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Half-Life 1 Anthology

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: July 23, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Half-Life 1 and its expansion packs are absolutely stunning. Even though the graphics are dated by today's standards, Half-Life stands out among first person shooters with great single player and online gameplay, great replayability and stunning support from the developer, VALVe software, with their Steam system. Half-Life will remain fun even longer if you get involved with mod communities, playing the various mods available for it and make your own mods. There are many tools available online for the aforementioned modding of the game from third party persons and official modding tools from the developer of the game.

[...]

Great Games--AVOID STEAM.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: February 22, 2008
Author: Amazon User

these are the games you remember. except for STEAM. with STEAM, you are only buying access to a game for as long as STEAM exists, however long that is. more, should you ever use your credit card to "chargeback" anything you've purchased via STEAM, your STEAM account will be disabled over this and you will lose access to everything you have already spent money on. why would you chargeback? because STEAM didn't give you a refund. because STEAM DOES NOT OFFER REFUNDS ON ANYTHING EVER. they could, of course--and it would be fair to both parties since the software is only playable over their system making pirating impossible. this is simply their arbitrary choice. which they do not make obvious. it's buried in section 4 of their subscription agreement. naturally, you should always first check out refund policies prior to buying anything anywhere. but the reason for this review is to warn you that if you are going to purchase this game, or these games, or anything, avoid STEAM. it just doesn't make sense to buy anything from a non-refundable system that doesn't have any guarantee of being playable in the future. if you are going to buy it anywhere, buy it from somewhere like here at AMAZON that at least will give you a partial refund on open software (that might legitimately be more than your rig could handle, for example, or might be badly flawed as does happen) or even a full refund on unopened software returned within 30 days (should you have gotten the wrong gift or if you have second thoughts for whatever reason)--"unopened" being a status STEAM does not possess. no, STEAM is buyer beware.

A Classic!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: February 20, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I played this game (Team Fortress Classic) alot a long time ago, and lost it. So I decided to buy it again. One of the best purchases ever. It's still a lot better than TF2.

Great Collection!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: January 23, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Since the debut of this videogame I was testing the Demo version (Opposing Force), now getting all the versions, I really have to recommend you to buy it. It's really great!

Just the best

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: November 22, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I honestly believe that this is the best game ever created, even thou half-life 2 is out I prefer to play this.

Poor version of a great game

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 11
Date: November 20, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This Half-Life Anthology is hard to judge. There are a bunch of problems with the game, which due to my lack of experience with the series, I don't know whether to pin on Half-Life the game or this particular Anthology version.

I'm a little perplexed by all the overwhelmingly positive reviews of the original Half-Life. I see "great story," "revolutionary," "intense action," and I can't really say I agree. While the beginning and end of the game are unusually dramatic for an action game, there is essentially no storyline in between the bookends. Every level is a series of trials to enter another doorway, to talk to another NPC, who will direct you to another doorway. In essence, the plotine of the game mirrored every other action game I've played. I grew pretty tired of the repetitive nature of the quest.

Half-Life's saving grace is the action, which is nearly always white-knuckled excitement, but yet not always fun. Valve did a great job with enemy placement and creative combinations of repetitive environmental objects. The marine AI is amazing, and still puts many modern shooters to shame. Unfortunately Valve had no qualms over using cheap instant-death traps to inflate the difficulty level. Nearly every scenario includes one or two improbable enemy placements, infinite enemy respawn points, or unpredictable roof collapses, necessitating quicksaves between every encounter. I really don't appreciate that kind of level design.

The weapons look and sound intense, and are easily the best visual feature of the game. Charcter models, particularly enemies, are well detailed and move fluidly. The rest of the game is hideous. Even giving it a ten-year grade cushion, the graphics of Half-Life's environments are ugly to the point of hampering gameplay. Critical buttons and switches are often obscured by the muddy low-res detail of consoles and panels. On more than one occasion, I thought a critical door switch was an eye chart or a Dominos pizza box tossed against the wall.

While weapons aiming is very accurate, there's not much more about the game's movement engine I can compliment. Protagonist Gordon Freeman moves too quickly at the default rate, and slides too much when attempting to stop. Even by the game's end, i couldn't get comfortable moving him on tricky surfaces or sneaking up on enemies. And the thankfully infrequent platforming parts of the game are brutal. Even climbing and descending a simple ladder was a continual excercise in frustration for me. Basically, I enjoyed shooting stuff but not moving my clumsy oaf of a character.

