So last night I played Half Life past midnight, checked socials later to find... valve have added in windows os support for the steam deck oled.... but why tho?
We have seen in recent days that microsofts windows operating system is grown to be a burdensome os. Windows 11 being sold as a free live service that includes software you dont need and with the crowdstrike outage, will likely harm your pc. It's become a less reliable os unlike previous versions.
But people are used to windows, a lot of software and games they play is only compatible with the windows os. And if they have a steam deck, they may just go through the process of trying to install windows on a linux based machine. Well, valve has decided to support that with an update to the OLED that supports windows drivers. I'm not gonna dare let windows touch my device but I guess for those who do want it, this news is a welcome one... i guess. Steamdeckhq.com
So speaking of Valve... Half Life. One of the most notable fps games of 98 and is the big reason for the shift in fps games going forward. Offering a more toned down, grounded story compared to the pompous bombastic games of before.
The games opening is a calm tram ride as you make your way to work, taking in the sights of black mesa and how massive the complex is. Of course on repeat playthroughs, this sequence does loses it luster which is why I looked at social media on my phone while the sequence went on, was still looking at socials all the way to pushing the cart. This is now my headcanon as to how the resonance cascade, Gordon was too busy looking at his damn phone.
Actually, it was pretty clear that something big was gonna happen to black mesa and not in a good way. On the tram ride you see a massive spill of radioactive material, a computer blows up as two scientists mention that its been happening quite a bit and even the two at the chamber door mention "yeah theres a small chance a resonance cascade will happen but its fine, trust". You'd have to wonder if black mesa had similar incidents before the cascade event.
Headcrabs kinda suck, particularly when you're walking down a corrider and one leaps at you from a dark corner and takes 3 health. Know how I said this game helped caused a big shift for fps, to be a bit more "serious" than arcadey run and gun? A lot of those games that try to recreate half lifes success also had their own version of the headcrab. A tiny enemy that has a melee attack that leaps at you, lotta games had thier own headcrabs and they all suck to fight.
Speaking of which, the game does like to ambush you at time, hiding an enemy behind an object or even spawning one behind you. On A Rail happens to have a lot of ambushes for you to have to deal with. Its that kind of chapter that you hear is terrible and you think "it can't be that bad" and then you play it and realise it was. Its based around travelling on a powered cart and for most of the chapter, you dont really need it you can just go forward on foot, sometimes its more efficient to do so compared to using the cart.
Combat in Half-Life is pretty great, chapters like "we got hostiles" being a great showcase of that as you face soldiers. But those moments come between sections of platforming which, in first person, isnt ideal. Yeah its wonderful to walk across pipes and jump over precarious gaps. May I please go back to shooting more aliens and shooters.
Despite some of my nitpicky gripes, i do respect half-life and what its accomplished. Its presence helped pushed gaming narratives forward and provided an alternative to games that featured gruff action heroes or mascot characters and even to this day, it still ends up influencing and inspiring peoples creativity with examples like ross's freemans mind series and wayneradiotv's half life vr series. And it was neat to play it on my steam deck... when I wasnt having my controls reset to the default layout instead of the community one I was using. Very strange bug.
Anyways, i'll leave this post off with a link to a video featuring gameplay of Half-Lifes alpha. Watch it here
See you all tomorrow. Feel free to leave feedback or game suggestions here. Anons are currently on.