“Half-Life 2 was released for the original Xbox? Really?”

That’s the reaction of pretty much everyone who discovers this, including myself.

The original Half-Life 1 came out on the PS2 (and unofficially the Dreamcast), however Half-life 2 is better known for the Xbox 360 and PS3 releases.

Somehow Valve managed to squeeze the whole HL2 experience into a 733MHz CPU, 64MB RAM and Geforce 3 GPU powered machine. The end experience is, pretty good!

Some textures are a bit muddy, performance can chug a little in wide open areas and there are quite a few loading boundaries. However I didn’t find any of that distracted from the experience in any real way.

I can imagine if I’d not owned a PC back when HL2 came out, I would have been very pleased to have been able to play this on my original Xbox.

I purchased HL2 for the OG Xbox out of curiosity, but found myself really just getting into the game when I started to play it.

Certainly you’ll get a better experience playing HL2 on a 360, but I’d recommend giving the HL2 + Xbox + CRT approach a try if you’d like to experience this classic game in a new way.