Half Life 2 on the Original Xbox is an incredible port. Here is why. 

I love how it has this lovely sound effect for echoes that no other version has. it also has some effects intact that are gone from Orange box updated version of PC/X360 HL2. Like eye gleam/shine in characters. Most noticeable on Gman during intro.

The audio difference is actually insane and caught me by surprise seeing them played back to back

There WERE additional changes aside from the texture reduction. Alot of prop, vehicle, and character geometry was reduced (airboat handle bars, barrels, etc), walls were added or replaced mesh fences to allow for additional loading screens and less to draw onscreen, and while certain audio effects were taken advantage of from the Xbox's audio hardware, certain sounds and voicelines have a reduced bitrate (Gman's speech at the endgame).

Love that your experience of HL2 was exactly the same as mine. Having to install multiple CDs only to then have to install some crappy program called "Steam" that wouldn't run on my crap internet, then finally getting it to run at like 640*480 with low settings and it still being absolutely the best thing I'd ever played

I didn't have a PC back then so I played it on the original Xbox. I honestly don't remember any performance issues because I was so immersed in the game, such a masterpiece.

Not only did I know this game existed, the game was also backwards compatible on the 360 very early on, which is even more incredible in my opinion.

I was one of those who knew, and bought it. I don't remember the lag - I just recall being super impressed by the physics, which even Halo 2 didn't really have, as graphically impressive as that was at the time.

This was my first experience with Half Life 2 and I played it all the way through. I loved every minute of it.

Wow, those combine sounds in the hallway at 7:04 could be straight from hl:alyx. Incredible audio processing for the time. Wish there was more focus on audio in today's game development

Xbox ports like this and Doom 3 are always so interesting, seeing what compromises they came up with to get it running!

Finally someone has talked about the audio improvements in the Xbox version! Whenever I see people talking about the Xbox version, most people overlook the audio differences!

wish we could get a mod too replicate those audio effects. Damn i love that

That audio is amazing. I can see how a 2005 gamer would exit that train and be immediately immersed and enchanted into the world. just watching it reminds me of the first time playing Bioshock.

I remembered playing it on my 5.1 home audio system the experience was truly out of this world.

One of my favorite aspects are certainly the audio, it sounds so good. And it being older and frozen in time, many exploits still exist. You can get out of bounds very easily.

HL2 blew my mind back in the day. It came with my new GPU (css available straight away and HL2 when it came out) and ran nicely at 1024x768 on high. The animations and facial expressions were amazing!

This is how I had to play HL2 for the first time. I had a PC but it would’ve melted down if I tried playing HL2. Even as a kid I always wondered how the hell they put it on an XBox. Pretty impressive

This port is super fascinating, especially with the modding community cracking this game open and getting other source engine assets to work like Garry’s Mod maps. It feels like we’ve only scratched the surface. Great video MVG!

This was how I experienced Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 and was very happy with both back then.

I had no clue it existed until i found a copy at a thrift store a few years ago. I had to boot it up and didn’t play much because i thought it looked so bad but now i really want to give it a full playthrough. That audio difference is insanely cool.

I've known of the Xbox port of HL2 for a while, but I've never heard the audio processing for it. The Breen speech sounds so much more realistic. I'm kind of blown away. It's like the original reverb in HL1, but without that tinny ring at the end

I remember those moments where in the xbox version, you'll see the devs placed a brick wall instead of a mesh fence like in the pc version. A good way to reduce models to pop in the game. Example of this is the following part of this video 8:27. The wall on the right would be a mesh fence on the pc version Man, I miss the older gen consoles. For me, gaming peaked when it reached xbox 360 / ps3 era.

I did know about and bought this port because I saw it on the rental shelf when I worked at Hollywood Video back in the day. I was blown away by it. Seeing that the audio is still the best in this version is mind blowing. I wonder why they haven't been able to replicate it with today's current hardware and sound systems.

I remember playing this game for the first time. It was like looking into the future of gaming. Very interesting and great video!

