3/30/24

One might think, given the number of years since the release of the acclaimed videogame "Half Life", that it would have ports for every device. That it might be, in fact, "easily accessible for all" or that playing this game on Tim Cook's small dick hellscape software would yet be possible using the givings of Mother Internet.

But today I write to you with a heavy heart, dear reader.

It was on this beautiful spring day that I lay inert on my twin size mattress on the bedroom floor and took it upon myself to do the most productive thing I could imagine; gaming. I am no self-proclaimed "gamer" and if my condition were ever to decline to the point at which I reached this state, I fear all would be lost for this world. But I had heard tales of the whimsical little ditty they call "Half Life" over the interwebs, the whispering melody of a mutual on the Tumblr website singing its praises like a canary of blessed hope. And I thought, perhaps, that I would play this game as a testament to its obvious affect on modern gaming as a whole.

Now, ordinarily, any young boy on the internet might have to find a repack off some fascinatingly retro website and pray to whatever god he believed in that it did not contain a trojan virus. I, however, was no ordinary boy. Fate had spoiled me with the metaphorical trust fund of a lifetime- my father, since I was very young, had purchased every video game known to man. The old bugger probably bought the game when it first came out. And he undoubtedly held it within his repository of Steam games.

So, excitable young whippersnapper that I was back in those days, when all was bright and warm, earlier today, I scampered off to browse this "Steam Library". And behold, Half-Life, in all its low polygon glory. What joy! What luck! Surely nothing could ruin this perfect moment for me.



Horror filled me. My eyes bugged out of their sockets and I fell to floor immediately in order to convulse pathetically there. After about an hour and a half of seizing, my nerves gave way, and I could at last parse the utter bullshit that appeared on my screen.

It appeared that to run Half-Life, I required a new PC. Bullshit, I said to myself, i'm not getting a new PC to run this old fucking game. This shit was made decades ago. I think my bright shiny PC can handle it. Surely it will not just fall over and die if I run this game. Why would that even be a problem. But, of course, my ultimate rival Tim Cook could not let me win. He's probably sitting in a tub of dollar bills rubbing Benjamins all over his face to sop up the oil somewhere out there, cackling at me for thinking I could ever use this piece of shit software to do anything.

Naturally, I refused to let Tim Cook foil my plans. I was going to play Half-life, damnit, and I would not be stopped by things like "software limitations" that were obviously designed by Big PC. Big PC doesn't want you to know you can play Half Life on your mac. this is so that they can sell you more PCs. Eventually you will need a seperate PC for each game. Here is my Fortnite PC. Here is my Minecraft PC. And here is this fucking mac that does not want to run Half Life.

Fortunately, I have an ace in the hole. Cards up my sleeve. I have google, and I'm going to look it up.

Sweat drips from my brow. I move my cursor towards the search bar. I can feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Any moment, I think to myself. Any moment tim cook's goons will come in and bust down my door, and I will be taken away in a burlap sack by large men in dark sunglasses.

I type in into the search bar. "play half life on mac". immediately a plethora of options are available to me.

Unfortunately, they are all reddit links. this means two things. Firstly, It is possible. I can play this game on the mac, for our neckbeard ancestors solved this problem long ago. Secondly, however, this also means it will be incredibly painful to solve this problem.

I would bore you with the details. I want to, really, and I don't value your time at all. You've just sat here looking at my essay about how I think apple products suck. What's another hour of your life? But I digress. My hands grow tired. I am not an infinite machine. I encountered many issues on my journey, and all of them sucked ass. I had to download three fucking pieces of software just to try and input the download for the Half Life engine mod into command prompt. I had to download Bootcamp to download Cmake and for Cmake to work I needed visual studio code with a c/c++ compiler. By the end of it, I wished myself dead. And do you know what happened? After all that?

it didn't fucking work.

I am going to kill myself