When they first hit our computers, Half Life 2 and the Source engine had us driving nails and bolts in our jaws to keep them in place. The game provided a truly amazing experience, and no matter how impressive the Source engine was at the time is was first seen by the public, its true power was slowly revealed as time passed. While with a truly revolutionary physics engine, what really made this a solid piece of technology was its versatility, as five years later, there are still games in development that make use of this engine.

Over the years, the Source engine received a lot of facelifts, as Valve released Half Life 2: Episode 1 and later on, Episode 2. And by the time the latest edition to the HL2 family was out, the original game, though it still used the same engine, started to look a little dull, and worse for wear. But even if Valve never went back to the original HL2 to give it a makeover, what it did do was make the Source engine mod friendly enough that the fan community could do it themselves. And eventually, they did it.

On the official Steam forums, a Half-Life 2: Update mod was made by one Filip Victor, and it's already making people go crazy struggling to download it. The mod tries to bring Half Life 2 a little bit closer to today's visual standard, and features a Source engine update all the way to the Orange Box version of it, High Dynamic Range, or HDR Lighting, Updated Models & Textures and even 32 Steam Achievements. The modder even posted a side-by-side comparison video in which the differences are clearly made.

The first obvious thing is the HDR Lighting, which was a rather controversial feature ever since it was implemented. Rendering things blindingly bright and shiny doesn't necessarily make them look better, and in all that light, HL2 loses its gloomy atmosphere. Texture and models have obviously been improved, as it can be seen on every character and textured item, as the video does try to make this more obvious with a close-up of Alex's face during an in-game animation, one thing that stands out in the video. While the geometry of the character's face is improved, a lot of the facial animation and facial expression of the character has been lost.

The mod is available for download on several hosting sites, but it's a rather big download, at just over 1Gb, so you might want to take a look at all the additional mirrors Steam forum users have posted for the mod. The thread and all the mirrors can be found by browsing the actual Steam thread here. As for a video sample of the updates the mod has made, you can view the comparison video below.

UPDATE: We've been notified that a fix for the facial animations is out and can be found here.