numerous” community bug fixes have been implemented.

That’s not all! Oculus Rift (and other virtual reality device) support has been added as well. We aren’t aware of any other VR units besides the Rift, but in March Valve told us it’s pursuing hardware itself. Speculating about other VR systems isn’t far from speculating about Half-Life 3‘s existence — we don’t know anything at this point. However, Linux gaming site Phoronix says to expect more good Valve Linux news in July. We reached out to Valve for more info and will update if we hear anything back.

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Via: Phoronix

Source: Steam

The Oculus Rift company is barely one year old, but it’s already off to a strong start. Developers have kits from a massively successful Kickstarter campaign, said kit has support from the industry’s biggest game engine creators, and the consumer-friendly HD version is already being shown off to press (we loved what we saw at E3 2013 last week). And now the company’s got a solid $16 million in the bank backing up its next step: creating a virtual reality headset that’s significantly more mainstream than the $300 dev kit currently available. But don’t think that alters the young company’s promise of virtual reality on the PC platform; quite the contrary, as CEO Brendan Iribe told Engadget, “We’re really focused on the PC as the platform to bring this to market right now.”

He said that Oculus isn’t against bringing its VR headset to consoles, but that PC remains the primary platform. “We’re always looking at other platforms — looking at consoles, we’re also looking at Android and the mobile side in a big way — but right now we really are focused on the PC platform,” he said. Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida told us last week in an interview that, “We’ve got a couple of the development kits, and I tried it out and I love it,” though he wouldn’t outright say if the PlayStation 4 will support the Rift. We’re betting “yes.”

As for what Oculus is doing in the short-term with the new infusion of cash? In short, it’s being used to staff up (the company’s still under 50 employees right now, mostly engineers). “We’re using the funding to ramp up on hiring more smart people, the best and brightest that we can find,” Iribe said. “The dev kit as it is now, that we’re shipping, will stay the same, and the software side will just keep getting better.” The vast majority of those new employees will be engineers — one glance at the company’s careers page quickly confirms this claim. Outside of new employees, though, Iribe said little will change in the company’s ongoing goal to develop “the very best virtual reality platform we can create.”

Filed under: HD

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Oculus announced its first round of funding today, wherein the company secured $16 million from investors specifically aimed at putting the Oculus Rift in consumer hands. The nascent virtual reality hardware company has repeatedly said its end goal with the Rift is to make it a consumer product; currently, only folks who backed the Rift on Kickstarter and those willing to spend $300 on a developer kit have access. A handful of games support the Rift, though more and more developers are promising not just support in their games, but entire games built from the ground up with VR in mind. An HD version of the headset was also introduced at last week’s E3 gaming show.

Oculus’ new business partners apparently see enough financial potential in the Rift to not only invest heavily, but to also take on board positions — both Santo Politi of Spark Capital and Antonio Rodriguez of Matrix Partners are now on the Oculus board of directors. “What Palmer, Brendan and the team are building at Oculus so closely matches the Metaverse that we had to be part of it. Working with them to get this platform to market at scale will be enormously exciting,” Rodriguez said of today’s news.

The company launched last year with a Kickstarter campaign targeting $250,000 — the project eventually raised just shy of $2.5 million, and now sells its Rift dev kit outside of the Kickstarter campaign.

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Fabled (and Fable) game designer Peter Molyneux has long been a visionary in the gaming world, and his most recent effort, the Kickstarted title known as Godus, has piqued our Curiosity. However, as a veteran of the console world, we jumped at the chance to get his take on next-gen along with an update on his own projects.

Surprisingly, Molyneux wasn’t particularly enthused with the new generation of consoles. Part of the problem, as he sees it, is that consoles are still too focused on the living room, while our digital lives are much more mobile — which is why, in part, Godus is being built for laptops and phones first. “I wanted them [the consoles] to shock and surprise me” with new ways to integrate with mobile devices, he says, but the current mobile features feel like a “bolt-on” rather than an integral part of gameplay. Aside from all the next-gen talk, we got an update on the man who removed Curiosity’s final block (he’s just beginning to enjoy the fruits of godhood), and got his thoughts on Oculus Rift (spoiler: he’s a fan). While words describing an interview are good, an actual interview is better — this one awaits you after the break.

Filed under: Gaming, HD

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I’m a little nauseous and a bit sweaty. This was my first time using the Oculus Rift. It’s the sort of thing you’ve got to ease into, really — sitting stationary, letting your brain adjust to the whole experience. Or you could just pop the thing on and run in place on a treadmill in a downtown Los Angeles hotel suite. Your call, really. Just don’t come crying to me when you’re having a bit of trouble standing up straight, as you attempt to step down from the slippery surface at the end of your session. Have I seen the future? Hard to say, of course, but whatever it was that just happened was neat — and if you were one of the 2,000 or so folks who got in on Virtuix’s Kickstarter, it’ll be heading your way in January.

The company’s CEO, Jan Goetgeluk took me through the paces of the system, a stationary design he settled on after toying around with a more traditional treadmill model. The Omni is really quite a simple thing at its heart, a concave, slick surface attached to two bars that converge in a circle. The company’s designed special soles, as well — plastic pieces raised at the heel and ball of the foot, with a fabric friction surface on the toe. Walk around and your feet slip. That’s about it, really. Of course, it takes some getting used to, and Goetgeluk stood aside as I learned to walk again: lean forward, step down on the heel and let the rest of your foot slide with it. It took a few minutes, and I’m still not exactly an expert

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

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