• tuckerm
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    686 months ago

    I downloaded an ISO of it a while ago and played through maybe third of the game. I found it to be very playable. People always mention the long load times, but it’s worth mentioning that long load times were much more common back then. (Although Half-Life on DC was even longer than usual.)

    Also, I hate to be nit picky, but the blog post linked here manages to be weirdly wrong about two things and it’s barely one paragraph long, lol.

    Half-Life is one of the most successful video games of the early 2000s.

    Ahhh, 1998. One of the best years of the early 2000s.

    Half-Life was everywhere… except one notable place: Sega’s Dreamcast. It has been a mystery as to what happened with a game destined to have a port on every possible platform.

    Half-Life was a PC exclusive until the PS2 port in November 2001, ten months after the Dreamcast was discontinued. The PC and PS2 versions are still the only official versions to this day. Half-Life is not known for being on every platform. Was the author thinking of Doom, one of the best games of the mid 70s?

    • @Jerkface
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      176 months ago

      Doom, one of the best games of the mid 70s?

      Who else here remembers late nights slaying demons to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water?”

    • @[email protected]
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      5 months ago

      You are correct about the release year. If one were being pedantic I suppose it would be correct to say that thanks to multiplayer and mods, Half-Life was a popular PC game/engine all throughout the early 2000s. Come to think of it, there are probably still people playing CS 1.6 today.

      • tuckerm
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        55 months ago

        Come to think of it, there are probably still people playing CS 1.6 today.

        Whoa, turns out to be a lot of them. 14,400 as of a few minutes ago! https://steamcharts.com/app/10

        That’s as many as the two most recent Battlefield games have combined right now. Battlefield 2042 currently around 8,000 and Battlefield V at 6,000. I’m sure console players would boost the Battlefield numbers quite a bit, but still. That’s pretty cool.

  • Admiral Patrick
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    286 months ago

    Semi-related, but to this day I remain impressed they got Half Life 2 ported to the original Xbox.

    • @just_another_person
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      106 months ago

      Why? It was just a PC on the inside with a slimmed down Windows 2000 variant as the OS. Storage concerns aside, it was probably a very straightforward port, just rip out the Steam bindings, and it probably ran pretty immediately.

      • Admiral Patrick
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        6 months ago

        Right, architecturally it was probably pretty simple. But the minimum system requirements for HL:2 versus the Xbox’s hardware is pretty stark:

        Half-Life 2 minimum requirements for PC:

        CPU: Intel Pentium 4 2.00GHz
        Memory: 512 MB
        Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 6100
        
        

        Xbox System Specs:

        CPU:  Intel Pentium III 733 MHz
        Memory:  64 MB (shared with GPU)
        Graphics:  Custom NVidia based on Geforce 3
        

        Edit: Definitely meaning the original Xbox and not the 360. Was one of the last games I bought for the original and still have it :)

      • @TheDrunkard
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        196 months ago

        Noooo, it was not that simple. Search MVG hl2 port on YouTube and watch and see why the port is actually very impressive

  • @MacedWindow
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    206 months ago

    The prototype is out there if anyone with a Dreamcast wants to check it out.

    • @Quetzalcutlass
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      46 months ago

      There’s a Half-Life mod that brings it to PC, along with one that ports the Decay co-op expansion.

  • UKFilmNerd
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    96 months ago

    I swear I downloaded and played Half Life for the DC back when I had the machine. I think it was Blue Shift which was originally going to be on the DC first (as an exclusive?).

    It was perfectly fine to play but I guess due to hardware limitations, the areas in which you played weren’t that large and loading times off the CD was quite slow.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      36 months ago

      I felt the same way. I could’ve sworn I played it on Dreamcast a few years ago, but when I asked my buddy (who’s a giant gamer) I was corrected that it never hit DC.

      • UKFilmNerd
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        26 months ago

        The Blue Shift expansion definitely was released onto the internet, but the loading times put me off playing the game.