20th Anniversary of Half Life 2

Wow doesn't time fly! I still remember the first time I played Half Life 2 like it was yesterday.

The original Half Life was a groundbreaking game which I played to death like I'm sure many on here did. While it took Valve 6 years to release the sequel it was well worth the wait.

To celebrate Valve have released a 2 hour documentary on the development of Half Life 2. I've only watched about half of it but it's a great watch to see behind the scenes of such an iconic game.

 

Half life 2 was a system seller.

Gabe's statement about not finishing the story is a bit of a cop out though, but by the time the orange box was rolling out, Valve were swimming in so much money they decided they didn't even need to be a developer anymore.
It's a damn shame, because Valve were a fucking amazing developer, I can only name 2 studios with the consistency Valve had as a developer in the history of gaming: Rare, and Rockstar North. And Half Life is probably the strongest debut in all of game development, and 2 simply smashed it out of the park.

But as much as I adored and still adore Half life 2, it is the product and the point in history where we (gamers as a whole) gave up ownership of our games just to play it. No one cared if you needed to have a steam account to play it, it was simply worth needing to go online to play the singular best game ever made up untill that point.

It's impossible to overstate how great the game was and still is.
It doesn't feel like a 20 year old game. If it wasn't for steam and a fifth of a century of updates, I could install the game off the CD's I still keep and be just as happy and blown away playing it now as I ever was.

I had an Athlon XP 1800+ and a Radeon 9200SE, and 512mb of RAM when it came out. I remember playing it on my cousins computer and being so blown away by the game that I forgave all the bullshit with steams bugs and constant updates that made all the problems worse in those early days that by the time I'd beaten it on his computer and bought my copy in 2005, steam was actually fairly decent to use.

Here we are 20 years later and probably only Rockstar North can still make a more competent game... with 1000 times the compute power... and 5 times the development time...

So few games come out that make you sit up and go WOW! Final fantasy 7 was one, Shenmue was one, Bioshock was one and GTA 5 was one.
Among the millions of games I've played, across all the countless and endless hours of fun, those games with Half life 2 are the only games that have ever wowed me.

There's many great games, Half life 2 is simply legendary, even after 20 years.

 

At the same time as you accept that change in 'ownership', at least Steam ended up being about as good as you could ever hope the "licensed launcher" software could be.

Imagine with no Steam and we end up in that bastardised psuedo-monopoly where every publisher and dev wants their own garbage launcher. Imagine a world where every launcher is as bad as the Blizzard/Activision launcher.

I don't think it's a controversial take to say that HL2 is the definitive PC game. Add on the legacy of it's revolutionary introduction of the online marketplace, I find it hard to come up with another game that measures up.

HL2 for PC, Super Mario for Nintendo, Halo for Xbox, Sonic for Sega, Final Fantasy 7 for Playstation.

 

Worth a retrospective.
worth playing.
takes me back. it is or was an outstanding game.
whether it was seminal in terms of pc games. well definitely. picked up on a few sci-fi themes and executed it well.

 

I wore my discoloured preorder shirt to celebrate, hoping Gabe would release HL3 I demanded my 16 and 18 y.o. nephews to get HL2 for free on steam and play a game which revolutionised graphics, physics and storytelling for first-person shooters.

 

I think I'll wait for the RTX version for another playthrough which is discussed in this thread in the Gaming forum. From the limited footage there is it looks they've managed to keep the look and feel of Half Life 2 just with upgraded textures and lighting. I'm glad they didn't go down the total overhaul path.

 

saw some story in the feed on it.

 

Wow, sounds like a high impact game to some, Ive got possibly 4 hours in the whole series. I guess it's not my thing. I bought the orange box for Portal. When people talk about cult games from Valve, L4d comes to mind. Not saying it's not a great game, just saying in my circles it didn't make a huge impact. Not like UT or Vice City/D2.

This might be a good excuse to see what the excitement is about and start a new play though. What game should I start with?

 

Give Black Mesa a run. It's kind of a remaster of the first game. With many extras. The original game is shorter and easier.

 

I got the orange box for team fortress 2 which gave years of entertainment, episode 2 and portal were a nice bonus.

 

Remake**

Black mesa is pretty tight, I should know...

 

lol black mesa from the Portal song..

 

Half Life 2 made me stop lurking on OCAU and register an account before the purge and got me into what I do for a career presently.

Yet I am in the retro forums 25/8.

 

FYI Half Life 2 is currently FREE on Steam, The Orange Box (Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, Portal, Team Fortress 2) is just $2.95 (90% off).

https://store.steampowered.com/app/220/HalfLife_2/

 

"yet"

HL2 is double retro now 10+10 baby

 

"Yet" Gaben used to work for a particular company, so it tracks.

 

I still have my boxed copy of HL2 that I bought on the 11/11/2004, paid $89.90 for it. It was the first time I used the new launcher called Steam.

I remember playing it on my 2.4GHz Pentium 4 Northwood at 3.8GHz. Started with a DX8 capable 4600Ti (damn I wish I kept that card), half way through I upgraded to a DX9 capable 6600GT - The difference blew my mind. Since the 20th year anniversary update's dropped, I've been playing the game flat out again.

 

I zero day downloaded it only to be mega disappointed with the elevator bug stopping any fun

a mate who was going to buy it was saying all sorts ... so I did the right thing, I downloaded another copy from a different release
only to have the same bug.
I seem to remember the boxed versions all had the (??)

not sure but I think the fix/patch was released only a day or so later
and it might have been a non official patch too (?)

 

I don't remember this bug, what were the symptoms of the bug?

 

the first area, the end scene where you walked into this lift/elevator to move onto the next area, and turned around in the lift and the game would freeze ...