yeah I tried that multiple times lol
steam support got back to me! they said they removed the “low violence flag” from my copy of the game. I guess there’s some sort of server-side enforcement where it encodes something in the executable before you download it? super weird. anyway I had to uninstall and then delete the game’s folder and then reinstall it but it works now!
except for some reason the crates shatter into glass when you break them lol
This game looks great with texture filtering off. Is that controversial to say? I played Half-Life for the first time in the early 2000s so I’m not exactly coming at this with eyes trained only on modern tech or only by recent remaster projects. The smooth filtering always looked weird to me and these textures are crispy with it turned off!
i don’t really think so, maybe in like 2005 it would have been controversial when people were like obsessed with putting horrific 3d shit in doom or something but for years it seems to be the accepted wisdom that anything quake 1 adjacent looks like shit with texture filtering. i always used console commands to turn it off. hl1 is also an interesting case because only opengl mode has texture filtering anyway. if you play in software you don’t get the extra gross looking water that sloshes around though
I’m the pervert who says these games usually look best at a high rez for when they came out because a lot of textures just plain look better when you can’t see them repeat forever at modern rez.
hl1 like barely works at its proper resolution of 640x480 after the update still because at least doing it in the menu made me switch to software, and then i couldn’t get past the valve logo whenever I’d start up the game and had to blindly switch resolutions again using win10’s alt tab thing to see. great times
it looks good without texture filtering until you get to the outdoors areas and see all the misaligned rock textures and whatnot. I think favoring unfiltered textures here is a little on the anachronistic side because half life was one of the first big pc releases that was really designed with texture filtering in mind. but that’s probably also why its visuals have aged very poorly. it’s not a very good-looking game either way… I guess it benefited a lot from crt monitor fuzz too.
the raytracing mod lets you play at 240p and honestly at that resolution the textures look great with filtering on. makes me yearn for an n64 port.
hl1 has such good sound design that the blurry textures don’t leave an impression on me. The game could look way worse and it’d still rock because of those sound effects
The controller support in this updated version is really nice. Analog movement and a very generous autoaim really help to focus on the hazardous environment navigation over combat.
I’m playing black mesa again after a full playthrough of half life 1 and for all that’s really good about black mesa, man they whiffed hard on the sound design. that’s probably the most off-brand feeling part about it outside of the poser-looking npc models.
this playthrough of hl i had the chopper just… despawn as soon as i got the rocket launcher
one of those moments i regret not using shadowplay
from tumblr via cohost i.e. somebody didn’t cite their source
A long dormant part of my brain reactivated seeing those Duke Nukem 3D and Blood levels appeared
Soldier of Fortune and F.E.A.R. too!
They’re still working on this thing apparently.
There’s a demo.
Finally someone has the moral courage to bring back the gonarch…
i got confused and thought it was the Monad for a few years there
Having dramatically worse viewmodel animations than hl2 from 2004 is just sad.
It’s amazing that this footage actually exists and is way cooler than we all thought it was.