I remember buying this game at a Half Price books along with Max Payne. I paid like $15 for both games. Great times back then.

I bought a modded OG Xbox this year, largely thanks to you. I played Half-Life 2 on it not knowing that there was a port and I remember being very impressed. It's cool how you made a video about this

the xbox audio is stunning. dr. breen talking, the way the sound reflects and reverberates around the room. the hallway acoustics too omg. would be nice to have an option to use/mod the xbox audio with the pc version!

Always a good Monday when MVG explains another technical marvel in gaming.

I'd love to hear your take on Rise Of The Tomb Raider on the 360, such an impressive port.

The icing on the cake is that most CRT's at the time would've added greatly to this port's visual experience in so many ways relative to most gaming setups today.

Came here to look at HL2 footage, learnt about the Xbox CPU update, nice! Thank you for that new knowledge MVG!

Wow I had no idea about the audio differences, that's super cool.

This port is how 13 year old me had his first Half Life series experience. My jaw was on the floor the entire game! I liked it so much that when I got my first PC capable of playing games the first game I got was Half Life 2, along with the first Half Life.

I’m really glad you covered this. I’ve always thought this was an awesome port, it doesn’t really run the best but the fact it exists at all considering the original Xbox’s hardware is incredibly cool. And I never noticed the difference in audio but I think that despite the performance and visual sacrifices the audio alone enhances the atmosphere so much that it’s worth a play for that alone

I had a friend who let me borrow their Xbox about a decade ago and this was the first time I played and finished Half Life 2. I was very impressed despite the low, chunky framerates. I've heard of half life before but I've never known much about it until then. It helped that I had a massive CRT that supported S-video and it looked very clean and clear. Later on another friend sold me his Xbox 360 and I ended up getting the Orange Box digitally (so, no orange box... it was a metaphorical box I guess lol) I don't have that specific 360 now but I did get another eventually, the Shiny super slim model and I was able to redownload everything from my account and I still have that console to this day.

The version was my first play through of HL2, and the sound - in 5.1 - was the most impressive experience I had heard, and the thing that always stuck out to me. Even though I eventually got a PC that could run it and played on the same surround speakers, I was always aware the sound just didn’t stack up and left me disappointed, but I never knew why until now. Flying through the canals in the air boat while distant shots were fired, and explosions happened around you; and being in warehouse rooms when explosions went off releasing swinging beams knocking barrels and stuff all over, was just the pinnacle of cinematic surround sound intensity.

It was my first HF game, it was so addictive. It was actually gifted to my by a school teacher that was big in to PC gaming.

Dude I was literally thinking to myself last night if you had made a video on the Half Life 2 Xbox Port, only to come to RU-vid and discover you've just made one. Incredible.

Never would have expected the audio improvements only on the Xbox! Reminds me of how the textures for GTA3 on Xbox get ported over to other platforms as the Xbox ended up getting the most detailed textures, even better than the PC build.

I remember that back in 2004 when I got my PC copy of HL2 it wasn’t able to run well on my older system at the time. I couldn’t afford to upgrade it, so the XBox port was the only way I could play it and I remember renting it at Blockbuster for a week straight. I honestly didn’t notice any of those issues you shown back then, it was an amazing experience.

Well to be fair the Original Xbox IS technically a PC... Edit Clearly a clarification is needed 😧 Perhaps I should've said this. I don't know about a impossible port given the OG Xbox is at the core modified PC hardware runninga version of Windows CE and DirectX,but is definitely an impressive port given the hardware specs. And now for a mini rant... Of all game consoles the Original Xbox is the most like a PC. The hardware is basically modified PC hardware , the controller ports are USB ports. The OS was some version of Windows CE .The X in Xbox stands for DirectX a 3d acceleration technology that brought the end of DOS as king of games on the pc.

