The Half-Life series by Valve is legendary for a number of reasons, including its inability to have the number three in its title. The company previously gave the first game away for free as part of its 25th anniversary. Now, albeit unofficially, there’s a way to play Half-Life 2 at seemingly no cost. You can do this via your browser, but it’s not really an example of cloud gaming, if that makes sense.
To start, this browser port – if you could call it that – of Half-Life 2 was made by a pair known as Slqnt and 98006. The process took three months, and it’s based on another “webport” for Portal. But according to Tom’s Hardware, this is technically the game running on-device instead of completely streaming from the cloud. As the report explains, this is done via the WebGL 2 JavaScript API and WebAssembly that translates C++ code from the Source Engine into JavaScript.
That being said, there is some downloading involved. At the beginning, this version of Half-Life 2 will download assets, and you’ll see this repeat to a lesser degree at various points in the game. The report notes that the cache is saved on a virtual file system, and the game uses this to create save files as well. As an added bonus, for those who know what you’re doing, you can also pull up the console and enter commands.
Because Half-Life 2 is such an old game, it’s not particularly graphically intense for modern systems. As such, I could get it to work somewhat smoothly even on a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus laptop, though there’s still the occasional stutter here and there. You can give it a try for yourself by heading over to the port’s URL, linked below. Considering the unofficial nature of the port though, it’s entirely possible that Valve would force it to be taken down one day.
(Source: slant [1], [2], @gabefollower, Tom’s Hardware)
