half-life-2-episode-1 posts

As promised on Tuesday Valve has now released the long awaited Mac port of their 2004 first person shooter classic Half-Life 2 via their Steam client In addition Half-Life 2 Episodes 1 and 2 have also been released for the Mac. Also, both the PC and Mac ports of Half-Life 2 and Episode 1 finally include Steam achievements for the first time and sport some graphical improvements based on the latest Source Engine (which Episode 2 already has). Finally all three games now support Steam Cloud which allows players to save games online and use them on any PC with a Steam client.

To celebrate all three games get a big 30 percent off sale for a limited time. Half-Life 2 is now priced at just $6.99 while Episodes 1 and 2 are on sale for $5.59 each. Finally The Orange Box which has Half-Life 2, Episodes 1 and 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 (coming to the Mac "soon) is priced at $20.99

As promised a number of weeks ago, Valve is finally bringing its classic 2004 shooter Half-Life 2 to the Mac platform via Steam. The game will be released on Wednesday as part of Valve's now regular weekly update of adding new Mac games to the Steam platform.

Shacknews has confirmed that the release of Half-Life 2 will also include Mac versions of the game's two mini-expansions, Episode 1 and Episode 2. It's likely that people who already own the PC version of the game will be able to download the Mac version for free. It's unknown if this release will also finally add the long awaited Steam achievements to Half-Life 2.

If you were quick on the draw with today's new UI update to Steam, you may have noticed something strange. In the new interface for browsing games, it now shows you the achievements a game can have in the information pane, as well as information on achievements you have earned. This is cool, and in the case of Half-Life 2 and Episode 1, it actually showed achievements specific to those games that were not there before.

Is this indicative of an update to the original Half-Life 2 and Episode 1? Achievements on the Steam network were finalized around the time Episode 2 released, so the original two Half-Life 2 games didn't have achievements built in (although they did have achievements in the Xbox 360 versions). Either way, for a brief while, Half-Life 2 displayed 33 potential achievements and Episode 1 displayed 13 potential achievements. They had icons not used in Episode 2 or any other Valve game on Steam, which indicates that the achievements were legitimate, even if you couldn't earn them. We've emailed Valve for comment on the potential new achievements.

It took much longer than previously announced but today Valve revealed that they have added support via Steam for the Novint Falcon PC game controller to all of the games in Valve's Orange Box collection. That includes Half-Life 2: Episodes 1 and 2 along with Portal and Team Fortress 2 (the original Half-Life 2 already supports the Falcon controller via a patch from Novint).

The controller allows gamers to "feel" effects like weapon fire recoil, the weight of holding objects like barrels and even feel textures in the game world. Valve has promised that they will add Falcon support to their other games including Left 4 Dead.

Earlier today we reported that a former Half-Life 2 mod turned commerical product called Garry's Mod had generated over $3 million in sales just by being on Valve's Steam service. Today Gamasutra has an article that reveals how many games Valve itself has sold. There's a big catch, however. The numbers are only for retail sales of Valve's products. They don't include the number of units sold from the Steam service.

Valve has always kept specifc numbers related to its Steam service to itself but there have been hints that those numbers are considerable. Even Valve's own CEO Gabe Newell has said he expects Steam sales of its games to surpass retail sales numbers.

So while these figures don't really give the whole picture here are Valve's own numbers on the retail sales of its games so far. The numbers do not include Valve's just released zombie co-op shooter Left 4 Dead. They also, for some unknown reason, don't include sales of the stand alone version of Day of Defeat which Activision released in 2005. Finally they don't include the retail sales of the PC versions of Team Fortress 2, Portal and Half-Life 2: Episode 2 which were released as separate products several months after the release of The Orange Box.

Half-Life: 9.3 million units
Half-Life Opposing Force: 1.1 million units
Half-Life Blue Shift: 800,000 units
Counter-Strike: 4.2 million units
Counter-Strike Condition Zero: 2.9 million units
Counter-Strike Source: 2.1 million units
Half-Life 2: 6.5 million units
Half-Life 2 Episode 1: 1.4 million units
The Orange Box: 3 million units

As we reported last week, Valve has now made five Source Engine based mods available directly via download on their Steam download service. The mods (Age of Chivalry, D.I.P.R.I.P., Insurgency, Synergy, and Zombie Panic). will now appear in a Steam user's "My Games" list after being installed and will receive automatic updates just like other games on Steam. Also, all of these mods now take advantage of Steamworks, which provides stat tracking and other features,

If you happen to be one of the two people in the world that doesn't have a Source Engine based game installed already, Valve's regular weekly sale is up your alley. They have reduced the price of their 2006 released first person shooter Half-Life 2: Episode One to $4.99 for this weekend only (it normally costs ($9.99).