I remember that the PC version of the original Half Life utilized EAX, and it sounded AWESOME. Team it up with a Creative 4.1 surround speakers... BLISS! I'm pretty sure EAX was part of HL2, but just checked and it's now not on the options screen? "Might be worth a google" 🙂

Along with Doom 3, this is one of the games that REALLY made me want to buy an Xbox. Granted, around that time, my uncle gave us his used laptop and it was fairly good for it's time, it had a 800p widescreen panel and it had a decent Pentium 4 CPU, it definitely could handle HL2 in dx7 mode at much better framerates than the Xbox version could handle and I even played plenty of Counter-Strike: Source on that thing for many years until I saved up for a better PC.

Actually incredible... the sound difference really blew me away. I really need to learn more about how the Xbox handles sound. Were there other games that have stand-out sound quality like this on the Xbox or was this just a standard unknown to me? Amazing video, I learn so much from your videos, thank you!

I knew about it! My friends rented it, and found the performance to be disappointing, but they did play through it. I remember thinking that it was impressive that they did it with 64 MB of RAM. I do agree that if it had been launched in 2004 along with the PC version, it would have probably been received much better. I picked up a copy for my Xbox a couple of years ago, and I am very glad that I have it.

I wanted a DreamX so bad back in the day. I saw that the Xbox CPU interposer has now been released under GPL that may open up the possibility of upgrading Xbox's again. It seemed to be like magic, a drop in boost to games and we can see it so well here with Half Life 2. Halo got a big boost on those consoles too.

Wow, i had no idea this game was on the OG Xbox; my first introduction was actually through The Orange Box with all the episodes on the Xbox 360 (with TF2 and Portal of course) I love coming across these kinds of videos and learning interesting things about these older ports

Great video, the Xbox version of HL2 was the first one I ever played and it was mind blowing at the time. I went back a few years ago when I was digging my old systems out and I never noticed how laggy it was back in the day I had to turn it off after a few minutes of playing. I was so grateful for this I must not have minded back then.

I wonder if you're planning on doing a video on the Playstation 2 port of the Original Half-Life/ The cancelled Dreamcast port. I think that port is also very impressive for the time, especially the Dreamcast version, such a shame it was cancelled. It would be a great video for your Impossible Port series.

*_Very nice vid. As always._* 😊

The first time I ever played Half-Life 2 was on Xbox in the form of a demo disk from the Official Xbox Magazine. The demo was a segment of the level "We Don't Go to Ravenholm". I will never forget that first moment walking into that environment with the music swelling, the severed legs dangling from the tree, and peeking inside the first room to see the sawblade stuck into the wall, suspending the torso of a dead zombie above it's lower half on the floor.

Thanks for making a video on this. Besides playing a bit on the orange box on 360, I was unfamiliar with the Half Life series until the recent 25th half life anniversary has got me playing both 1 and 2. This is very informative.

Great Video! I got myself HL² for my OG XBox a while ago and i do enjoy it quite a bit. Question though: At 7:45 you say "no real reductions aside from Textures", but didn't they also cut back on geometry quite a bit here and there, walling off some areas that have background geometry to save on polygons etc?

I played this version when it was new and loved it both for the game's design and for how it pushed the hardware. It's one of those games that comes late in a console generation that makes it easier to wait for the next generation.

I just got an OG Xbox with first time recently and I didn’t grow up with one. When I was looking for games, I did see half-life two and I was very surprised knowing of the hardware specs of the Xbox. Thank you for doing this retrospective and bringing light to this port.

It's funny to think back to the launch of Half Life 2 and how much the internet hated Steam compared to how the software is viewed now.

I love this video series! I'm excited to watch this video, but if I could leave a suggestion/request, can you do an impossible port video for Wolfenstein The New Order on Xbox 360? How they got that game to look as good as it did is black magic to me! I can sort of get the ps3 port because of the Blu-Ray Disk, but they got the entire campaign to fit on two DVDs! (50GB game btw that crushed contemporary PCs)

back then I didn't know they were releasing the 360 and I bought the OG in 2005. I only had the ps1 and a windows 95 pc so the jump was amazing. I played HL2, DOOM 3, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory. It felt like the future.

