Coming in 2012

Valve announces a new Half-Life game

Maybe this is just wishful thinking, but Valve has dropped a few hints about our favourite bearded and crowbar-wielding adventurer this year. Back in March, Valve's PR man Doug Lombardi stated that Valve was 'not done with Gordon Freeman's adventures,' and the hero of Half-Life even made a cameo appearance in Portal 2.

What's more, we've waited for over four years since Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and it's about time Valve took a break from Left4Dead and returned to the Half-Life franchise. Will we ever see Half-Life 2: Episode 3? Probably not, if a recent interview with Valve's top boss, Gabe Newell, in Develop magazine is anything to go by.

According to the interview, the idea of episodic gaming has now been replaced with the concept of 'entertainment as a service', where games are no longer cut up into episodes, but instead follow the Team Fortress 2 model, where a game is a platform that can evolve and receive updates via Steam.

How this could work with a new Half-Life title remains to be seen, but we predict that Gordon Freeman's next outing will be in a brand-new game called Half-Life 3, rather than a new episode, and it might just be the best PC game ever made. That said, we don't expect to be able to play this in 2012, but we really hope that Valve will announce something new from the Half-Life franchise this year.

OnLive changes everything, but not for everyone

OnLive is one of the greatest ever ideas for gaming in principle. It doesn't matter if your PC doesn't have the latest graphics card and CPU - you can just use a basic net-connected PC, or even Android-based tablets and smartphones now, and play the latest PC games via cloud-based hardware over a video stream. All you need is a good Internet connection. Ah yes, this is the problem.

In much of the UK, of course, this isn't a problem at all. However, OnLive requires a minimum broadband connection speed of 2Mb/sec and recommends 5Mb/sec, which simply isn't possible in many areas of the UK right now. You can check the average current broadband speeds across the UK at http://maps.ofcom.org.uk/broadband,which reveals the depressing state of the UK's broadband network.

We clicked a few places randomly, finding that 23.8 per cent of broadband users in Herefordshire, and 17.6 per cent in Norfolk, had connection speeds under 2Mb/sec, for example. OnLive is a great service, but it's sadly one that's going need to wait for the UK infrastructure to catch up before it can become standard. This isn't going to happen in 2012, but we do expect to see a lot more of OnLive, and maybe other similar services, during the year. Watch this space.