Hazardous-Course 2 mod for Half-Life

Last year, the Half-Life community ran an event called Breaking The Bar to raise the all-time concurrent player count of Half-Life 2 as recorded by Steam. After that event was successful, they came together once more for an event named Remember Freeman, this time themed around Half-Life, and proved the strength of their community's collective strength by smashing the record once again. To celebrate this achievement, here's five Half-Life mods that have kept the franchise going through thick and thin!

Year of the Dragon

By Magic_Nipples

A crossover mod and toolkit featuring the mechanics and play style of Spyro the Dragon. Half-Life mods adding new levels and perspectives to Black Mesa are quite common; so are Half-Life total conversions, being one of the easiest games of the period to mod. However, mods that merge together two totally different games into one unified experience are much rarer, and this mod taking Spyro's third person adventuring into Black Mesa puts not just a new coat of paint, but a new idea altogether into Half-Life's mould.

They Hunger

By Black Widow Games

They Hunger is a single player horror based mod of Valve's first-person shooter Half-Life. It was released by Neil Manke's Black Widow Games in three episodes, the first in 1999, the second in 2000, and the final installment in 2001. All three were at one point bundled with the PC Gamer magazine. This is one of the all-time classics of modding in general, a title so remarkable that remakes, follow-ups, and fan content is still made of this mod to this day.

Half-Payne

By suXin

Half-Payne is a Half-Life mod that aims to bring some gameplay bits from Max Payne. All the features you'd expect are here, done justice within goldsrc - kickass slow-mo for skillshots, diving around bullets and projectiles, a change to health and damage mechanics, new weapons from the Max Payne games, and dozens of other changes great and small to make you feel like Max Payne really did just wake up in Black Mesa as everything started going wrong.

Cthulhu

By PhilG

Cthulhu is a single-player modification for Half-Life. It contains 65 maps, 21 new monsters and 14 new weapons. You play Ranulf Stafford, an occult investigator in Arkham in the year 1928. Drawn into a nightmare chain of events, you find yourself the only thing standing between mankind and the return of Cthulhu, one of the most dreadful of The Great Old Ones.

Hazardous-Course 2

By Richman

The Hazardous-Course 2 is a spoof of the original "Hazard-Course" from Half-Life, which resembles the first player training levels. The difficulty is quite challenging, but the rewards are accordingly. The Basic Training is peppered with hidden Secrets, which reveal tools, shortcuts, control rooms, and other features, to ease almost all challenges. There are two Secret Levels and one Bonus Level to discover, and to complete to access the final part of the Hazardous-Course.

Breaking Bars

Half-Life needs no introduction - it's a series deeply linked not only with ModDB, whose history of hosting Half-Life content dates all the way back to the site's inception in 2002, but with the entirety of gaming itself. So many games have learned the lessons Valve set forth back in 1998 and it's hard to think of gaming franchises more iconic than Gordon Freeman's forays into alien madness. Despite a waning level of support from Valve over the last few decades (with one notable exception in Half-Life Alyx), the Half-Life community has remained alive and well thanks to passionate creators that go the extra mile time and time again.

A Great Leap In A Short Time...Span

The most recent display of collective community strength was in their Remember Freeman event, one which saw players teaming up to beat the all-time concurrent player count record on Steam. Just over 6,000 was the number to beat, but in the end the community more than doubled the player count up to 12,310 in a massive outpouring of community streams and support, headed by community content creators like Noclick, LambdaGeneration, and more.

The Right Man...

This event was the successor to another achievement from last year, where Half-Life 2's concurrent player record was beaten. There's many Half-Life titles which might benefit from similar treatment - the expansions for the original game, the episodes, or perhaps even one of the many top-quality Half-Life mods released onto Steam itself - and if these last two events are anything to go by, the community seems poised to beat whatever records they set their mind to.