There should be a speed run category for this version on authentic hardware and duke controller.

Very interesting stuff, great video as always MVG.

This was the way I first played Half-Life 2 back in 2009. I had a Mickey Mouse CRT (the one with speakers for ears) with an original Xbox hooked up via composite and a Duke controller. I remember playing it through 3 times absolutely loving it for its storytelling. The depth of the story and how well it executes it really is why it's my favorite game of all time to this day. I actually hadn't played Half-Life so I had to gather parts of the story from context clues and Combine OverWiki articles. It was amazing and coming from playing primarily on GameCube, PS2 and late 90s PC games it was the best looking game I'd ever played. Oh how times change. I recently booted up the Xbox version on my 360 and it was so jarring how different it felt having played on PC with maxed settings for nearly a decade. A truly impossible port, we're lucky we got it running as well as we do. I bet the community given enough time, effort, and tweaking could get it running at 60 fps but they'd need to decompile it first and optimize it further. Now I'm just eagerly awaiting Half-Life 2 RTX.

Loving the impossible port series so far. Keep up the awesome work.

Wow thanks for this MVG!!! I played HL2 on the 360 when The Organge Box came out, but I had no idea that there was an OG XBox version. Amazing!

Thanks for covering this. These console versions are how I first played the Half Life games. I still have my discs for HL1 on PS2, HL2 on Xbox and the Orange Box on 360.

For whatever reason, this is the only platform I have ever finished HL2 on. I remember absolutely loving it, and I still consider HL2 one of my favourite games of all time.

the right game on the wrong system can make all the difference in the world.

I saw a copy in a used disc store several years ago (Deja Vu Discs), and being surprised that it existed. I will say looking back on it, it is impressive given that they managed to squeeze it onto both the original and the 360. Ironically I bought the PS2 port of Half-Life 1 from the same store, and that was my first experience with the game.

I played this version first way back in 05, and the sound coming out of my Logitech 5.1 surround stereo was mind blowing, when all I'd heard previously was the PC version on cheap headphones.

I quite like the chunky look of the xboxs visuals in hl2. It reminds me of playing 3D games on my old amiga where to get a decent frame rate (ie >10) you could either make the screen smaller or you could chose 2x2 or 4x4 "chunky" pixels

I never knew the game existed on XBox, it's quite a feat. I'm always amazed by the performance you can squeeze out of limited hardware with some dedication and a lot of ingenuity (an technical know-how). I was quite impressed by the sound spatialization.

I've been waiting for you to do this video! I will say that a few maps were altered to be more Xbox friendly. I think there was an old EGM magazine that covered the changes.

Beautiful deep dive into how awesome this release was! I was a PS2 guy during the Xbox's heyday and never really had any experience with it. Now if I had unlimited room for my retro hobbies I'd definitely own one :)

such a beautiful time in gaming history

Half Life 3 would break the internet

0:35 yeah I remember that as well, I remember my friend coming across a offline installer that allowed you to bypass steam to install you game off the discs, The odd thing about Doom3 is the performance can be greatly improved if you just increase the cache settings in the Doom3.cfg file on older original hardware from the time, you can go from low quality to high by increasing the settings from the default 40 to 256 or higher

holy shit. i always marveled at the sound design after playing hl2 in xbox when i was kid but never really felt 'wowed' playing it on PC. this has to be why. that breen speech reverb fills me with so much nostalgia

In 2005 everybody who had xbox was happy to see HL2 on their platform, even if it was so choppy. In 2023 every body is upset that they can play Batman on Switch because of choppyness.

My first experience with Half-Life 2 was actually the orange box on the 360. I remember that version playing quite decently.

