Half-Life 2 Jurassic Park mod now uses Source SDK 2013

(Image credit: BUTANe)

Update: An earlier version of this story explained that Half-Life 2 mod Jurassic Life will no longer require a Half-Life 2 installation to run, but does still need the Source SDK. It's been edited to highlight this fact.

Jurassic Life started its, um, life as a mod for Half-Life 2 set on Jurassic Park's dinosaur getaway of Isla Nublar. The latest update from its team notes that Jurassic Life will no longer require a Half-Life 2 installation to play. As the ModDB description explains: "You won’t need HL2 at all for the game to work. We wish to let you know that JURASSIC LIFE now only requires SOURCE SDK 2013, which is free and obtainable on Steam."

The modders' training video, with its de rigeur grainy VHS aesthetic, introduces the weapons, dinosaurs—sorry, animals—and also voice actors of Jurassic Life. It's pretty fun hearing them do impersonations of the movie's cast, though Jurassic Life apparently draws inspiration from the book as well as the movie for its locations. You'll play as a park ranger Robert Muldoon, which means the guy whose job is to say "clever girl" and get messily devoured, though perhaps tranq darts and a cattle prod will swing the odds in your favor.

Will see later this year, when it's planned for release. As the modders note in a disclaimer, "This is a non-profit fan-game that is not intended for commercial use" and they're confident Universal won't object on those grounds.

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.