I'm writing this 4h after the end of 19th Nov 2023. It's still hard to believe that Half-Life is twenty five years old. Easier said than believed. Since a young age I've been invested in this franchise, my first game actually being Portal: Still Alive on the Xbox 360. I was watching a facts video about Portal where I found out about Valve's legacy and its ties with Half-Life. Thus, I got curious and played HL1 on my crappy HP PC and loved it. That was about 10-11 years ago. Since then, Half-Life as a game has had such a positive impact on my life. I've spent countless hours messing about with cheats in campaign, playing in random HLDM servers, in experimenting with mods [as you may have seen with The Phoenix Project Software]. Nowadays I invest most of my free time to producing an ambitious mod for Half-Life and its multiplayer. This year I finally took up the task of completing Black Mesa which I've owned on Steam since 2016. I was simply breathtaken by Crowbar Collective's work, especially in Xen. The Xenian artstyle in Black Mesa & HL are beautiful. The content update from Valve has been simply a breath of fresh air, especially now that mod support is fixed. I can't thank the company enough for doing this. Despite hiccups from Valve in the past, and reluctance to create Half-Life 3, I will still always love HL. Half-Life is my favourite of all-time game series [with Halo behind it of course], and if it didn't exist, I'm not sure what I'd be doing productively nowadays. Thank you Valve for celebrating the game's 25th alongside the fans. While many other retro PC games fall to incompatibility issues, mouse bugs, FPS lags, resolution issues, stretched sprites, your support helps Half-Life prevail over all. Just needed to get this off my chest. :)
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