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kingphreak writes "The popular Half-Life mod, Natural-Selection is undergoing an update. Natural-Selection: Source (a port of the original to the new Half-Life 2 Source Engine) and Natural-Selection 2 have been announced. It is not known by Charlie "Flayra" Cleveland and the rest of the NS Team whether NS:S will be a direct port or whether NS2 will use the Source Engine, UT2004 Engine, etc." They're currently testing Beta 6 within the community.

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to the official Natural Selection page, where V3.0 Beta of the Half-Life mod "hybrid first-person/real-time strategy game" is now available. According to the page, changes include 10 new maps, as well as the addition of Natural Selection: Combat, a "...new fast and furious gameplay mode focusing on intense action. Combat games generally last less than ten minutes, and require very little knowledge to play." The mod can now be played using the add-on's "official Steam support", and will be "...listed under the 'My Games' section (not as a 3rd-party mod)", a laudable achievement for the Natural Selection developers, who've also implemented vital "skulk prediction fixes" for this update.

Thanks to GamersWithJobs for their piece discussing a new study about teamwork in online games. The study homepage has a PDF download of the student-authored paper, which is based on a survey interviewing "a total of 4,712 people" about their team-based gaming experiences online. In terms of improving and evolving teamwork, a variety of options are discussed: "A central commander role like in [Half-Life mod] Natural Selection supports the team aspect... and received positive feedback. However, an unskilled commander might destroy the team experience, as indicated by the votes for S2's Savage."

Entropius writes "Natural Selection, a free Half-Life mod that contains elements of both traditional first-person shooters and real-time strategy games, has just gotten a complete overhaul with the release of version 2.0. In a nutshell, it combines the best elements of StarCraft and Counter-Strike. NS 2.0 adds new alien abilities, commander interface changes, changes to the resource model, four new maps, and more flexibility in alien evolutions. It's a whole new game now, and a blast to play... one of the most innovative new mods in a long time. The mirrors are straining to keep up, but here's a list of download links via readyroom.org." Update: 08/01 14:43 GMT by S : Here's a very necessary BitTorrent link, thanks to commenters.

MonsieurEvil writes "Valve announced today (http://www.planethalflife.com) that the long-awaited Half-Life 2 will be appearing at E3, and will be released this year. The NDA for press is supposed to end on April 28th, and quite a few magazines are already hyping their scoops. Hopefully all the teen-angst types that show their superiority through decrying this as vaporware can now listen to their elders..."