HomeLAN Fed has conducted an interview with Phil Daniels, president of Maverick Developments. They are currently working on Machiavellian, an action adventure FPS using the Half-Life engine.

Thanks to Phalex and Corey for the word that Beta 5 of Action Half-Life has been released. There is a Windows and Linux release, the Windows download is 90mb, the Linux one is 94mb. Phalex included some mirror sites with his email, which is nice as the official site seems down at the moment.

Windows - Jolt.co.uk - Servebeer.com
- Gamigo.de - Multiplayer.it - Extremeplayers.de Linux - BlueYonder.co.uk - Extreme Players - Multiplayer.it - Gamigo.de
- Jolt.co.uk

Fileplanet is hosting a 9.3mb movie showing some ingame action from the upcoming beta 5 release of the Action Half-Life mod. Also, on Planet Half-Life are four screenshots. Beta 5 should be out soon.

Trepidation Software has scored an interview with Gabe Newell, who is the Managing Director at Valve these days. If you are looking for new info on Valve's future products, this interview is not for you. However, Gabe does answers questions about his time at Microsoft, how Valve got involved with Sierra, if there were any particular features in Half-Life that were hard to implement and what he is particularly proud of in the game. They also ask him if his life has been affected in any way after the release of the game, what his opinion of bunny hopping is, if Valve plans to make games outside of the Half-Life/Team Fortress world, if there's any TF2 info he can share (no) and a few other things.

How did Valve become involved with Sierra? We were going around talking to publishers about the ideas we had for Half-Life. It turns out that most of them thought we were on crack, although they were polite enough at the time. I had a friend who knew Ken Williams, the founder of Sierra, and he kept telling me that we should go pitch Sierra. I was skeptical that Sierra would be interested, but it turned out that Ken had just barely failed to get the publishing rights to Doom and was really interested in making up for that mistake. He had been around enough Microsoft people to realize that we weren't as insane as we came across to other game publishers, and he pretty much signed up Half-Life on the spot.

The first version of the Desert Crisis mod for Half-Life has been released. Release 1.0 is a 97mb download, and various mirrors are available. You can read more about this multiplayer class based modification here.

The Day of Defeat site has word that if you're having problems installing version 2.0, remember to delete the old version first. You need a fresh install or you'll have problems.

As promised (though a bit later), version 2.0 of the Day of Defeat mod for Half-Life has been released. It's a 138mb download, so it might take you a while. You can grab it from Fileplanet, FileFront, Patchez.de and various other mirrors as listed on the DoD site. Day of Defeat 2.0 features ten new maps, a new machine gunner class, new weapon models, and more.

After a cryptic message yesterday, the Day of Defeat team has now confirmed the 2.0 release is today. The new version should be available at 5pm CST.

Got word of an online radio interview tonight at 10PM CST. Rantradio and Redphive are working together to broadcast an interview with Gooseman (Counter-Strike) and Mugsy (Day of Defeat). These interviews will be broadcast during the The Sean Kennedy Show on Rantradio.

CS Nation is reporting that the next releases of Half-Life and Counter-Strike will not come with Steam. Steam is Valve's content delivery system, but is not really friendly for the bandwidth impaired.

Half-Life mapper David Johnston (creator of de_dust among other maps) let us know he has released a new single mission pack for Half-Life, ETC2. ETC2 comes 2.5 years after the release of the first ETC. It's a 13.5mb download.

Want to work at Valve? There are four job openings. Thanks The Warthog.

As you might know, Valve has recently started testing new builds of Half-Life and Counter-Strike. Besides testing their Steam system, they are also implementing some new anti-cheat measures. Erik Johnson was kind enough to answer a few questions about Valve's effort to stop cheating. You can check out the Q&A right here.

- First of all, why did it take Valve so long to counter rampant cheating in its games? [Erik Johnson] Valve has actually been working on cheating for some time, like keeping our network protocol secure and issuing unique WonIDs to every person playing online. We've only recently begun to talk about it in a public forum. ...

HomeLAN's Saturday morning interview is with Charles Cleveland of the Natural Selection mod for Half-Life. Natural Selection is a mix between an FPS and a RTS, and features a sci-fi setting. JCal asks about the idea behind the mod, the weapons for both sides, levels and settings, what are the important gameplay elements, what it was like to go to the Half-Life mod expo, the current status of the mod and a few other things.

It's been quiet around the Opera mod for Half-Life for a while but there's a lenghty update on the official site. Basically they are working on all kinds new things and the project isn't dead. A few new screenshots are included as well.