Half-Life 2
From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Half-Life 2 is a first person shooter video game created by the company Valve. This game is the sequel to the original Half-Life video game which came out in 1998.
It uses the Steam technology also developed by Valve. This technology is a gaming platform where all games made by Valve can be played. It supports several modifications for the games too.
Steam is a revolutionary distribution system that is quite difficult for pirates to "crack" as an account who has a CD Key (A combination of 25 letters and numbers) registered to it cannot have that same key registered somewhere else. Some have found the way to bypass the system and play a lot of the games (Except the newer ones) without paying. The disadvantage of this is that they still haven't found a way to play online multiplayer games in non-pirated servers because of the key system. The crackers change the Steam program and give it away for free in various webpages, claiming they won't stop doing that until Valve lowers the price of the games.
Many unrelated games like Earth 2160 or Darwinia have contracts with Steam to distribute their game over Steam because of pirates' difficulty cracking these games.
Half Life 2 is based on an engine called Source. The old classics (Day of Defeat, Counter-Strike) have both already gone Source.
