Then it becomes a sci-fi game with zombie creatures and similar monsters. The first few levels are eerie and brilliant what's really scary is that they seem so realistic and not-so-far-away from where we are now. I was surprised how the game combines so many different styles - first you start out in a bleak future-world reminiscent of "1984" and you join the resistance to fight the fascist ruling. Apart from Steam (the worst idea ever conceived by any gaming company) "HL2" delivers non-stop. The irony is that the game has made its way online anyway while people such as myself who purchased it often experience troubles with Steam because if you forget your password, or someone else uses it before you, you have to buy another copy of the game and they won't just replace the password itself. I was on a 2001 PC with outdated specs and had dial-up - Steam (which is a major pain and the only downside to this game) takes forever to download mandatory updates and "decryption" files in an effort to cut back on Internet piracy. When I first got the game I couldn't play it. And with the advancements in technology since the first game, "Half-Life 2" takes advantage of this to its fullest. Valve - as they first did with the original "Half-Life" - provides similar scenes of plotting and character dialogue, but you never leave the POV of Dr. Curiously enough "Doom 3" received more attention for blending cinema with gaming but I think "Half-Life 2" did so much better - there aren't cheesy cut-away scenes such as there are in "Doom 3" (which was still a fine game) and you actually feel like you ARE in an alternate reality. Its plot is better than 90% of action films today and it seamlessly blends realism with science-fiction. This is the game that will blow away those of us who always thought games were simplistic. There will always be the classic arcade games and the great Mario games for NES - but "Half-Life 2" takes gaming into a new dimension. For someone such as myself, who had taken a long hiatus from gaming, this was a refreshing revolution of the medium. The rest of the news is painful to read, honest - why the heck do Valve beating their classic title to a pulp? I mean, I can understand Gabe having a love-hate relationship with the franchise, but goodness me - just leave HL alone!Īnd yes - seems like the old "WON" version of Half-Life is a go-to version for definitive experience and everybody should look it up instead (maybe one day it will be published on GOG lol)."Half-Life 2" really elevates videogames to a new art form. Not sure if either 8 or 8.1 version of ddraw.dll will fit for W10 (if you're using it), but give it a try (or try to look up Windows 10 ddraw fps fix)
Try first some more standard fullscreen resolution (1024x768) and see if it works. Grab ddraw from zip-file in this folder and toss it into Half-Life Folder. Starting from Windows 8, MS has changed (and screwed up) DirectDraw emulation, which in most cases causes massive reduction of framerate or, in this case, total crash when in fullscreen. I'm going to get killed for saying that, but all things considered, better go playing Black Mesa (at least when it's finished)Īlso I don't know if it is valve's fault or newer versions of windows, but software renderer in fullscreen just doesn't work anymore.Ok, that one was easy to pin point. g-r-e-a-t.īut to be honest, Half-Life is old now. Oh and also, since a certain nvidia driver, transparency supersampling is broken and produces weird blurring artifacts on textures now.
Unfortunately I guess the best way to play vanilla Half-Life is to get an hand on the physical Half-Life antology, which still had all the sound effects, high quality music, and all the renderers with all their features. Since the multiplatform update (which removed D3D and made the game available on Linux and MacOS) we lost a lot of things, the sound and music quality has been massively downgraded and are now forced to 11KHz for sounds and not much more for music, removing other surround effects and else,Īnd especially, we lost a BIG thing graphics wise in OpenGL, that was present before in OpenGL (wtf valve), and that's gl_overbright, the console command still exists but setting it to 1 does nothing anymore now, it gave a MUCH BETTER lighting quality, now the quality of the lighting feels dull and washed out, even the software renderer has better contrast in lighting now !Īlso I don't know if it is valve's fault or newer versions of windows, but software renderer in fullscreen just doesn't work anymore. No you did right to bump this thread, because in the meantime I discovered a lot of very interesting things,