Half-Life: Uplink (Demo) (PC)

That's a nice effect, but if you stare at the 'H A L F - L I F E' text bouncing from left and right in the background long enough it starts looking kinda dopey. It's so weird seeing the original, un-Steamed title screen again though after all these years.

Hello and welcome to Super Adventures in Gaming, the site that just can't stop putting up articles about Half-Life. My friend mecha-neko wrote up his opinions on the authentic original version of Half-Life a couple of years back, and then I took a look at the fan made remake Black Mesa a few months later, but there's Half-Life content that neither of us have looked at yet... like Opposing Force, Blue Shift, Decay...

But there's also Half-Life: Uplink, a demo released in early 1999 featuring a modified version of levels cut from the actual game, which happens to be the first Half-Life content I ever played. It's also the first Valve developed content I ever played, which is fitting because today is the 10th anniversary of my Steam account!

Don't bother looking for Uplink on Steam though, it isn't there (though you can apparently download it as a mod for Half-Life).

(Click the screenshots to expand them into dimensions unimagined by gamers in 1998... except not really, as 1280x960 was already in the resolution list for me to choose from.)

Oh by the way, did you know that Half-Life was PC Gamer's Game of the Year 1998? Well okay you probably have an idea seeing as there's a badge right there on the title screen, but did you know that it was literally figuratively every other magazine's Game of the Year too?

Half-Life 2 (PC)

The Steam Summer Sale (2013) is still dragging on, doing it's best to tempt me into poverty, so I figured that today I'd have a quick replay of the first hour or so of the first ever game I added to my Steam library to take my mind off the deals.

Steam wasn't actually launched with Half-Life 2 back in 2004, it predates the game by a whole year in fact, but this is what pulled the mainstream to the service, kicking and screaming (and whining on forums). This was the first single-player game to require online activation and man that was a lot of fun at the time.

(Click the pics to super-size them. Warning: this article contains more than your recommended daily allowance of words.)

Black Mesa (PC)

Today I'm looking at Black Mesa, formally known as 'Black Mesa: Source', a free fan-made remake of the legendary first person shooter Half-Life (made with Valve's blessing!)

Yeah it's only been a couple of months since mecha-neko played the original game but whatever, I'm playing this anyway. Half-Life's one of my favourite games, and I want to see what happened when these fans got hold of it and decided to 'improve it'.

Click the pictures to view in extreme 1280x800 resolution. Yeah, yeah, I know, I should buy a new monitor.

Half-Life (PC) - Guest Post

This is my 100th post on Super Adventures in Gaming!

For a nice change, I'll play a first person shooter that everybody's heard of so you can all laugh at me as I fall down holes and miss the obvious!

Science is a preference for the habitual voyeur of what is known as...

Cheer up. I've hit my Parklife gag limit already and we're still in the intro.
Click the pictures to view them as clean PNGs!