VR-free versions of Half-Life: Alyx keep improving

Kongi the Conqueror's Pancake FPS Starter Kit for Source 2 games is not primarily intended for playing Half-Life: Alyx, as the modder is at pains to explain. "Please don't use this to play Half-Life: Alyx and then complain about the game being bad!!!" as the GitHub pages puts it. "This was NOT intended to be used to play Half-Life: Alyx with!!! It is intended to be a base for non-VR supporting addons for the Source 2 Engine to use!!!"

But guess what? People have been using it to play Half-Life: Alyx, including YouTuber Goutrial, who combined it with several other mods for what seems like the ultimate non-VR Alyx experience. The Half-Life 2: MMod Team came up with a bunch of weapon sounds and animations, Jun Choi over on ArtStation modeled the weapons themselves, and then Shadow_Run on GameBanana combined those animations with those weapon models. Jeremy Lorelli on GitHub provided the Vscripts, and when you add those things together what you get is a version of Half-Life: Alyx with first-person arms holding guns that you can shoot with your mouse.

Is it going to be the best way to play Alyx? No, it's a game designed for VR, of course that's the best way to experience it, what a silly question. But people who can't afford VR or find it makes them sick can use stuff like this to play the new Half-Life with and that's OK. PC gaming is all about messing about with mods and options to get everything the way you personally want it, and this certainly is a thing people want.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.