Valve Updates Half-Life For 25th Anniversary - Adds Official Steam Deck Support

[kpedersen]

That's anything digital a person can buy from anywhere. I could say the same thing about RHEL subscribers and RHEL/IBM going out of business. RHEL is one expensive limited time demo to risk playing GNOME on.

If you have archived RHEL and the package repository, if IBM shuts down any kind of servers. it wont affect you. You can keep on installing and running the software on any machine you want.

When Steam servers shut down, you unfortunately won't be able to install and run the game on any machine you want. You won't even be able to replace GPU Hard Disk or it will change the DRM hash key and trigger the need for a reactivation.

RHEL's approach is scummy but not DRM. It is a paywall.
Steam's approach is also scummy and DRM is much worse from a digital preservation point of view.

[ssokolow]

For me personally some games just didn't age very well.
I never played Half-Life as a kid, but I really enjoyed Half-Life 2 and its episodes.
I've tried to play the first Half-Life a couple of years ago... But I just couldn't get into it.
Pushing the little table into beam opening the portal to the alien dimension and stuff.
I guess if you played it as a kid you can appreciate it more.

Same goes for my Sega Dreamcast console which I've recently modded with an optical drive emulator (GDEmu).
I now have a big set of games stored into some sd-card so I can play some of the classics such as Resident Evil Code Veronica.
Because everyone praised that game back in the days and I didn't have it.
I've tried to play it for like 15 minutes before turning it off.
The character movement is so stiff having to turn around with the dpad.
I just couldn't get into that game as well lol.

Honestly, Freeman's Mind ruined Half-Life for me. It's just so bland now without Ross Scott's offbeat simulation of a stream of consciousness.

[Snak31]

[QUOTE=skeevy420;n1422686]
Resident Evil 0 HD Remaster

May I, kind soul?

[skeevy420]

Wouldn't mind if still available, cheers

Check your PMs

[Errinwright]

Resident Evil Revelations.

Wouldn't mind if still available, cheers

[skeevy420]

So technically it is an unspecified time limited demo whilst Steam servers exist?

That's anything digital a person can buy from anywhere. I could say the same thing about RHEL subscribers and RHEL/IBM going out of business. RHEL is one expensive limited time demo to risk playing GNOME on.

[skeevy420]

I have Half-Life on cdrom and even installed it a few weeks ago, it was playable and fun but it was pretty buggy and lacked some of the "refinement" 25 years has added to the game; still it was Half-Life and not tied to Steam.

I must say that I definitely lean towards games from GOG, I can be relatively certain that the game once playable will continue to be playable. Games with awful launchers like UConnect and Rock Star Social Club are going to be a crap shoot. At least Steam is dependable and has good Linux compatibility, other platforms are a hot mess even under windows.

GOG sometimes trails Steam in game updates but Steam doesn't always keep up, which too can be a good thing, Alice: Madness Returns works on Steam but has never worked right on whatever Epic is calling their current game launcher.

GOG, Good Old Games, Good Old GOG.

Plus, practically every older game has been cracked. If Steam quits working I'll crack my paid-for games. Not ideal, but that's my plan.

[skeevy420]

For me personally some games just didn't age very well.
I never played Half-Life as a kid, but I really enjoyed Half-Life 2 and its episodes.
I've tried to play the first Half-Life a couple of years ago... But I just couldn't get into it.
Pushing the little table into beam opening the portal to the alien dimension and stuff.
I guess if you played it as a kid you can appreciate it more.

Same goes for my Sega Dreamcast console which I've recently modded with an optical drive emulator (GDEmu).
I now have a big set of games stored into some sd-card so I can play some of the classics such as Resident Evil Code Veronica.
Because everyone praised that game back in the days and I didn't have it.
I've tried to play it for like 15 minutes before turning it off.
The character movement is so stiff having to turn around with the dpad.
I just couldn't get into that game as well lol.

I'll 2nd the Black Mesa comment. I had a hard time with the oldness of Half Life, too, and Black Mesa makes it a lot more tolerable if you're not coming in wearing nostalgia blinders.

Heh. Old-school Resident Evil tank controls. The older I get combined with playing more games that use dual stick move and look with full 3d movement and scenes, games with tank controls and fixed scenes become harder and less fun to play. I totally get where you're coming from. Earlier this year I couldn't get through RE1 Remake before quitting, a game I beat multiple times as a kid when trying to speed run it. My nostalgia blinders didn't help.

The copy of Resident Evil Revelations that I'm trying...now was trying...to give away doesn't have tank controls

The old Tomb Raider games are like that to me, too. I envy younger folks who didn't have to go through the teething pains of the PSX 3D revolution before dual sticks existed or had to deal with triple grip single stick N64 madness.

[gukin]

I have Half-Life on cdrom and even installed it a few weeks ago, it was playable and fun but it was pretty buggy and lacked some of the "refinement" 25 years has added to the game; still it was Half-Life and not tied to Steam.

I must say that I definitely lean towards games from GOG, I can be relatively certain that the game once playable will continue to be playable. Games with awful launchers like UConnect and Rock Star Social Club are going to be a crap shoot. At least Steam is dependable and has good Linux compatibility, other platforms are a hot mess even under windows.

GOG sometimes trails Steam in game updates but Steam doesn't always keep up, which too can be a good thing, Alice: Madness Returns works on Steam but has never worked right on whatever Epic is calling their current game launcher.

GOG, Good Old Games, Good Old GOG.

[stormcrow]

I highly recommend this Ross Scott video:

"Games as a service" is fraud.

See some of the subsequent cases mentioned in the comments of both that video (eg. Audible) and also the comments of these later videos if anyone needs clarification on why the lawyers knee-jerk saying that he's wrong are probably wrong:

• Dead Game News: France vs. Valve + maybe the rest of the world
• Dead Game News: Lawsuit against Apple on digital ownership

It's a complex issue that I really would prefer not to be TL;DRed so, as a "sampler" of his argument, he's pointing out that consumer protection law sees goods and services very differently and that, if the customer only pays once for something rather than a recurring fee, it's probably a good rather than a service in the eyes of the law regardless of what the EULA says, and it's probably fraud in the eyes of consumer protection law to sell someone a good and then remotely brick it at a later time without their consent.

He's wrong* because "fraud" has a legal definition and it changes between jurisdictions (the details changes between jurisdictions, for example France's legal definition may not be accepted anywhere else). "Games as a service is fraud" would have to mean you weren't told up front what the terms of use were. That's clearly not the case with Steam, hence, not fraud (at least in the US). That's a hyperbolic argument that doesn't stand up to the plain definition of fraud (being: a deception practiced to induce another to give up property or surrender a right). There's arguably no deception in Valve's ToS for Steam. When you are banned or otherwise Steam shuts down, you will lose access to those products you paid money for. You made a choice. You accepted the ToS.

(*) Hyperbole is one thing, but this is a disingenuous argument that is in itself being deceptive because words have meaning that you can't just change on whim no matter what marketing tries to sell you.