Hacker News Reader

Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

It's also free until Monday (as in free to get, not just limited free play) https://store.steampowered.com/app/70/HalfLife/

View on HN

I grabbed the free copy…and then fell down the rabbit hole and bought a bunch of other HL games for $6.

I'm just now getting into PC gaming via Linux. I've always had a Mac, so I missed a bunch of games like Half Life.

Now I'm wondering when I'll get to play any of them…

Then that worked! Multiply $6 by 500,000. And Valve's got themselves a cool 3+mill.

I'm about to do the same! Genius marketing on valves part!

I was looking at all the $1 titles, and realized it wasn't worth the $5 I might save to figure out which ones to take and which to leave.

Half Life was one of the games that has native ports an run fine on OSX before Catalina.

One of the worst things that happen to MacOS is cutting support. Apple really is careless about gaming :(

Apple doesn't care about backwards compatibility at all. Mac software is OS version dependent, and the OS version is hardware dependent, and if you don't have the approved OS and hardware combo then tough luck.

Say what you will about Windows and Microsoft, but they live and breathe backwards compatibility.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/10/windows-95-went-the-...

I agree, more on this:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

If you have a VR headset, you could try the excellent VR mods for them, which makes them much more impressive to play nowadays in my opinion!

Black Mesa (the game) is also factastic. Highly recommend!

I played through Black Mesa the game after visiting the “crowbar collective” booth at pax east, and missing half life the first time around. Really loved it.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/362890/Black_Mesa/

My understanding is Black Mesa is a half life with modern graphics. So now original half life is updated…

And a complete overhaul of the "Xen" area, which was the weakest part of the original game.

Oh damn, I still have my original Half Life CD key committed to memory. I wonder if that still works.

IIRC redeeming a Half-Life or Counter-Strike CD key on Steam grants you the Half-Life 1 Anthology pack[1], so it's worth giving it a shot!

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/237/HalfLife_1_Antholo...

Is it possible to play it off-line though? I remember that was an issue when I got The Orange Box with Half-Life 2.

IIRC you should be able to download it and then put Steam into offline mode and it won't call home until you flip that toggle again... unless they changed how that works since I last fiddled with it. Might need to play once before flipping toggle off.

Its worth it for the assets alone, you can play hl with the open source xash3d engine.

What’s the benefit of doing that please?

It's a whole different engine that may have some advantages that make it worth checking out over or in addition to the updates Valve has made for this special release: improved performance (through a more efficient culling system, etc), support for modern features like dynamic lighting, use of HL mods on newer systems by providing compatibility fixes. The engine can also run other games and works on mobile devices with less common screen resolutions, but YMMV. For a while, it was a good fallback to the official game if you were having a problem with it on new or less-supported hardware, but with this anniversary release, maybe it is less "necessary" and more "cool" to use an OSS alternative engine.

Most engine reworks like that (Doom, Age of Empires, Heroes III, etc) offer significantly improved performance and scaling for modern computers.

There are often other enhancements, too, including native support for Mac, Linux, etc.

As one of authors of Heroes III one I could say Xash3D is amazing project worth to check for Source 1 game fans.

Valve support for their old games is outstanding and they all have native support, great performance, constant updates. It's like extremely rare for old games to be supported that well.

HL1 is already quite performant though and does have native support for Linux and Mac on Steam without needing third-party engines.

Not disputing that engine replacements / source ports can be great (I work on one myself) but it's weird that there are three replies that sidestep the actual question: What does this particular engine replacement add over vanilla GoldSrc?

bypassing Steam I presume?

The offline system for steam is way less glitchy than it was pre-2010. Like another commenter said though, you may need to be online the first time you launch the game.

There is also the Goldberg Emulator [0] if you don't want to rely on Steam at all.

[0] https://mr_goldberg.gitlab.io/goldberg_emulator/

Interesting. I do have a steam account, haven't used it for a long time, it doesn't seem to be in my password manager

So I went to reset my password, but got thwarted by the captcha. To email me a password reset link.

I think Ill just torrent it.

I don’t think you’re gonna make it my guy

There have been CAPTCHA problems with Steam for at least a year. Search "steam captcha broken" and you'll see endless Reddit threads about it. Last week it took me two days to get it to work - the only solution was to solve the CAPTCHA from a mobile device in order to do a password reset. CAPTCHA just did not work on MacOS or Windows at all. After solving the CATPCHA on mobile and resetting the password, I was able to use it to login via Windows and MacOS.

