According to Valve, that is. I've had Half-Life on the mind for a bit lately, for some reason, and I've been thinking of going back and playing through HL2 again, since it is probably the best FPS I've ever played. I'm sure some of you never got around to giving it a whirl, so maybe now while it's free would maybe be a good time to maybe install it and maybe play it and maybe fall in love with Dog all over again?

Portal 1 and 2 aren't free...

Episode 2 was good, I'll say that much.

Cool beans

I am less solid on Half-Life than most but HL2+Ep1+Ep2 had some great set piece moments and I think the developer commentary is required viewing for anybody with even a passing interest in game or level design as Valve did a great deep dive on things as simple as "We put this water tower here to catch your eye so that you are looking in this direction when a helicopter flies by". And it is a great insight into why games like CoD just lock your viewpoint rather than try to use visual cues

Half-Life 1 I think is probably going to be more fun to play but aged much more poorly in terms of mechanics and design. At the very least it should be fun for Borderlands players to realize where the vault monster originated from. And it is probably really fortunate that Black Mesa finally finished (?) Xen just in time for people to consider buying that before playing HL2 for free.

Also: Obligatory joke that this means they are all permanently free to play because Alyx is on valve-time

A cool idea but I'm surprised there's anyone who doesn't already own them all already, with how many times they've been a dollar on sale or even given away for free.

@wemibelle: As "core gamers" it is kind of hard to imagine. But one of the big things that was talked about when Epic Game Store launched was just how many fortnite players had never used steam. Either because they were console/mobile players primarily or because they were genuinely a new audience

Coupled with Half-Life 2 being older than a significant percentage of online communities and consumer bases and I think there is a very large audience to "get hooked on" Half-Life or to at least install Steam to get a free game or two.

Now whether Half-Life is something that will really draw significant crowds these days is a different question.

tbh, I don't' think those games aged very well.

I've had Episode 2 on my PS3 backlog for ages and had very little incentive to play it. Now I can cheat my way through it and get it off my list.

Thanks, Gabe.

I was literally thinking about replaying HL2 just the other day since next month will mostly be devoid of releases. Alyx might be the driving factor into me finally getting a VR headset.