Amon
Staff member
2007-09-24 to 2007-09-30; Sega Dreamcast (leak)
Half-Life
Gearbox Software was slated to release a port to the Sega Dreamcast under contract by Valve and their then publisher Sierra On-Line near the end of 2000. At the ECTS 2000, a build of the game was playable on the publisher's stand, and developers Randy Pitchford and Brian Martel were in attendance to show it off and give interviews to the press. However, despite only being weeks from going gold, it was never commercially released; Sierra announced that Half-Life on Dreamcast was cancelled "due to changing market conditions" onset by third-party abandonment of the Dreamcast. That year Sierra On-Line showed a PlayStation 2 port at E3 2001. This version was released in North America in late October of the same year, followed by a European release just a month later. Around the same time, Half-Life: Blue Shift, which was intended to be a Dreamcast-exclusive side story, was released on PC as the second Half-life Expansion Pack.
Although it has never officially been released, the Dreamcast version was leaked onto the Internet, and was proven to be fully playable; it contains the full versions of Half-Life and Blue Shift, both with an early version of the High Definition Pack, but has a somewhat inconsistent framerate and lengthier load times when the player moves from area to area. Also, there are some saving problems; the number of blocks required to save on a VMU increases rapidly as the player reaches the end of a level, then drops at the start of the next. While the game allows the user to remove files to increase space, sometimes it still isn't enough.
Half-Life
Gearbox Software was slated to release a port to the Sega Dreamcast under contract by Valve and their then publisher Sierra On-Line near the end of 2000. At the ECTS 2000, a build of the game was playable on the publisher's stand, and developers Randy Pitchford and Brian Martel were in attendance to show it off and give interviews to the press. However, despite only being weeks from going gold, it was never commercially released; Sierra announced that Half-Life on Dreamcast was cancelled "due to changing market conditions" onset by third-party abandonment of the Dreamcast. That year Sierra On-Line showed a PlayStation 2 port at E3 2001. This version was released in North America in late October of the same year, followed by a European release just a month later. Around the same time, Half-Life: Blue Shift, which was intended to be a Dreamcast-exclusive side story, was released on PC as the second Half-life Expansion Pack.
Although it has never officially been released, the Dreamcast version was leaked onto the Internet, and was proven to be fully playable; it contains the full versions of Half-Life and Blue Shift, both with an early version of the High Definition Pack, but has a somewhat inconsistent framerate and lengthier load times when the player moves from area to area. Also, there are some saving problems; the number of blocks required to save on a VMU increases rapidly as the player reaches the end of a level, then drops at the start of the next. While the game allows the user to remove files to increase space, sometimes it still isn't enough.
