Valve Releases Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary Update

[sophisticles]

Cool, HL2 really is a legendary game, one of those games that people talk about years after they have stopped playing them.

Quake 3 Arena, Doom, Civ, UT, Duke Nukem, NFL Blitz, Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros, Postal, you realize just how hard it is to make a good game considering all the ones that have come and gone and no one remembers.

Anyway I get to play this on Windows since I dual boot so my weekend will be great.

[rabcor]

Half Life 3 when?

[ssokolow]

Because of the DRM inflicted by the Steam DRM Platform, this is also an unspecified time limited demo. No thanks!

I have a friend who has the somewhat odd stance that he'll pay for anything he wants to play, then play a pirated copy. In this case, you're not financially endorsing the DRM like you would be if you paid, so maybe do that?

(I just don't play 'em at all. I'd be worried that the giant backlog of games I paid for on GOG.com or Itch.io or whatever would be judging me for it. ;P )

[kpedersen]

I have a friend who has the somewhat odd stance that he'll pay for anything he wants to play, then play a pirated copy. In this case, you're not financially endorsing the DRM like you would be if you paid, so maybe do that?

(I just don't play 'em at all. I'd be worried that the giant backlog of games I paid for on GOG.com or Itch.io or whatever would be judging me for it. ;P )

Its not a bad approach. Though an issue with what your friend does is that if he pays for the game, how does the publisher know that he does not approve of the DRM? I feel it would be better to damage them financially by not purchasing it. It is a hard one because (some) of the team I do want to reward financially for their efforts. Even purchasing art books and other merchandise doesn't seem to make the correct statement. Perhaps normalizing paypal'ing random key developers directly?

I spent a lot of time back in the day working on various steam.dll cracks and also some of Valve's open-source projects on GitHub, as well as maintaining some FreeBSD ports of various Valve development tools for FreeBSD, so I feel I "gave back" to the community over the years, just not the developers unfortunately. Weirdly I spent longer (and enjoying) doing that than any actual game I was going to play.

[chithanh]

Indeed. If the company goes bankrupt, there will be no-one to pay the developers to create the official DRM "cracks" required for the customers to play their collection. This just won't happen and Valve knows it.

"I thought for a whole five minutes about it, and could not come up with a solution for this problem, so it won't ever happen!"
C'mon, it is not that hard to imagine how Valve's provisions look like.

I believe Steam requires connection to the DRM servers every few months. Certainly when the hardware ages and needs replacing, the DRM will be retriggered because the hardware profile hash will have changed. Its all just such a scam.

There is nothing stopping Valve from releasing a Steam client which does not require connection to Steam servers. In fact this is how in case of bankruptcy, Valve could ensure that people can still play their games.

Then additionally set aside funds for prepaid hosting of the game files for one year and traffic costs for (game size * number of owners), and everyone is covered with all their games.

[Anux]

Nice and thanks Michael,
I somehow haven't played it and would have never bought it on steam, but for free ...

[prazola]

its native for me... opengl and all. no .exe, no proton running.

43543543.jpg

They used to hav toGL to run DX game on linux. It's single threaded and usually it makes games run like crap.

[L_A_G]

Found myself playing it for a few hours yesterday. Still as good as I remember, but like Black Mesa* its got inconsistent frame pacing, even with vsync enabled, and that always makes me queasy a few hours in.

*Fan-made, Valve approved, remake of the original Half-Life in the Source engine

[FireBurn]

Did they update lost coast too?

[ssokolow]

Its not a bad approach. Though an issue with what your friend does is that if he pays for the game, how does the publisher know that he does not approve of the DRM? I feel it would be better to damage them financially by not purchasing it. It is a hard one because (some) of the team I do want to reward financially for their efforts. Even purchasing art books and other merchandise doesn't seem to make the correct statement. Perhaps normalizing paypal'ing random key developers directly?

It's not about sending a message for him. It's about reconciling his sense of morals (pay for what he plays) with his desire to maintain agency over what he plays (no DRM).

I'm the one who refuses to financially endorse their behaviour by sticking to games I can buy DRM-free from somewhere like GOG.com... or at least as eBay'd pre-2005 CDs or DVDs that Alcohol 52% Free Edition or Alcohol 120% Retro Edition can image and either that or CDemu can mount on a PC with no Internet access. (Preferrably the former, since that helps to send a message that there's money to be made by publishing on GOG.com.)

I spent a lot of time back in the day working on various steam.dll cracks and also some of Valve's open-source projects on GitHub, as well as maintaining some FreeBSD ports of various Valve development tools for FreeBSD, so I feel I "gave back" to the community over the years, just not the developers unfortunately. Weirdly I spent longer (and enjoying) doing that than any actual game I was going to play.

Reminds me of how I seem to spend more time (and get more fun out of) setting up my my retro-hobby PCs and "game console except not a console"s than actually playing games on them.

(What's my favourite classic Mac OS game? It's called "How pretty can I make /srv/retro look when viewed via Netatalk and AppleShare?" :P ...now that I've more or less given every folder a custom icon and made sure the HFS Creator/Type codes stored in POSIX Extended Attributes are all correct, I'm thinking I'll start to add descriptions to all the .sit, .bin, and .hqx files using ResEdit and my recent discovery of how Finder lets files have custom Balloon Help text. Heck, given how often I'm going to repeat that task, maybe a quick little "Set balloon help for this file" utility will be my first non-tutorial project as I work through Programming Starter Kit for Macintosh.)