Best Version of Half-Life

[Ed Oscuro]

The PS2 port is the way to go. Superior controls due to twin analog sticks,

Better than a good mouse and keyboard? No way. Half-Life is all about twitch pointing. It's not crippled by analog sticks, but it's not designed for them, either. Even if somebody wants to play an FPS the wrong way, there's no reason to abandon the PC, here, because joypad support is integrated into Half-Life on Steam. Plug in your Xbox 360 USB controller and go.

faster frame rate,

On any modern PC, your hardware can render far more frames than your display can show, and at any resolution you like. Your PS2 won't be outputting 1600x1200, which isn't critical for the main game but very helpful in preventing eyestrain, and used by some custom maps and the like.

The one caveat is that the widescreen support for the GoldSrc (classic Half-life) engine is Vert-, meaning you get the same field of view in widescreen as in normal 4:3, but with some of the top and bottom cut off. However, the extra clarity (i.e. sharpness) conferred by high resolution graphics more than makes up for it. Letterboxed 1600x1200 graphics on a 26" widescreen > the hell out of a grainy television image through s-video.

sharper and more detailed graphics,

One command everybody should add to autoexec.cfg:

gl_texturemode "GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR"
Trilinear filtering.

I don't know what you mean by sharper, but Gearbox (if I'm correct in remembering it was them) sure did pump up the polygon counts on monsters and the like, even over Blue Shift's "High Definition" pack if I recall.

The High Definition pack has a lot of good stuff in it, but using the classic models and stuff doesn't bother me at all.

faster loading times, and more efficient saving.

Not at all faster than a PC, and saving is as easy as F6 + F7.

Also has the cooperative game of Decay, the only part of the Half-Life saga that PC owners never recieved (Although there's a homebrew remake of it available for PC).

I'm not 100% sure but the "remake" of Decay seems to be straight ports of the maps, as opposed to being reinvented. It's not the most amazing-looking mod I've ever seen but there are some good moments in there. Works fine on a PC, and the porting crew added some bonuses like some kind of online tracking.

It isn't just a cooperative mode for Half-Life, it's a unique expansion pack with it's own storyline telling the story of two scientist much like Blue Shift and Opposing Forces were.

Speaking of which, the main reason (in my view) to own Half-Life is for the hours and hours of gaming goodness in the expansions, from some iffy "classics" like the various iterations of the Halloween Mod, to classics like Poke646 and Poke646: Vendetta, Afraid of Monsters, the amazing Neil Manke / Black Widow Games mods like the They Hunger trilogy ("you are what I eat"), and so many more. If you really want to get the most of FPSing you ought to look up at least a couple of the classic HL mods.