June 29^th, 2004 (12:00am) - The ’King of Vaporware’ crown might not be taken off of Duke Nukem Forever’s head just yet. The game which originally debuted at E3 2003, Half Life 2, originally took the gaming press by storm but since has gone in and out of the limelight so many times that many gamers wonder if the game will ever see an actual release. Well perhaps in an attempt to calm gamer’s nerves (and a bit of Doom 3 pre-emptive damage control I suspect), Valve Software’s Gabe Newell recently popped into the Half Life 2 Fallout forum to give gamers this to chew on:

"To the best of our admittedly weak planning abilities, we are looking at August."

Uhm, okay? This seems to jive with their previous best estimate of "Summer 2004", however any PC gamer worth his weight in RAM surely hasn’t forgotten the supposed September 2003 release date and subsequent theft scandal. And with more and more developers falling into the unfortunate trend of waiting until Christmas to dump everything in our laps at once, who knows really when the game might ship. At this point, all we can really hope is that it does - eventually - and not be held up in limbo with Dukeforever.