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The linked documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbZ3HzvFEto
It's also free until Monday (as in free to get, not just limited free play) https://store.steampowered.com/app/70/HalfLife/
I grabbed the free copy…and then fell down the rabbit hole and bought a bunch of other HL games for $6.
I'm just now getting into PC gaming via Linux. I've always had a Mac, so I missed a bunch of games like Half Life.
Now I'm wondering when I'll get to play any of them…
Oh damn, I still have my original Half Life CD key committed to memory. I wonder if that still works.
Is it possible to play it off-line though? I remember that was an issue when I got The Orange Box with Half-Life 2.
Interesting. I do have a steam account, haven't used it for a long time, it doesn't seem to be in my password manager
So I went to reset my password, but got thwarted by the captcha. To email me a password reset link.
I think Ill just torrent it.
At the bottom of the page is a crowbar... maybe you should see if it's useful!
Oh man this makes me miss when websites had fun and did this kind of stuff with Flash
Thank you, that was fun.
The achievement-popup was a cute addition. :D
Steam deck got an upgraded chassis from the sound of it.
Seek. Medical. Attention.
God I still love this game. The welcome speech of the Mark IV. How the scientist talk to each other, and how different the talk is when they speak with guards. How they first hope for a government rescue which decides to kill any and all in black mesa. How fearsome those black assassins are. That you can tickle that insect-bomb thing. In my opinion, HL2 felt much more scripted and less lively. No mention of a recompile for Intel 64bit Macs though.
Looks like no recompile, sadly: "Notice: This product is not compatible with macOS 10.15 Catalina or above. Click here [1] for more information."
[1] https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/5E0D-522A-4E62-B6...
I got my first real introduction to first person shooters with Quake II. I used keyboard only, with page up/down keys for vertical look. When Half-Life came out my friend would only let me play if I looked with the mouse instead. I thought that was so dumb. Why not just use both sides of the keyboard? Why split controls across two devices? But I relented and picked up this wonky control scheme pretty quickly. Then I bought my own copy and wore it down to the nubs over the course of years. I loved mods. My favorite was Action Half-Life. I played Counterstrike a few times when Xena Warrior Princess posters were plastered around maps and scientists acted as hostages. I thought it was too derivative of other accurate combat mods.
When Half-Life 2 came out I bought the pricier version which came with HL1 and all the expansions, mods, etc on Steam. Those are my oldest purchases on the service, naturally.
I love that they brought back the software renderer (and allowed you to disable texture filtering). There's something about that style I find charming.
I'm just waiting on my steam deck to charge so I can curl up on the couch with this for a few hours before bed.
EDIT: I tried it out on my laptop while waiting for the deck to charge, and I'm seeing some bugs in the software renderer with missing textures for semi-transparent objects like floor grilles, so I'm switching back to OpenGL for now. If anyone at Valve wants log-files or information on my setup in order to reproduce, I'm happy to provide it; my email is in my profile.
One of the level designers, Dario Casali, marked the 25th anniversary with a complete playthrough and commentary. [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLk5gaNp4x_AVIJviyHueH...
This game holds such a special place for me, not only for just fun childhood memories, but also so much of what got me into the excitement of how cool it was to see the rapid progress of tech.
Certainly, it isn't atypical for software industry folks of my age to have games be a gateway into tech, but I think I was a bit different in that I rarely considered wanting to make games, rather I enjoyed the tinkering with my computer and the rapid pace at what games could do as much as the game (which continues today with my spending more money on playing with the hardware and toys rather than the actual games) and half-life just
I first played Half-Life on a family PC with no graphics accelerator and I loved it, but I remember the jank from ~15 FPS at a few hundred lines of resolution. This is what drove me to build my first computer and after debugging my way through all the issues that a 12 a year old would make when building a computer before the age of YouTube, I remember being absolutely blown away by the lighting and speed of what this little piece of hardware added to the experience.
That wasn't the first time I felt the rush of getting a computer to do something I wanted (that would probably be getting doom running in windows 3.1 after dealing figuring out the mystical "command line") but it certainly was one of the most drastic in just how fast tech changed.
A small addendum to this... I really want to figure out how to bring similiar experiences to my kids, because it was that loop of problem -> learning -> breakthrough that I think was hugely transformative to not only my career trajectory, but also just in learning to love learning.
So thanks Valve and Half-Life team for this happy memories... but maybe I won't feel the same when I try and play HL DM this weekend and inevitably realize how slow my reaction times have gotten in the last ~25 years ;)
One of my favorite documentaries was made by Noclip, which tells the story of Half-Life and Valve. It is soo good, a must watch. Interestingly, though, it features no one from Valve, as they, in typical Valve fashion, ignored their requests. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQLEW1c-69c
So I'm very excited to watch this new documentary featuring people who worked on the game, made by the same people, such a surprise haha.
Aside from just generating tons of goodwill, does anyone have any insight into why Valve would do this? Obviously, I think it's great regardless of the motivation, but are there rumblings of Half Life 3 that I've missed or something?
Just a few days ago I downloaded a Half-Life PS2 ROM because it looked like the only way to get decent analog stick support for the game.
After purchasing a Steam Deck earlier this year, Half-Life was one of the things I was really looking forward to. It was pretty disappointing once I realized the gamepad support wasn't quite there.
The update claims they've improved this and verified it for the Steam Deck. So excited to give this a go later this weekend.
I would really, really love to be able to play Half-Life again for the first time.
I feel the same way about the first Bioshock, and about the early years of World of Warcraft. Those two are from a bit later obviously, but the three of them really raised the bar for me personally in what was possible in a game.
With HL, it was how immersive the world was, and how very strange and complex the story turned out to be.
