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10 Years of Half-Life
intenscia writes "After 10 years of Half-Life and dealing with its silent protagonist Gordon Freeman, ModDB looks back at everything that Valve made possible with the release of its first game. The freedom and flexibility the Gldsource platform gave modders resulted in a plethora of user-generated content such as Counter-Strike and Team Fortress. In this article they take a brief look at the mods that made the jump to retail as well as the top non-commercial mods that have become perennial classics."
Planet Half-Life used the occasion to look back at the history of Valve. Valve is celebrating by offering the original Half-Life for less than a dollar on Steam.
When a new Quake comes out, they open up the old engine. The original Half Life was OpenGL if I recall, and could be ported by the community to Mac, Linux, etc. etc. etc. Selling the game for $1 is a nice move. Opening the engine (a decade old engine that won't hurt Valve in the least) would be a better move.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Half-Life wasn't the first FPS game to capture my attention but it was the first to enthrall me to such a degree that I went out and bought the damn thing. Years of Counter-Strike, Natural Selection, Rocket Crowbar and other various interesting mods later, I'm damn glad I did. I garnered a metric fuckton of fun from that game and it feels like it's been a lot longer than 10 years since its release.
/salute
But then I guess that's what one can expect from a Valve game. Blizzard has a nice attitude: "when it's ready". Valve goes one further: "when it ready and only if it's fun". When HL2 was delayed by a year or so there was a lot of complaining... but nobody was complaining when that thing was released.
Here's to one of the best games ever released!
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, watch it -- I'm huge!
User-generated? I don't think so. The original TF mod for Quake was made by TFS, which was just a group of players at the outset, but they were hired by Valve. Team Fortress Classic was a Valve product.
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
A lot of people forget how generally unprecedented it was at the time for an action game to begin with half an hour of context and tone establishment instead of throwing you right into the fire.
Traveling through the massive subterranean tram network, checking in at the desk and grabbing your equipment to start what would have been a normal day's work... As the tension is slowly built, something goes wrong, and then aliens show up out of that, the effect is something vastly more profound than jumping into Quake and shooting stroggs straight off the bat.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
It was most notably how the story was told--first person, no cut scenes--that partially made the game so revolutionary. The atmosphere, AI, and sheer size of the game (it's pretty damn long for most people) are also pretty large points; for many situations you also had to develop a plan on how you were going to advance, rather than just figure out the best way to kill everyone in sight. The game isn't actually that similar to DOOM (which still is a great game to play that for some inexplicable reason has aged incredibly well, in my opinion) as DOOM is more oriented over killing the demons. In fact, to compare this game with DOOM seems to me that you either didn't play DOOM very much or you didn't play HL very much. Both are pretty different FPSes.
In addition, the game's friendliness to modifications leading to Counter-Strike and a host of other free mods has pretty much solidified its position as one of the greatest FPSes to come out.
Wait a minute. You buy a game through Steam...an on-line marketplace...then bitch about having to connect to it every now and then? Seriously?
There is an off-line mode for playing Steam games for those times when your Internet connection is down/missing-in-action.
If you install a Valve game from a CD it does not download the game. It will download updates, but those are a good thing.
Other PC games require you to insert the disc every time you boot the game. This could be considered equally atrocious as what Steam does. If you don't have a network connection no game for you versus no disc no game for you.
Steam only delivers ads for other Steam games. Not for Coca Cola or some crap. While it may install a startup agent(I don't remember honestly) it can easily be turned off. No steam code on startup on my system.
I hate DRM as much as the next guy, but Steam doesn't piss me off. It's acceptable to me. My biggest problem is that the Steam client itself performs like it was written in QuickBASIC.
I dare say. But aren't you selling yourself a bit short? :)