Half-Life was a great game, had a huge impact
on the shooter genre and everybody who grew
up back then loved this game, myself included.
Valve did a decent job of releasing new content for
all of us to play, such as Blue Shift and
Opposing Force, but the real heroes were the
modders who filled the void with hundreds
of standalone fangames of every concievable
length and quality.
A few of them are super famous, and if it
made this list, it's because I think you should
go play it.
Quick Disclaimer: This list is only interested
in mods, not retail spinoffs.
So no Counter-Strike or Team Fortress Classic.
If you have to pay money for it, it isn't
a mod.
#1 Adam.
OK on second thought, you probably can skip
playing this one.
It was one of the earliest Half-Life mods,
came out in 2000, and it had one of those
classic half-baked fangame plots about being
an alien trying to kill Einstein...but none
of that mattered 95% of the gameplay was just
using Half-Life assets to make Black Mesa
rooms in your average military base, and the
only real "legacy" this mod has is...this
naked chick.
See, for whatever reason, the developer felt
the need to add a military brothel that the
player briefly travels through, and that custom-model
became THE base for so many female characters
in other mods.
Since Half-Life itself has like, no girls
whatsoever, you would find this model all
over the place back in the day, wearing all
sorts of different outfits.
#2: They Hunger was one of the largest and
most ambitious Half-Life mods ever made, and
my personal favorite on this list.
Starring a writer surviving the zombie apocalypse
in a lonely countryside town, They Hunger
does for John Romero-style zombie horror what
Half-Life itself did for laboratory-catastrophe
horror.
Almost all the environmental assets were custom-made
and it featured custom voice-acting, music,
and enemies including zombified farm animals.
They Hunger set the bar for every mod to come
afterward by showing just what the GoldSrc
engine was capable of.
#3 Wanted! was another total conversion mod,
this time set in a spaghetti western frontier
and starring a sheriff chasing after a gang
of bandits who just ransacked his town.
Wanted! is a great game in itself, but its
biggest legacy is its loads of custom GoldSrc
scripts that future modders could use to slowly
branch out from just using Half-Life assets.
Due to being set in Wild West, most of the
weapons were custom-scripted, and Wanted!
also came bundled with a multiplayer mode
that featured working bots and game modes
other than just Deathmatch.
#4 Afraid of Monsters is a full-blown horror
mod, released in 2006.
You play as a suburban man suffering from
night terrors and addicted to painkillers,
and the gameplay involves stumbling through
ordinary locations like hospitals and houses
fighting your own hallucinations.
Not only did Afraid of Monsters get its own
Director's Cut which is a huge upgrade to
the orignal mod, the same developers used
a lot of the skills they learned making Afraid
of Monsters to create the spiritual successor
Cry of Fear, which is itself a hugely influential
horror game.
And finally #5 Sven Coop has set the standard
for Multiplayer Half-Life mods ever since
first coming out in 1999.
It took the Half-Life single-player campaign
and made it cooperative, so the whole server
can play through the game at the same time.
It has a staggering number of user-made maps,
and as of 2016 it's even available on Steam,
containing the complete campaigns for Blue
Shift, Opposing Force, They Hunger, and Afraid
of Monsters.
Of all the games on this list, it's the only
one to maintain a dedicated community of its
own, and you can still find hundreds of thriving
servers even today.
Again, I highly recommend you try any of these
games out, there are download links in the
description.
Thanks for watching, this is aabicus with
the SPUF of Legend, have a good 2019!