With Bioshock, it was the story above all, and how for the first time I was taken in by an "unreliable narrator" in a video game. The reveal around "would you kindly" was really shocking to me, like a good book can be.
With WoW, it was everything, but entering Ironforge for the first time was just a stunning moment for me in particular.
> The entire UI has been reworked to scale at larger screen sizes. We built most of this stuff for 640x480 CRTs and apparently some of you have upgraded since then.
I love this quip :D
To those who are unhappy with the graphics of HL1, you can download Black Mesa which is an remake of the original.
As someone who first played a CD copy of Half-Life before picking up the Steam version, it's amazing to see that they brought back features which were neglected from the Steam release – most notably the viewroll when moving left & right and a semi-recreation of the old main menu.
Many of the QOL changes are greatly appreciated (especially grenade physics), the changes to technical limitations (and addition of func_vehicle) will be a godsend for modders, and I'm surprisingly over the moon that Valve have acknowledged the psyched out Barney from the alpha.
Welcome to the H.E.V. Mark IV protective system, for use in hazardous environment conditions.
High-impact reactive armour activated.
Atmospheric contaminant sensors activated.
Vital sign monitoring activated.
Automatic medical systems engaged.
Defensive weapon selection system activated.
Munition level monitoring activated.
Communications interface online.
Have a very safe day.Love this. I do wonder how the bug fixes will affect speedrun attempts, and if people will start using this for speedrunning or if they'll stay on the prior version.
This is cool , Im just really confused, I somehow coincidentally was JUST playing Black Mesa this evening, ( Hl1 redone in Half-life Source Engine apparently by a fan base with permission) and I am ofcourse a bit surprised to hear this news ( as I rarely play games ) , but also because I don't understand how it relates to Black Mesa.
Black Mesa clearly seems to look better basically as its in the new engine ( but I note a couple of very small things are missing such as how you customise your player model in HL MP) - and it took a long time to make, so I am a bit confused why they have gone back to improve the original code but not port or not just improve Black Mesa. Sorry if I am out of the loop, I'm honestly just in the dark how the 2 product relate, reasoning wise.
> Incorporated func_vehicle entity support from Counter-Strike
By far the most important change in this update.
Love to see Valve revisiting old games and giving them modern quality of life improvements.
That was pretty wild. I created a multi-player game and within a few minutes 31 other people showed up.
Then I used alt+tab and the game crashed.
One of my favourite memories of early teens was playing HL1 Deathmatch with my brother. We didn't have a situation that enabled actual Internet play, and we were not "in the know" about metastrategy or anything. Learning to endlessly use the longjump module with the OP4 covert ops character that did flips when jumping, to fly across boot_camp in seconds, was just exhilarating and eventually led to my brother never playing against me again. I'd just fly around the map picking up health/energy/grenades and then just blast him with the grenade launcher and disappear again.
Such good times.
There is an easter egg in the website.
Is it finally available at 64bit so I can play on my Mac?
This is awesome... but why not just help out Black Mesa?
Can anyone tell me what's the best version to play: black mesa or the original (this anniversary update)? I installed both last night, original plays 4k out of the box.
I ended up comparing the intros, in the rail cart bit last night. They are quite different surprisingly. (Hrm, I'm developing weird habits as a sleep deprived parent).
I'm on a good pc, 3070, Ryzen 3600.
I never really played this back in the day. Though I did buy half life 2 around release and nearly completed it but this was before steam did cloud saves so I don't have my save file anymore.
I see I can buy the full collection for a bout 4 pounds. Opposing force looks interesting.
I really shouldn't be buying games I don't have time to play!
I would literally pay a year wage for an @half-life.com email address.
Ah, it now works on the Steam Deck. Wondered why it would happen.
I have to say, I had HL - bought it, and a few other games - moved to Steam, moved the games there, then in the end, few years later, bailed on Steam. Customer service was appalling. I lost everything.
I love HL, and if I could get hold of it without Steam, I'd have it, but I don't know of a way to do that, and I've lost the copy I originally bought because leaving Steam meant loosing everything.
I love the fact that on the games requirements on the Steam page it still says it runs on Windows XP when in fact all support has been cut for long now, leaving out many of us who got into Steam on the first place because we either wanted a legal digital copy of our physical collection or because many physical game keys WOULD also activate a digital license. I still keep Windows 8 because it's still supported on Steam but that too will change in january 1st next year. The irony is even sweeter, given that this update should very well work on period correct machines (which again, many of us still keep running) but alas, you'll still locked out.
We'd gladly trade all the distractions the client forces down our throat (stickers, trading cards, avatars and all of that stuff) for the ability to single play the games we legitimately bought. But that's not an option we have, unlike say GOG, who also doesn't support old OS but at least gives us the possibility to download the games. I'd even concede some form of DRM that doesn't involve the Steam client but naaa, "the h4x0rs will get into your XP box that you keep solely for retro gaming and shut off the world. you must upgrade, re-buy, expend!"
Anyway, happy birthday Mr. Freeman.
HEV suit design is still one of the most slick sets of armor in any game ever. Just enough practical touch to look feasible.
I'm still waiting on half-life 2: ep3....
HALF-LIFE 3 CONFIRMED
I don't know where to get the updated code to make mods with though. A lot of the changes they mentioned were specifically for modders, so I don't know why I can't find the source code anywhere.
That's a very neat surprise! Many active multiplayer servers too, today!
Now release HL3 ;)
Obligatory mention: the Black Mesa HL remake using the HL2 engine.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/362890/Black_Mesa/
Full walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHKUVdb5YTM
Time to terrorize crossfire with the glu-on gun again!
Remember when video games were cool?
No raytracing / RTX support? :(
Disappointing they never made HL3