It suddenly made me remember that this is how I felt when I first played the game aged 13: that Black Mesa was a real, dangerous place, and I was trapped there. I was getting genuine heebie-jeebies from being closed-in by zombies, and from hearing the grumbling of Vortigaunts from around corners. I was fine with headcrabs leaping at my face, but Half-Life 1 is much more of a horror game than its sequels.

What was more unexpected was how frightening I found it. It is hard to aim the crossbow without crosshairs and the hornet-firing alien arm is massive. Combat works quite well, though its clear that this is not what these weapons were intended for. Soon enough, you cause the resonance cascade, and begin the fight against the invaders from Xen. It's a little strange - but 22 years later, so is all the original audio. Their spoken dialogue was made by taking the audio files from the original game and running them through an automatic processor to make them sound like women. The mod comes with some other non-VR related changes, such as female scientist models. Plus, now I can show the scientists how I groove everytime I put the HEV suit on.

I've walked into the lobby to hear Barney talk about how his system crashed dozens of times, but pressing the alarm under his desk by reaching out why my real hand is all new. If you're as big a fan of Half-Life as I am, then it's delightful just to inhabit familiar spaces in virtual reality. It also has a bunch of comfort controls, like the ability to teleport and turn in fixed increments if first-person free movement makes you feel woozy. You can see your hands in-game you can pick up objects using the grips of your motion controllers you can use every weapon, including guns, as melee objects. There are a lot of games that users have hacked VR support into, but HLVR is better than most because it goes the whole hog. The Half-Life 1 VR mod has been in development for years, with the most recent update at the end of last year. It's impressively feature packed and easy to set up, but it was a simple ladder that sold me. I thus spent some time this weekend fussing around Black Mesa in the Valve Index, using a Half-Life 1 VR mod. A new Half-Life game is only a few weeks away, but it occurred to me that there was no reason to wait for Half-Life: Alyx if I wanted to experience Vortigaunts in VR.

What order to play half life