
Electronic Arts - Electronic Arts
Windows 98
Release date: 2005-09-26
CD-ROM




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.
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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.