Half-Life 2 celebrates its twentieth birthday, sorry for the old call early in the morning. For the occasion, Valve has taken care of its legendary game by offering it a big update and above all by offering it free for a few days. The offer ends on Steam at the end of the day, this Monday, November 18 at 7 p.m., so if you want to (re)discover the title, don't wait too long to add it to your game library without paying. Unfortunately, you will not be able to play on your Mac, the fault of compatibility still restricted to processors remaining at 32 bits.
This incompatibility has been maintained despite the update, which does not mean that playing on a modern Mac is impossible. If you have a model equipped with an Apple Silicon chip, Half-Life 2 should launch without too much problem and offer excellent performance thanks to the Game Porting Toolkit integrated into macOS and thanks to an app like Whiskey. I haven't had time to try the second one, but Half-Life worked perfectly in this mode, it is also the advantage of old games to be less demanding on a technical level and therefore to be better satisfied with this kind of tinkering.
Mac Gaming: the Game Porting Toolkit, a tool for developers that benefits gamers
Valve didn't make fun of PC gamers, with a Half-Life 2 not only free, but also complete. The game now includes all the extensions as well as the Steam Workshop, which will allow you to modify the game without having to leave it first. It's never too late to fix bugs and improve a game, the proof: twenty years after its initial release, the title gains a corrected map which will resolve many problems, while the graphics have been improved. This is not a complete recreation like Cyan did with Myst et Rivenbut we can hope for improved lighting and fog.
As if that wasn't enough, a two-hour documentary was released on YouTube to tell the story of the game and its creation, with testimonials from those involved over twenty years ago. It must be said that Half-Life 2 was much more ambitious and complex than its predecessor, which forced the various people involved to come up with new ideas to achieve their goals, at a time when the majority had to be created from scratch. Moreover, Valve created its own 3D rendering engine at the same time as it was developing this suite…
Once the free period ends, Half-Life 2 will remain sold on Steam at €10.
