It's been a while, Mr Freeman
November 16, 2024 12:33 PM   Subscribe

Valve has just updated and rereleased Half-Life 2 in honor of it's 20th anniversary. Included are the add-ons Episodes One and Two, many bugfixes, developer commentary and much more. There's also a 2 hour documentary. And it's free on Steam.
posted by Catblack (32 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
Aside from Doom, this was the only 1st-person shooter I ever played all the way through, and that was 20 years ago, apparently. (I would have guessed 30!) I'm guessing my reaction times are no longer good enough, and there is already so much stuff I don't get done. I added it to my account just-in-case...
posted by maxwelton at 12:43 PM on November 16, 2024 [1 favorite]


Oh man, I am still stuck on HL2 on Xbox360! I'm in a weapons locker in the prison and they are at me from both sides and I can't get the turrets to stand up against the swat guys. Love this damn game but I'm so bad stuck I haven't played in years. (I'm also stuck under a bridge with a dragon outside in Skyrim).
posted by J.R. Hartley at 12:44 PM on November 16, 2024 [4 favorites]


Metafilter: Stuck under a bridge with a dragon outside.

Also, obligatory "YEAH YEAH, WHERE IS HL3????" comment.
posted by slater at 1:14 PM on November 16, 2024 [4 favorites]


I really liked Anna Washenko's first time ever playthrough. It if really cool to see someone engage with the game so far after it came out, I loved Half-Life 2 when it came out fwiw, but I can see how what was so amazing and innovative then has aged differently.
posted by Carillon at 2:23 PM on November 16, 2024 [3 favorites]


The easy-cheesy way to get through the prison level (with the turrets in the tiny room) is to merely turn the turrets 180° in their lockers, so they face the room and are much, much harder to knock down. You can hide in the extra locker and watch Civil Protection roleplay as Swiss cheese.
posted by Western Infidels at 2:34 PM on November 16, 2024 [5 favorites]


I got this game free with a purchase of my first AMD processor way back when. I got very little work done on my brand new machine for quite some time.
posted by seanmpuckett at 2:57 PM on November 16, 2024 [1 favorite]


Oh, I hadn't thought to keep them in the locker. I end up blocking off several of the entries to the prison block to make for a more manageable flood of enemies.

But, yeah, now that you mention it, it's been a while since I made my way through Ravenholm using only the gravity gun...
posted by rmd1023 at 2:58 PM on November 16, 2024 [1 favorite]


Speaking of stuck under a bridge, I'm on the damn hovercraft in 2 and quit after not having figured out how to get the floating ramp thing working and just gave up,I forgot what the issue was and now that I see it I guess I have to start over from before I tried? Or is there a way to solve this. Do I need a tool to get the barrells in to float the ramp?

Anyways, yay Valve!
posted by symbioid at 3:42 PM on November 16, 2024


i once played through the original over the course of an entire sleepless night in an underground refrigerated fish laboratory. the concrete, the condensation dripping off all the pipes, the occasional splash of a nocturnal fin... truly one of the experiences of my life. i've been a lifelong fan ever since. how rare is it for a sequel to live up to its primogenitor? to surpass it? i expect we'll still be talking about this game in 20 years, if we're talking about games at all.
posted by LegallyBread at 3:42 PM on November 16, 2024 [2 favorites]


The Half-Life series makes me sad. It's just the kind of game that I would enjoy, but I can't play for more than 10 minutes without puking my guts out from motion sickness. I can't even watch other people play. No other game does this to me.
posted by SunSnork at 3:52 PM on November 16, 2024 [3 favorites]


What timing! I just did a playthrough (HL2, the episodes, Portal, Portal 2) a couple months ago. Is the 20th anniversary version substantially different, other than the commentary?
posted by mittens at 4:40 PM on November 16, 2024


(Scroll down to the bottom of that 20th anniversary page and you can pick up the gravity device. And then you can use it.)
posted by nobody at 4:57 PM on November 16, 2024 [3 favorites]


Figuring out how to shoot saw blades at the zombies with the gravity gun remains a top gaming experience for me.
posted by gauche at 4:59 PM on November 16, 2024


There’s something poetic about them giving HL2 away on Steam now. I have it in my Steam account already, as like many people from that era, purchasing it was my first interaction with Steam, ever. It was a bold move, and obviously it’s paid off insanely well for them, but it does make me wonder what the Valve that didn’t invent the infinite-money-pipe would have produced these last 20 years.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 5:04 PM on November 16, 2024 [3 favorites]


The first person who shot me in Metafilter Team Fortress 2 was Frohman as a Sniper. True story.
posted by asok at 5:04 PM on November 16, 2024 [5 favorites]


The Half-Life series makes me sad. It's just the kind of game that I would enjoy, but I can't play for more than 10 minutes without puking my guts out from motion sickness. I can't even watch other people play. No other game does this to me.

Oh god, I remember this happening to me! It was apparently a thing and I followed online advice at the time to tweak the FOV (field of view) and it totally helped me...though I later saw it claimed that it was debunked that was a factor for people. But, anecdotally it worked for me, so... *shrug*
posted by Pryde at 5:20 PM on November 16, 2024 [1 favorite]


I'm still waiting for the VR version with advan-- Hello, Gordon!
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 6:37 PM on November 16, 2024


I don't think I can really explain how big of an impact the E3 2003 demo of Half Life 2 had on me. You can watch it on YouTube for yourself.

The high resolution textures, the expressive character models and faces, the physics engine, the voice acting with lip animations that matched the words... it all really struck me as such a huge leap in games (also at the time I was still playing Doom and Wolfenstein 3D on the family computer that couldn't play Quake and Half Life and other modern games of the day.)

