Valve unveils E3 plans

Both Half-Life 2 Xbox and Half-Life 2: The Lost Coast will be on show at E3 next week according to developer Valve Software, which made the announcement as it rolled out a service update on its Steam content download service.

HL2 Xbox will be on display on Microsoft's E3 booth rather than Vivendi-Universal Games; Valve having recently broken off its long-term publishing relationship with VU to the extent that none of its games will be handled by the publisher beyond August 31st.

Half-Life 2: The Lost Coast will be on display too. We're not sure where yet, but most of you aren't even going so it's hardly a big deal. The Lost Coast, in case you're confused, is a high-definition one-level episode for HL2 which takes a specific area of the game and makes it look ridiculously good-looking.

It's due out on Steam later this year for "customers that meet a specific set of high-end hardware requirements," and should not be confused with proper expansion Aftermath, which is also due out on Steam later this year. There's no word yet on whether Aftermath will be at E3, but we wouldn't be surprised if it was.

The update doesn't clarify whether either Half-Life 2 Xbox or The Lost Coast will be playable, but if we had to guess we'd say that the former will and the latter might not be.

We'll let you know for sure sometime next week!