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Comment by bni | Hacker News Reader

If you want to play Half-Life today I highly recommend Xash3D FWGS (yes its a super awkward name)

Easy to use Mac build here: https://www.macsourceports.com/game/halflife

IMHO, if you want to play Half-Life today, go get Black Mesa, an absolutely fantastic fan-made remake with Valve's blessing:

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

Black Mesa is an almost exact copy of Half Life at the start, and where that's true it's incredibly well done. Feels very much like a remaster.

Unfortunately, by the end of the earth levels and certainly on Xen, the levels switch over to original designs. They become massive and sprawling, boring and confusing. They really should have stuck to doing a like for like reimplementation.

I grew up on Half Life, so playing the first half of Black Mesa a few years ago was one of my favorite adult gaming experiences. But I gave up who knows how close to finish line after Xen was insufferable.

There is one Xen episode close to the end that is indeed way too big for its own good and quite boring, I will give you that, but otherwise I found the new Xen levels very well made and fleshed out. Lets be honest, the original Xen was quite lackluster...

Well, even if the levels are well made and I've just got poor taste, Half Life was such a tightly designed package, introducing new weapons, things to play with (like the trains), enemies, environment modifiers at a steady pace.

Replacing a 5 minute level with a 20 minute level, even if it's better, ruins that pacing. There's just not enough content in the game to support it.

I agree Xen was by far the weakest of the original levels, but I don't think it's a coincidence that it was also pretty short. I think they knew it had novelty but no staying power and probably cut it to the bone.

I'm confused after reading this thread; the Xen levels are long in original HF, or in Black Mesa?

> Unfortunately, by the end of the earth levels and certainly on Xen, the levels switch over to original designs

By original designs, do you mean HF1 version, or pre-HF1 designs that didn't get implemented in HF1?

Black Mesa has a longer Xen and original designs took inspiration from retail Half-Life but weren't exact copies of map layouts etc.

The original Xen is rubbish. I’m glad they remade it. Just like they did with “On a rail”.

Black Mesa is a masterpiece.

Do you mean the later levels are bigger and more confusing in black mesa?

Genuine question, as I own both versions and don't know which to play.

IMHO, if you want to play Half-Life today, you can also just play the original, I've played it recently and still an amazing game, and several aspects I like it more than Half-life 2. Some might not like the graphics for being dated, but after a while you get used to it.

Steam Deck owners might want to skip this one. Black Mesa randomly crashes on my Deck for some reason despite being listed as playable.

This is engine for HL1 while OP talks about HL2.

I'll add, if you have a VR headset, modded HL1 runs beautifully on it with full hand controller support for gun aiming and crowbar smashing. I've also heard lots of praises for HL2 VR mod bringing the game to new levels, I have yet to try it myself.

Or, can still be purchased on Steam for $0.99, during sales. Windows only though.

Eh, I don’t really think that this is an “or” situation. I think that this is an “and” situation. The last time that I set up Xash3D FWGS, I had to copy files from the version of Half-Life that I own on Steam into a different folder so that those files could be loaded by Xash 3D FWGS. I haven’t tried Xash 3D FWGS in a while, but it looks like you still have to do that [1]. Also, are you sure that the Steam version of Half-Life is Windows only?

[1]: <https://github.com/FWGS/xash3d-fwgs/blob/f0342763547d9bcf486...>

> Also, are you sure that the Steam version of Half-Life is Windows only?

You're right! It looks like Linux has a native build too. Apparently the Windows version, through Proton, runs better though (not that it matters).

What's the point of using this xash thing then?

It’s open source and runs on all kinds of platforms. Original HL1 runs on old Windows and IIRC DOS. Nowhere else

Valve updates HL1 every few years so it runs on contemporary platforms. DOS was ancient history by the time HL came out, you might be getting it mixed up with Quake1

For whatever reason, Valve doesn't want to open source the engine so some people have taken it upon themselves to build a reverse-engineered engine (which now runs on Android, in the browser etc).

Its ported to Linux just like cs 1.6. Not sure how good Mac build is though.

Steam version: This product is not compatible with macOS 10.15 Catalina or above.

Yeah Apple's latest round of breaking changes hasn't been addressed (and seemingly won't be).

The Linux and Mac ports happened in 2013 or so (presumably getting one working went a lot of the way to getting the other working, though there is some speculation that Apple poured in some money to help make it happen).

MacOS 10.15 dropped support for x86-32 binaries.

Later it became clear why: the Apple Silicon transition, and Rosetta 2, which is optimised for running x86-64 binaries on Apple's Arm64.

But the same change is looming on Linux: Ubuntu tried in 2019 but was persuaded not to, Fedora has tried more than once.

WINE 11 can run Win32 binaries on a pure 64-bit host OS without 32-bit libraries. So, you can run some 32-bit Windows games on 64-bit Linux and macOS which cannot run the 32-bit binaries of their own older versions.

Apple merely jumped first. I think it's not to be blamed here. It'll happen everywhere in time.

Oh that's right the - the 32-bit thing. Incidentally Valve experimented with 64-bit GoldSource 20+ years ago for servers at least but didn't really pursue it.

the windows version is playable on macos through wine. Even modern version, I got it running on a m2 mac mini on Macos 15 sequoia

EDIT: this was for HL1 I’m not sure about HL2

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