I actually ended up playing this version of Half Life 2 first before playing it on the PC. I can't remember exactly how that happened, but I think it was a result of not being super familiar with the Half Life series at the time of its release and seeing it for rent in my local Blockbuster. I didn't realize how vivid HL2's visuals were at the time, so I didn't think much of the herculean task of porting HL2 to the original Xbox. I think I got all the way through the game up to Ravenholm level before giving it a try on the PC. I don't remember the frame rate being unplayable for the most part but it eventually became apparent to me that the developers had to make some sacrifices to get it working on the original Xbox. Funny enough, I also played Half Life 1 on the PS2 before playing it on the PC. Funny how it worked out that way. Awesome video!

That train station reverb sounded so good!

I didn't have a PC that could even come close to playing Half Life 2 until about 6 or 7 years ago, so I was absolutely thrilled by the OG Xbox port. I played it through at least a half dozen times. Really thrilled to learn more about how they managed to squeeze it all into the big X.

its strange how environmental audio has regressed on PC's over time. I seem to recall a lot of patent/licensing issues possibly being a factor which would be a shame if that is the reason.

Great video! Will check it out eventually on Xbox.

Wow I never realized how good the sound is on the Xbox version! The echoes are awesome!

I remember getting this when I bought the orange box. I had so much fun with this game.

i remember when iwas young my Nvidia Riva TNT2 cried on this game😅

oooo i always wondered about this. thanks for making this video

I did NOT know this existed on the Xbox 1 (yeah, I call it by it's proper name ☺️). One of my all time favourites for sure and did a playthrough recently on Steam with subtle Update mod and boy does it still look and play great. The combine radio audio still and will always put me on edge. Great video!

The xbox version was my first time playing Half Life 2, on a tiny little CRT in France, wired directly into the socket... it got fried after being bumped. I also had Half Life, Blue Shift, Opposing Forces, and TeamFortress Classic via the anthology. Weirdly, I don't remember the framedrops being so bad, also would be rather surprised if the game is aware of anything other than the CPU speed increase, games tend to need patching to work properly with xbox unified memory expansions.

The Half Life port on PS2 is also very impressive

Man, hearing all that reverb on Breen's audio REALLY changes the vibe in those portions....I really should replay and see if there's any mods that can replicate that for PC

I got into the orange box collection for xbox 360 a few year late when I borrowed it from a friend when I brought up portal and he asked if I ever played half-life. I had no idea about it, but immediately fell in love with the whole series after that. Had no idea this was available for the og xbox, and it's definitely impressive what they were able to pull off with the old tech, even if the frame rates neared unplayable at times.

My first half life game on XBOX 🤣

These RU-vid adds get so annoying that i watch less and less RU-vid.

Thanks for this video. It’s taking me on a nostalgia trip. The original Xbox version was my first time experiencing Half life 2.. even if it was graphically inferior it was one hell of an experience as one of the first linear story driven fps games I played

This version was actually my first ever exposure to Half-Life 2. A childhood friend of mine had it and I watched him play through the part where you assault the beach with the ant-lions

Og XBOX was extremely powerful compared to the PS2 at that time.

Awesome video. I first played HL2 at a friend’s house on his XBOX I think. I got the original Xbox for my 10th birthday after being blown away by Halo, GTA, and many others. I loved it. I didn’t own a copy of HL2 until orange box on 360. Went back to finish it in lockdown . All those years later I still thought it was incredible. Definitely ahead of its time. I’d love to play the first one. Just watched a documentary on that game. Clearly a special time in gaming. 👏👍

This is the video I needed My favourite game, one of the most intriguing ports presented by my favourite Gaming/Modding/Homebrew/Dev RU-vidr Great video as always and amazing how they pulled that off. I played HL2 on the PC and now years later on the XBOX One X. Unfortunately never had an OG Xbox, but that*s going to change soon 8)

I've been wanting to see this game run on a DreamX for YEARS!! You've answered a big question for me regarding whether it would run better or not on that hardware, thanks for checking it out! 😁👍 Out of curiosity, was a 128mb patched xbe or RAMdelimit used in this test?