The game still holds up graphically (heh, mostly) and gameplay- and story-wise. The fact that there were no "levels" but the next areas just (for the time) seamlessly loaded into each other made it feel like an action movie you inhabited rather than a video game you were playing.

Or maybe I just associate it with a time when I was 20 years younger.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:55 PM on November 16, 2024 [1 favorite]


The first person who shot me in Metafilter Team Fortress 2 was Frohman as a Sniper. True story.

Oh yes, and the Half Life 2 parody comic Concerned also holds up. (Mostly. It was pretty decent and not-awful for a 2000s web comic humor.)
posted by AlSweigart at 7:57 PM on November 16, 2024 [4 favorites]


Article in the Guardian
posted by jouke at 12:11 AM on November 17, 2024


Frohman is still way into Half-Life-- here's his PC Gamer article on trying to glean hints from that documentary on whether Valve will do more Half-Life. (Answer: apparently, only when GabeN thinks there's enough new stuff to play with.)

Fun fact: Frohman got me onto Mefight Club, and thence onto Mefi.
posted by zompist at 12:24 AM on November 17, 2024


@AlSweigart Concerned was legit hilarious.
posted by chmmr at 2:41 AM on November 17, 2024 [1 favorite]


SunSnork: I can't play for more than 10 minutes without puking my guts out from motion sickness.

Pryde: It was apparently a thing and I followed online advice at the time to tweak the FOV (field of view) and it totally helped me.

I have a friend who plays at minimum 120FPS on a high-refresh-rate screen (144 is common these days) to counter his motion sickness. YMMV, I reckon it's worth checking out.
posted by k3ninho at 3:04 AM on November 17, 2024


Forget half life 3, valve can’t even be bothered to spend a month or two of engineering time to port half life 2 to apple silicon. Hell just producing a 64bit Intel build would be enough to run it in wine.
posted by dis_integration at 6:02 AM on November 17, 2024 [1 favorite]


Half Life: Alyx was a pretty good VR experience (except for Jeff; fuck Jeff), and they pretty strongly hinted at a sequel. So maybe in another 10 or so years, we'll get that.
posted by xedrik at 8:32 AM on November 17, 2024


Tyler McVicker thinks Valve are pretty far along on Half Life 3 and that's good enough for me.
posted by mokey at 9:33 AM on November 17, 2024


SunSnork: I hear you. Normal walking-around is okay for me, but the airboat makes me feel sick after about 15 seconds. While driving the dune buggy is mostly tolerable for me, the animation of getting in and out of it is puketastic enough for me that I literally just close my eyes during it.
posted by rmd1023 at 9:45 AM on November 17, 2024


Also wanted to note about Half Life 2's influence with Garry's Mod continues today with machinima Skibidi Toilet (previously).
posted by AlSweigart at 10:53 AM on November 17, 2024


I just want to say that no matter how many times I’ve done it, Ravenswood still gets the jump scare out of me!
posted by drewbage1847 at 11:10 AM on November 17, 2024


> Forget half life 3, valve can’t even be bothered to spend a month or two of engineering time to port half life 2 to apple silicon. Hell just producing a 64bit Intel build would be enough to run it in wine.

Amen. They could do a really half-assed port as well - no need to rework the crazy optimizations that went into the original game - CPU/GPU power has increased so much that it wouldn't matter.

I don't even care that much about HL2 (it is perfectly fine) but I miss stabbing newbs in TF2.
posted by AndrewStephens at 2:03 PM on November 17, 2024 [3 favorites]


this was such a formative game for me. i think about it probably once a month.

It came out when i was 13, and under pretty funny circumstances for me life wise.

See, i had gotten in a fight with my mom over her extremely strict internet use/computer/"screen time" rules. And she had said "if you don't want to follow my rules, get a job, and buy your own computer". A few weeks later i ended up rescuing a fairly high end flood damaged computer(with a voodoo 5 5500!) from a church benefit sale, replacing the power supply, and it ran. A few weeks later, i managed to score a wifi card from the yard sale of a rich man who was leaving the country.

And back then, no one believed in wifi passwords. The entire internet was open to me. I pirated everything... until i ran out of space on my 28gb hard drive. I ended up buying a brandless cd burner from a shady local strip mall computer shop, and checking junk mall flyers for sales on CDRs for months until my desk was just piles of "inuyasha episode 26-27" and "homeworld cataclysm"

This started a basically apollo program project with total determination to get more storage, and eventually an actually good pc... which led to me starting an actual business at the age of 12 based off estate sales, a flea market booth, and a website i learned HTML to make.

And a lot of it was because i wanted to play this game.

It all led to walking into my dads home office one day and going "hey, can i order some stuff on your credit card?" "uh... with what money" at which point i slapped a stack of 100s on his desk.

After the shock wore off, we marched over to my janky computer setup and ordered a whole cartload of parts. The day they showed up was better than any christmas that had come so far, and the wait for the back ordered video card(a 6600gt 256mb, as i remember) was agonizing. In the interim time, i had him drive me to buy a really high end gigantic NEC crt off craigslist for somehow, $20 because it had a tiny chip in the glass from shipping.

As far as i remember, i beat the entire game in one marathon like 14 hour sitting. That sounds right.

What an absolute masterpiece.
posted by emptythought at 1:41 AM on November 22, 2024 [5 favorites]


The Half-Life series makes me sad. It's just the kind of game that I would enjoy, but I can't play for more than 10 minutes without puking my guts out from motion sickness. I can't even watch other people play. No other game does this to me.

Changing the FOV absolutely does work. I wouldn't have been able to play it without it. I have trouble with a lot of games and have to tinker a lot to get some of them in a playable state so that I don't get motion sick (beyond the tinkering any PC game requires by default).

For example Mirror's Edge I was never able to play, and the few times that I tried ended up lying on the floor wishing I was dead.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 4:57 PM on November 28, 2024


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