Half-Life is my favourite FPS. I was blown away by Half-Life: Uplink (my first contact with HL) back in the day. Such an awesome demo!

My vote goes to Unreal 😁
both are great games but Unreal is more appealing to me ... infact I played HL about a year after it's release IIRC

I don't think I can pick one over the other. I have played Unreal more though, and prior to UT the Unreal multiplayer was pretty popular.

Pointless to compare really.

Unreal was released ahead of Half-Life by at least 6 months but was arguably a technical superior title. However HL was based on a better story and thus some would say a better game. They both had good and bad within.

Remember both for what they provided at the time they did and be thankful that such innovation was encouraged/allowed.

It is perfectly understandable not being able to pick one of the two as they are both excellent games and set a standard for years to come 😀 why not compare different strenghts and weaknesses of the games though?

I used to play HL multiplayer on WON and also OpFor later on Steam. Always eclipsed by CS in popularity but lots of fun.

Half Life has far better movement and aiming control.
The movement engine in Half Life enabled a lot of new mods with great styles of gameplay by only making an differently oriented map.

Both games are really great, i love them both. I used to play a lot of both Unreal and Half Life when i was younger. Unreal was always known as the best shooter with the sickest guns, where half life was known more for action and fun.
Weapons in Unreal were really cool when the game came out - Lasers, rockets, snipers. Many fun mods came with the game too. I spent countless hours with friends on capture the flag.
Graphically Unreal did look better at the time and the size and design of maps was also amazing. I tried mapping for both games, camera control in UDK was extremely annoying, while mapping for Half Life was an piece of cake.
I still map for half life and counter strike and i cant really compare the two, they are both amazing, i love both styles of graphical display.

Music in Unreal had more action and more memorable songs. Half Life has its fair share of good ingame music (Hard Technology Rock), but Unreal wins here in my opinion. Action voices were also better (swears hehe), skaarj kinda sounded like crap.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng9NbNX9Hsw

Since both games brought me an very large amount of pleasure when i first played them i think i can safely say they are both really great 😀
But who would win as better would have to be brought down to details in many aspects.

I would really like to know what is up with the mouse control in Unreal. It is delayed and doesn't feel very responsive. I made a topic on this ages ago but got no answers, maybe now someone knows about this. They did something in UT to fix this but didn't bother to include it in Unreal. In HL it was all fine from the get-go.

Music in HL is redbook but unlike Unreal there is no way for it to play without that I think. Definite minus right there. I recall the music being absent in Steam. And anyway there is no competition in this area, the Unreal soundtrack is one of the best ever created and really sets the mood for the game.

Unreal didn't make me reload my glock an excess amount of times or have a corrupt menu screen buffer bug that was annoying to work around.....

also HL's mouse movement's bad as well - you'll have to add the -noforcemparms parameter.

There's also the coding to mention - Unrealscript didn't REQUIRE AN EXPENSIVE LICENSED VERSION OF MICROSOFT VISUAL C++ 6 to allow you to make mods!

Do agree that weapons in HL get boring and dull after some times and that i would rather use UT weapons any day, but Gauss and Tau were an cool concept, and Gauss is one of my favorite game weapons of all time.

The buffer bug is extremely annoying now that i am playing HL with voodoo 3. The time it takes to display that effect is very annoying.

As for C++, I think i am 100% sure when i say probably more than 90% didnt pay anything 😀

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To add onto the audio discussion, i loved the fact when you inserted an audio disc into the tray while playing Half Life it would use the audio disc music instead of original ones. Loved HL with reggae 😁

I disliked the HD Pack for HL after using it for some time back then. The original models fit the game better 😀 OTOH I do use the official S3TC textures when playing UT on a modern PC, so it's really down to personal preference.

One thing to add is that both games had very innovative software DSP engines (reverb etc) for the time. Really makes dedicated audio processing hardware unnecessary 😀 the one in HL is probably better since it seems to have more variety on the environments. And while Duke3D already had this it was realized in a more crude way in that game.

Software DSP required MMX instructions just for it to be fast enough to not mess up the rest of the game, 'course everyone by then had atleast a Pentium 1 with MMX processor.

I still prefer hardware mixed audio since when it's mixed in hardware there is NO overhead and there is NO audio delays, yes I'm looking at you %(*$#(ing windows 7\vista...

Honestly Unreal looks alot better than Half Life but GoldSrc has some features Unreal should of had from the start, like rope sprites and beam emitters... not to mention an ACTUAL particle system rather than the stupid "make a mesh full of triangles and set bParticles to true"...

No comparison here really, but we can provide the pros and cons as you said d1stortion.

First time I ever played HL was a demo of Opposing Force back in 1999-2000. I remember being scared to death with the headcrab zombies. I played HL in 2001-2002(?) I think.
I didn't play Unreal until 2003, although I was playing a lot of Unreal Tournament and loved that game. Unreal, as much as I like it, I couldn't bring myself to beat it until a couple of years ago when I really set myself down to do it. The thing is, I would always play a couple of hours and then never touch it.
As such, Half-Life for me is the better game, simply because I have played it more and because I absolutely loved the sequel. Both games are revolutionary for their time.

