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?
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.
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.
Semi-related, but to this day I remain impressed they got Half Life 2 ported to the original Xbox.
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.
Noooo, it was not that simple. Search MVG hl2 port on YouTube and watch and see why the port is actually very impressive
That’s not at all how porting a game works.
No, this would make it much simpler. No translations, differing architectures, or OS bindings to struggle though. Asset and compilation tweaks, and controller bindings, and that’s a large portion of the work.
You have zero idea what goes on when porting a game, do you? It’s ok, not everyone does. Understanding you can learn is a good thing.
Watch this before replying, here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c66hfqw4SKc&pp=ygUHTVZHIGhsMg%3D%3D
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 6100Xbox System Specs:
CPU: Intel Pentium III 733 MHz Memory: 64 MB (shared with GPU) Graphics: Custom NVidia based on Geforce 3Edit: Definitely meaning the original Xbox and not the 360. Was one of the last games I bought for the original and still have it :)
As a point of comparison, 360 has 512MB RAM. HL2 was targeting PCs comparable to PS3/360, but somehow they got it working on an Xbox.
Makes you wonder what corners they cut to get it functional.
So playable frame rate was the main corner cut.
