This is a blatant advertisement for my favorite HL1 mod Action Half-Life. This mod is played daily by a small die-hard community. Servers are paid for and maintained by a small fraction of that community and the servers are constantly being updated with new map rotations and fun ideas. It's amazing what a free mod, for a game I comparatively barely touch, and have logged near over a thousand hours on, using other top played times as a metric, would bring me so much. I've played with some interesting people which I wouldn't have otherwise, I've laughed, I've gotten angry, I've cried and I've had the time of my life in an era where there are almost too many interchangeable matchmade people to care about. Who you are even interacting with anymore? I could just be cranky and old, so rather than spewing paragraphs praising Half-Life, which would be much deserved of course, I would like to focus your attention over to the modding community for this game.

Speaking ignorantly and purely from the soul, Half-Life is one of the last games to use a real hard edged netcode, better suited to a local area network, the feeling you get from modern games with lots of interpolation is "smooth" and rather rounded more than square, while it's healthier and necessary for these modern games to function I can't help but feel like something is lost. A bad analogy might be HL1=vinyl record, HL2=mp3 but you can really feel, every tick and every frame as you traverse whatever world you may inhabit at that time.

Whether you are a diehard Counter-Strike surfer, bhopper or kz_ climbing map addict, maybe you are flying through the skies in Earth Special Forces executing sweet anime moves I know little about, diving through windows dual pistols clutched and firing in Action Half-Life, bunkering someone in Digital Paintball, providing grand strategy for your living breathing human units with epic macro action in the impressive RTS\FPS hybrid Natural Selection, driving the ball downfield in International Online Soccer or finally taking the game seriously and going prone in Frontline Force, sneaking up to the objective near the enemy line or flip the coin and go back to Counter-Strike one of the most tactical mods to grace the engine. These are just unique avenues of depth, in which your character is figuratively, holding their hand out, dragging it across the overgrown grass, as the once clear skies, have turned grey, and you begin to feel the first light raindrops, almost unsure if they're real as the sensation grows more and more, as you trip and fall face f'n first into the pavement. You can feel this game when you play it, and in a well crafted mod this is all carried over to a completely new experience, now you are considering the value of the game engine itself, goldsrc.

I could write many, many, many.... many more dumb words about how Counter-Strike, TFC, Action-Halflife have given so much to me and I did dedicate a portion of this to Action-Halflife the most fun, stylish and action-oriented mod in my opinion, but I want to give a huge shout and plug to Sven Coop, my lord, they have done a lot of work with goldsrc, like I mentioned before I am completely ignorant and have little knowledge of the true workings of the engine but things I have noticed since playing it as a mod for Half-Life originally, would include, the fact it's now completely free and you don't even need Half-Life 1 so it's standalone now, you can run 200 fps in a goldsrc game which I have never witnessed before, and a little secret incase you wanted HL1 solely for the story, you can play the entire Half-Life 1 campaign, (possibly expansions?) in Sven Coop without even owning Half-Life, I mean hot damn, so feel free to use Sven Coop as a demo of sorts, if anything to experience the feel of the game and its physics.

This has all really been related to multiplayer experiences, simply because that takes the cake for me personally, I didn't even drop one word about the amazing selection of Half-Life singleplayer mods, They Hunger being hugely popular, Wanted being an excellent western mod, USS darkstar being notable personally with other more recent efforts like, Cry of Fear and Paranoia really pushing the engine, Cry of Fear is standalone and free on steam just like Sven Coop, figured I would mention that. If you love Half-Life mods you know I missed a ton of ground but these are good starting points.

I would like to provide some resources here just because I feel they are important

decent curated list dedicated to SP mods and following just a thread incase anything was missed originally
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=244869429
https://steamcommunity.com/app/70/discussions/0/612823460277370132/

dive right into moddb and start collecting experiences
http://www.moddb.com/games/half-life

marphy black's "Half-Life files"
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDmcwfn8y0lMtlqcpUhggk0FB1EC2i3iB

the segmented speedrun on quadrazid's channel
https://youtu.be/VtI5HM7GVGY

random old video of mine showing off some of the action within Action Half-Life as well as a couple maps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tms928wCM0A

glanced this again some time later and wasn't sure I mentioned science and industry, it deserves at least that

and added this gabe quote that echos the value sentiment - "Gabe: First off I want to stress that we have always tried to give gamers a lot of value for their money. If someone bought the original Half-Life and has kept current with all of the updates, MODs, and so on, they probably think Half-Life was the best value they've ever gotten for their money."

tldr - you get like 100+ games if you just buy this one and even if you don't, there are great experiences waiting to be had in various free-standalone-totally converted flavors