Whoo!
Hey all. So yesterday, after about half a year of looking at every Gamestop location I frequent, I finally found a used copy of original Half Life for the PS2 for $12:
After playing Half Life 2 (and episode 1 and 2) I wanted to go back and play the game that started it all. While I know that Valve has released Half Life Source (a version of the original game with a graphical update to the engine that runs Half Life 2) for PC, no version of Half Life for Mac has ever been released. If I owned an Intel Mac this wouldn't be a problem, since the Intel Macs have direct hardware support for DOS and Windows, but I have an old-school G4 Powerbook that is a bit underpowered for dual booting. Hence the PS2 version.
The irony here is that I once owned a copy of Half Life, but never played it. When I first went to college (I had a PC at the time) everyone was playing Counterstrike, which at the time was just a Half Life mod. In order to play Counterstrike you had to download Half Life itself, which I did, but didn't play it, since I wasn't that interested at the time. Counterstrike eventually became an official product of Valve (and the people who created it were hired to do other neat stuff for them) and I eventually got a Mac.
What's funny about this copy of Half Life is that the game received a graphical update, and was an early PS2 title (2001) that several reviews I read considered to be a strong utilization of the PS2s processing capability. Looking on the back of the game's box, it's touts it's "incredible realism" in graphics, "awesome AI" and so on. However, looking at the screens themselves, especially when compared with later PS2 games (God of War, Final Fantasy 12, Metal Gear Solid 3, thank you very much) the graphics look very simple, and the textures especially flat.
It reminds me of a recent interview I saw with contemporary game developers about the state of the art. In the interview people like CLiffy-B (Gears of War) were saying that the graphics had gotten good enough that games would be able to focus much more on gameplay, because realism was now a mainstay of game production. But looking at the box art for Half Life, with it's claims of incredible realism, I can't help but think that game producers will keep on pushing the uncanny valley (the term for the space where something artificially human stops being cool and becomes creepy) deeper and deeper. I can't wait for the days when we look back at a games like Crysis, Grand Theft Auto 4, Uncharted, and Gears of War and laugh at how we thought we had achieved something like realism.
After playing Half Life 2 (and episode 1 and 2) I wanted to go back and play the game that started it all. While I know that Valve has released Half Life Source (a version of the original game with a graphical update to the engine that runs Half Life 2) for PC, no version of Half Life for Mac has ever been released. If I owned an Intel Mac this wouldn't be a problem, since the Intel Macs have direct hardware support for DOS and Windows, but I have an old-school G4 Powerbook that is a bit underpowered for dual booting. Hence the PS2 version.
The irony here is that I once owned a copy of Half Life, but never played it. When I first went to college (I had a PC at the time) everyone was playing Counterstrike, which at the time was just a Half Life mod. In order to play Counterstrike you had to download Half Life itself, which I did, but didn't play it, since I wasn't that interested at the time. Counterstrike eventually became an official product of Valve (and the people who created it were hired to do other neat stuff for them) and I eventually got a Mac.
What's funny about this copy of Half Life is that the game received a graphical update, and was an early PS2 title (2001) that several reviews I read considered to be a strong utilization of the PS2s processing capability. Looking on the back of the game's box, it's touts it's "incredible realism" in graphics, "awesome AI" and so on. However, looking at the screens themselves, especially when compared with later PS2 games (God of War, Final Fantasy 12, Metal Gear Solid 3, thank you very much) the graphics look very simple, and the textures especially flat.
It reminds me of a recent interview I saw with contemporary game developers about the state of the art. In the interview people like CLiffy-B (Gears of War) were saying that the graphics had gotten good enough that games would be able to focus much more on gameplay, because realism was now a mainstay of game production. But looking at the box art for Half Life, with it's claims of incredible realism, I can't help but think that game producers will keep on pushing the uncanny valley (the term for the space where something artificially human stops being cool and becomes creepy) deeper and deeper. I can't wait for the days when we look back at a games like Crysis, Grand Theft Auto 4, Uncharted, and Gears of War and laugh at how we thought we had achieved something like realism.