Most disturbing to me were the number of glitches I encountered playing Half-Life. Weapon animations would cut out, or doors refuse to respond to my prompt so often that I began to suspect something wrong with the code in this Anthology version. And I experience scripted sequence failures on at least four or five occasions that halted my progress. Without cheat codes, I couldn't have finished the game.

So, I can easily see why people went nuts over the original Half-Life when first introduced. Perhaps it was the stellar multiplayer mode that made so many people overlook the weakness of the singleplayer storyline. Unfortunately, the above problems along with the intrusive and annoying Steam service lead me to belive that this Anthology is simply not the preferable version of Half-Life to be played.

A scrutiny of Half-Life

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 10
Date: September 05, 2007
Author: Amazon User

First, to give credit where credit is due, Half-Life, being one of the originals to start the trend in Alien shooters, had an excellent plot by comparison to some of the other popular shooters. Likewise, it was an innovater of the true first-person shooter concept, there were literally no cutscenes where you the player were somehow capable of traveling outside your own body to look at stuff from different perspectives. Overall, the idea being, that such third-person cut-scenes detract from a little concept called role-playing. Not only was the plot interesting, but the very concept was fascinating to me as I'm something of a Sci-Fi fanatic. Yet, I can say honestly, that I would have been happier if the alien presence in the game simply hadn't been there and it was really all about trying to survive your own government, during a scientific disaster. What I can and will knock this game for is what I knock most PC original titles for. The programmers were lazy & cheap enough, not to include gamepad support. And frankly, this concept being thought of as acceptable or 'okay' by PC elitests is a testiment to the fact that they've lost touch with the very purpose of the PC itself: being a useful tool, which can make life easier. I firmly believe, the play control issues that result in all games that are for the PC and stick with the keyboard and mouse routine, would benefit greatly in terms of simplicity and enjoyability if the program and design section that supplies the PC with games, could be bothered, to allow for a more proper, and more efficent interface tool to be used. Further, I attribute this very issue, almost solitarily as the reason why behind the stats that proove, even though a PC is technically more graphics capable and can provide better sound quality, more people are willing to drop 600 dollars on a PSIII or other console rather than even bother with PC gaming - at all. And sadly, the PC-elitest snobbery that 'game-pad' is a bad word is to blame - as it simply enables the very platform they support, supposedly, to get pwnd in the market. Because while more capability should be a selling point of the PC, it's definitely not in this case, due directly to a lack of pride amongst it's game developers.

only a quarter life

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 6
Date: August 27, 2007
Author: Amazon User

While this package contains all four games from valve, it is missing something important that were available from earlier half-life packages - a dedicated server and a map editor. This shouldn't present any problems for an average player, but it sure feels like a hadicap for die-hard TFC/CS fans who'd like to host their own servers and create their own maps

Also, most files (like maps etc) are zipped up into the propriatory .fgc files, which may become an issue if you want to install mods etc.

All the origional Half Life fun on one disc!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: July 28, 2007
Author: Amazon User

When i saw this Anthology on Amazon for $10.00 i had to get it.This game has all the origional Half-Life games on one disc!It includes the Origional Half Life,Half life blue shift that has you playing as a security gaurd,Half life opposing force in which you step into the boots of one of the Soldiers that is sent in to clean up the Black Mesa area and best of all is Team fortress classic.TFC is the online team based game in which you pick which kind of class you want to be(pyro,medic,spy,demo)and start trying to take over the enemy base with the help of your teammates.This is the most addicting game of them all and will have you lose long chunks of time while playing it.At only $10.00 this is an amazing collection.The only thing missing from this collection is counter strike but at this price that is a minor gripe.

Fun game and easy to set up!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: July 17, 2007
Author: Amazon User

First of all this was my first time playing half-life and I have to say it is fun. Some people complain how much a pain in the neck Steam is, but it really isn't that hard to set up. You go to their website, click Get Steam Now, click Free Download(only do this if your computer is good enough)and thats pretty much all you have to do to set up an account. The only downside to this is that you have to have internet access, but that should not be a problem. Now about the game. It starts basically by introducing you to your surrondings. After that it' fun from there on in. Great storyline and non stop edge of your seat action,this game in a nutshell. Hope this helps.

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