Unreal has a sense of loneliness in a vast and alien world and always tried to show off impressive and moody landscapes, together with some amazing music. The technology was simply amazing, but I always found it iffy. Software rendering was very impressive, but 3Dfx was the only hardware acceleration you could use initially (initial release had absolutely no support for D3D or oGL). And for years to come, the Unreal Engine was plagued with awful performance on D3D hardware. Deus Ex ran like shit on the GeForce 2 for example. Level design wise, some people here said that Unreal had much more vast levels than Half-Life, however very few of them were done right. Most of the time you were traversing an "empty" landscape. My favorite track is Isotoxin, a rather weird but somehow effective composition! The location it initially plays in is filled with enemies that I loved mowing down 😁.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiTX4dchAnQ

Half-Life, on the other hand, had a different approach. It felt like every good Action B-Movie should be. Shit goes down, one man mows everything down. The more the merrier they say and it couldn't be any better here, with aliens and marines duking it out and you in the middle of all this madness. People at the time went kinda crazy about the whole concept of persistence in level transitioning and storytelling. I think the cryptic figure that is the G-Man added a lot to this, people going online and noting locations he was sighted in etc... I think it takes a turn for the worse during the Xen levels and it is also one of the best examples of FPS platforming done right. Music was not as memorable as Unreal, but that ending credits music for example was as sweet as anything 😀. Technically, it didn't look anywhere near as good as Unreal, but also had far better HW Acceleration support and had a lighter system "footprint".

Nowadays, playing these games on anything else other than a Voodoo 3 and a fast Pentium II makes us feel as if the games were unplayable, since we are indeed spoiled by 60 frames per seconds and high resolutions. However, I'd say an MMX 233 with a Voodoo 1 was very acceptable for both games at 512x384 or even 640x480 (especially Half-Life). I had a friend who played the shit out of Half-Life on an MMX 166 with Software Rendering.
It's kinda like Crysis 1. I remember being so impressed when I was playing it on my Core 2 Duo 6550 (2.33GHz) and Radeon 4850, almost 5 years ago, and then I was so disappointed when I wasn't getting 60fps on my current hardware a few months ago.

F2bnp wrote:

but 3Dfx was the only hardware acceleration you could use initially

*cough*PowerVR SGL*cough*

Unreal did influence Half-Life a bit late in the development though. There wasn't flares until much much later in 98. Eventually down the road (2003-04ish Steam updates) it gained detail texture support 😀

leileilol wrote:

F2bnp wrote:

but 3Dfx was the only hardware acceleration you could use initially

*cough*PowerVR SGL*cough*

Totally sure about that? AFAIK my Unreal copy only includes Software Rendering and Glide.

Yeah the landscapes in Unreal may be quite empty for the most part but it's really the scale that counts. Just traversing these vast environments like Sunspire without any sort of fogging or popup (*cough* Turok *cough*) is damn impressive for the time. It sure required an expensive Pentium II system, but at least the difference to older games was clearly visible.

I recently ran the game with Direct3D and it was OK for the most part, but would require significant tweaking to get a result close to Glide. Still a heck of a lot better than the experimental POS OpenGL renderer they came up with for UT...

It's really noteworthy how other 1997 and 1998 shooters completely pale in comparison to Unreal and HL... one game I actually knew about back then and was drooling over was Turok 2. Needless to say that the whole key searching and enemy respawning BS gets boring really quickly, so it's a bit ironic that I couldn't sit through this game, while with Unreal I definitely didn't have to force myself playing it and consider it one of my all time favorites 😀

And yeah Unreal supports PowerVR. Just immediately head to the PowerVR fun thread 🤣

I also liked Klingon Honor Guard at the time. In some bits it's kind of more ambitious than Unreal (cameras, physics on items and particle effects and decals) but it fails a bit in the art and animation department and some of the combat is a bit of a luck shoot, and the music is just CD audio and the transition to cutscenes can be buggy. Also some of the level design is definitely a bit aimless guidedangit buttonhunts, but so was Unreal to a lesser extent if you didn't read translators.

BUT MASSIVE SPACE STATION LEVELS

Firtasik wrote:

Half-Life is my favourite FPS. I was blown away by Half-Life: Uplink (my first contact with HL) back in the day. Such an awesome demo!

Those are exactly my thoughts. I was a bit disappointed that this chapter didn't appear in the final game, nor was the main character aiming to preserve the base. In hindsight, one could already guess it when he left behind the scientist and the security guard at the fallen filing cabinets without a cutscene or dialogue. I think Uplink was the second demo after the game was already out, but it was the fist one I played.

Both games are great, and both still work on modern PCs and look great. HL, perhaps not so much lacking 16-bit dithering. But it still runs. And both had awesome software renderers.

Both story settings are good. Half-Life felt more physical, plausible. But when I get tired of the government watching over me, I'd take my chances against the skaarj. I think I felt more 'lonely' in HL than in Unreal, because until the end of the first campaign (before I was dispatched back to Na Pali) I wasn't followed.

I never had a opportunity to play KHG but one of the funniest things about Unreal is, when it came out everybody jumped face first into the damn editor and look what came out of it... Don't get me wrong some of the stuff people made is really good but, there are quite alot of hilariously bad maps and mods...

Epic did do something right giving people the editor right off the bat. Believe it or not though, UnrealED is all you really need (as well as UCC obviously) to make a standalone game seperate from the UnrealI UnrealShare packages.

But the fanmade mod scene was still more active on HL, or not? I think Action Half-Life was popular for a while, and then CS obviously 😀

Btw I don't care at all for HL2. Something that was great about the first one has been lost with it, and then there is the driving level...