To add to the problem, there are numerous "solutions" about flushing DNS caches, disabling IPv6, using the audio CAPTCHA, and other tricks that just did not work for me. I tried every "solution" in a dozen threads until the mobile suggestion finally worked.

EDIT: I was not using a VPN or proxy

To add to the confusion, I encountered this about 2 weeks ago and power-cycling my router did fix it. My IP didn't change, so it must have been something cached on the router? It's just so weird that this issue has about 10 different "fixes" that may or may not work for someone.

Why not make a new account? Valve is giving this out for free, partially to get people to use their program more. Why not support them in that small way at least?

Presumably the same captcha nonsense.

Is it ok to steal from a liquor store because they require a license shown to buy it and for some reason you can't get yours?

I’d download a car, if that’s what you’re asking.

If the liquor store is also the DMV that approves licenses and they've been closed for over a year, yeah.

It's also a free giveaway so it's more like grabbing some of the free tasting samples without approval.

This is more like them requiring a license, but then also refusing to actually check yours.

It's not stealing, please stop repeating this nonsensical comparison.

Just like if I watch you key in your PIN at an ATM, I'm not stealing your PIN. You can still use your PIN, same as before!

My PIN is 3414, copy it as much as you like.

Indeed.

You're trying to reason with a person who can't even complete a captcha.

Captchas can be an endless hellhole if you are on a network that the captcha provider happens to dislike. No fault of your own.

I’ve had situations in the past where I tried 10-20 times to complete captcha and it just kept throwing one after the other at me. Whereas when I am at home and not using VPN I always complete every captcha in like one or two attempts.

the captcha on https://archive.ph is an endless loop of clicking the "I'm not a robot" reCAPTCHA checkbox for me. sometimes i'm lucky enough to get to the "click all boxes that have a bus" and i never know if the one tile that has a fraction of the side mirror counts as being a bus or not. sometimes i guess correctly, and sometimes i find myself in another endless loop of identifying objects. i suspect it's a nanny service on my work machine because if i fire up a windows sandbox instance and archive the site there, i can sometimes get some luck.

it's a stiff price to pay for getting around the data science medium articles that require a sign up, and then an app, and then a subscription.

That’s usually because you’re using Cloudflare’s DNS, either explicitly or implicitly via Apple private relay (long saga you can easily search for)

interesting. i found stuff on WARP and VPN but i’m not using that - just 1.1.1.1 on my router (and you do mention DNS). thanks for the tip.

They may be on VPN. Google recaptcha has dynamic risk-based friction and is prone to serving effectively impossible challenges to users on VPN.

In his defense, the best way to solve a captcha is by pretending you are partially blind. If you actually select all the relevant squares, Google just says “nope lol go again!”.

My theory is that, if the real goal of the captcha is for AI training then you would want to get rid of the people that were close but not quite right (let them proceed) . If the user was 100% correct on the first test, you'd probably want to give them more tests.

Steam has had a widely reported issue with the captcha on the password reset page for over a year now.

It appears that the containment system has completely failed.

Out of curiosity, why wait until just now to torrent it?

I'm not really a game person. The point is that getting things the right way should be a better experience then going to piratebay.

Nonsense like captchas only hurt legitimate users, and when those captchas are asking you time and time again it's simply not worthwhile. Had I wanted to actually spend good money on a game they would have lost a sale, and for what -- to stop a robot asking for a password reset email to an existing account?

Steam is a perfectly fine experience and captchas are the universal standard these days. They lost someone who's 'not really a game person' and wasn't willing to fill in a captcha for a free game, I don't think they're too worried about lost revenue. I highly doubt tracking down and downloading a legit version of the updated Half-Life from a torrent site is an easier option, but you do you.

Steam is a ... somwehat tolerable experience. The client is extremely bloated for its primary function (installing and launching games) and this is only getting worse.

Steam is also dropping support for older operating systems - ones that you originally used to buy your games. That is also NOT perfectly fine.

But it's free and you didn't really answer the question.

Were you looking for a soapbox to stand on?

> but got thwarted by the captcha

...how?

did an ai write this

Reply on news.ycombinator.com