[mr.miyagi]

Posting in a Half-Life 2 forum, Valve's Gabe Newell has confirmed that the troubled Half-Life sequel will go gold in August, suggesting that an end of summer release may be in the works.

To the best of our admittedly weak planning abilities, we are looking at August, said Newell, adding that the game will also appear in a less violent version, specially created for the German market. The game will also be localised into English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Thai.

Since VU Games has not yet confirmed a release date for the game, it is possible to assume that the publisher may sit on the title for a late September release in order to avoid the summer holiday sales lull.

Mr. Newell also mentioned what the installed size of Half-Life 2 will be. The total size of the game, on disk, will be 2GB while installed it will take-up 3 GBs of hard-disk space, not including the extras such as CS:Source, HL:Source and DOD:Source. This suggests that a DVD version of the game will be the most widely available, with a CD version also very likely.

nag: