half-life-2-episode-2 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.

In 2007, Valve released The Orange Box collection for both the PC and Xbox 360. Xbox 360 owners, however, actually got a version of the original Half-Life 2 in their port of The Orange Box that is graphically better than the current PC version. That's because Valve decided to give the Xbox 360 port all of the updates they had made to the Source Engine since Half-Life 2 was released for the PC back in 2004, including support for HDR lighting and improved character models.

While Valve doesn't seem in a hurry to give PC owners those kind of updates, a group of modders have taken it on themselves to bring the original Half-Life 2 up to speed with the graphical updates that were put into Half-Life 2 Episode 2 (released in The Orange Box). They even hacked in some new Steam achievements. You can see the differences in the YouTube video above. It's currently unknown how Valve feels about this kind of modification but if you want to try it out this Steam message board thread has some download links for the mod.

[Via Rock Paper Shotgun]