Half-Life was my introduction to FPS gaming; I loved every game in the series that I had the pleasure to play - Half-Life, Opposing Force, Blue Shift and Half-Life 2 (Lost Coast, Episode One, Episode 2). I never got round to playing Alyx; I didn’t have hardware that would cope!
Half-Life also spawned the CounterStrike series; I sank way to many hours into them.
My favourite game remains the original; I enjoyed the narrative and the occasional puzzle. I purchased the upgraded graphics pack (which also fixed a few glitches) and prefer the original with this pack to the remastered version of the game (Half-Life: Source).
And you’re probably right about the crypto thing; if my defection had happened in ‘10 - ‘11 due to price increases that would have been more crypto and less financial crisis. Memory blurs a little.
The above build (with a suitable NZXT H7 case) can be built for around £3,800; such a generous budget might be doable but deep down I know this build is over the top and that I cannot really justify ploughing that much into something like this. Thank you for the PCPartPicker recommendation; I will try that.
I have little doubt that the above setup is overkill for my purposes. My difficulty is that I am so far behind and out of date in my knowledge of what constitutes a decent baseline specification that I am having to approach this from a position of embarrassed ignorance.
A couple of folks have recommended PCPartPicker so I will give that a go.
It’s on the tip of my tongue; there was a whole series of ghost pirate themed “hidden object” point and click puzzle games. I’ll update the post when it comes back.