Are the original Half-Life games still enjoyable today, or is that just Boomer nostalgia? Are the Source/Black Mesa versions simply better?
Half-Life is still kino today.HL2 kinda mid though
>>12905789>kinda midso would you say that its value on a scale from 0 to 100 is somewhere in the 0 to 100 range
>>1290580470-ish
>>12905754They're still solid experiences. I replay them every few years and always have a good time. I am biased though since I dislike what modern big budget games have become and mainly almost exclusively enjoy only indie games or double A studio releases in 2026. Regardless both games are dirt cheap to pick up and are short enough that forming your own opinion is easy enough.
>>12905754Half-Life is better than Black Mesa, but Black Mesa is worth playing through at least once.
>>12905754After replaying HL/OpFor/BS I'll say only base game is good. OpForce really disappointed me this time, second half of the game is like surface tension but longer and worse. Black Mesa is just bad in every way. Visuals are so cluttered they put ugly red lights everywhere to tell you where to go, player physics are too slippery and xen is a chore. Also new soundtrack is super gay.
>>12905754Avoid Half Life Source at all cost!! Valve just lazily port the HL1 assets to the source engine and it slowly became buggier and buggier as time past due to engine update. That's why the Source version got delisted.
Uplink isn't a real game; it's a demo. Also, I accidentally glitched it by going into the areas in the 'wrong' order. Apparently if you use the shipping containers to jump over the fencing and into the facility before completely clearing out the military and vorts on the surface, it loads assets in the wrong order and leads to weird frozen scenes of soldiers and scientists in their 'frame 1' configurations (the state in which they appear prior to moving when the player triggers a particular event by arriving for the first time into a specific area).You can't kill them, either. They are invulnerable until the action starts. You have to back-track and move around the surface again to trigger the events in the 'correct' order.
>>12905839I appreciate Opposing Force for being a harsher and more punishing experience for the player than the base game. Too many DLCs go soft on players. OF puts you in a maze-cave with huge spiders and then sends you into a room with infinitely-respawning aliens which attack until you figure out a puzzle. The reward for finishing the puzzle and clearing out the aliens is another spider cave.
Black Mesa isn't Half Life, it's Half Life 2 disguised as Half Life.
>>12905848HLS isn't unplayable or anything but the few bugs you'll notice are REALLY bad. It's worth getting it just to have it unlock HL1 assets in Gmod imo.Also weirdly enough I kind of liked the way barnacles are bugged in HLS, it actually makes them an actual threat because they're so easy to avoid normally. I've probably gotten got by barnacles more times in a single HLS playthrough than I have in all the times I've played every other Half Life game combined and I consider that a good thing, they're such a non-issue normally.
>>12905754Yes, they are worth replaying, specially if you havent replayed them for a long time, because you start noticing new things. However, I feel like you can only truly enjoy Opposing Force and Blue Shift if you play Half-Life as well, because as standalone games the two expansions arent very interesting.
I thought they were really good, still one of my favorite games of all time, even though I have no nostalgia for it.
>>12905754>Are the original Half-Life games still enjoyable todayYes because HL invented the "cinematic" shooter
>>12905754I played in 2007-2011 and they were still pretty good.
>>12906126
>>12905754The originals are worth playing. Source was a lazy porting of GoldSrc assets into the Source engine, and was broken by the introduction of Steampipe. Black Mesa, like all remakes, is its own thing and should be treated as such.
the only real problem with it is kind of crappy difficulty balance. on normal the xenos are basically helpless animals you slaughter and on hard the soldiers are absurdly bullet spongey to the point where body shots might as well not exist.
>>12905754I replay HL1 every other year, blue shift is short but sweet, opposing force is a mess but it does have some decent parts. the source ports are buggier and generally considered inferior and shouldn't be played over the originals but it's your choice. black mesa is a different game and not retro???Xen is absolute kino btw, only console kids hate it
>>12905754They're great. I've only played through Blue Shift and Opposing Force once but I enjoyed them. Played through the original quite a few times. Black mesa is worth playing through if you enjoyed the original. The source port is shit.I prefer Half Life 2 tho
>>12905754Black Mesa is just better than the originalThat said, all the expansion packs I played were good too and there’s no Black Mesa equivalent
>>12905754Half-Life 1 is one of the most playable games ever made. You'd have to have a brain made out of literal cow shit to think it is inaccessible.
>>12905789>>12905815>kinda mid>rates it 2 tiers outside of mid-range
>>12905863Yeah but the bullet sponge enemy spam pissed me off more than anything so I ended up cheesing the late game. Like for the sewers, turns out the spiders can't really leave the sewers so if you lead them back to the entrace they get stuck on the geometry and you can magdump into them safely. I still like OpFor but it is a little overtuned I think
