Remember the Microsoft presentation in Spanish which gave us the QWERTY controller? Well it seems that there were a lot of secrets out that day since the latest slide from the presentation mentions a game which you may not have heard anything about but which got us confused. In one of the slides shown at the event in Spain and during an XNA presentation, game engines are mentioned and about half-way through the list (made up mostly of games confirmed for x360) a little known game called Half-Life 3 appears. But wait a minute, you might rightly think, isn"t this jumping the gun? Surely Half-Life 2 would have to come to XBox first, before any thought of a third installment right? These are legitimate questions, especially when Half Life 2: Aftermath has not been released for PC yet (expected this fall).
But it"s still hard to deny the fact that the names Valve and H-L 3 are staring us down from the slide. There is little doubt that Microsoft have been chatting to Newell and co. trying to secure some form of cooperation; as there is little doubt that such a move would prove particularly beneficial to the MS camp in the next-gen console wars. But mentioning a Half-Life 3 when Valve itself has mentioned nothing is simply cruel. At best the mention of the game suggests that Microsoft is well ahead in the game to secure Valve"s next H-L game for the XBox, at worst this is just a ridiculous exercise in planning ahead which could go terribly, terribly wrong, after all it"s hard to forget how smoothly the H-L 2 release schedule went.