Half Life 2

[Jon_in_london]

Anyone Bought it?

Anyone hate STEAM?

Anyone been battling for 16 hours to play the game you paid ***** loads of money for?

:mad:

[Orangutan]

I bought it.

I could have done without steam. I have never lost a game disk or CD key so why I need steam or how it benifits me I can't fathom, certainly I see no benifit from protecting me against piracy I still had to pay $50 for the game.

However after the 2 hours It took to get the game working via steam I did enjoy playing the single player game. Love the physics engine love the graphics. Multiplayer wasn't so good.

I went back to playing CALL of DUTY online with my friends.

O.

[FFed]

I got a free copy from the video card I bought, so I was able to download HL2 from steam and it worked pretty good. I played and finished the game without much problems from steam so I can't really complain. I did not try multiplayer though because I play Call of Duty multiplayer so much, and I didn't think it would be as good.

[a_unique_person]

Originally posted by Jon_in_london
Anyone Bought it?

Anyone hate STEAM?

Anyone been battling for 16 hours to play the game you paid ***** loads of money for?

:mad:

Just finshed it. Do you have broadband?

We are used to steam now. Better get used to it. At least it does give you game options on-line for free if you like multi-player.

I love all the mods that were created for HL1. My favourite is Day of Defeat, but my kids love Counterstrike.

The range of mods that has been created for Half Life is incredible. There must be about 200 of them. Some are good just as curiosities, some a waste of time, but together they give half life a real value added aspect.

Now they will be re-releasing DoD in HL2 format. Can hardly wait.

[Jon_in_london]

Just finshed it. Do you have broadband?

We are used to steam now. Better get used to it. At least it does give you game options on-line for free if you like multi-player.


No I dont. I think thats half the problem. If you need broadband why didnt the cunch of bunts say so on the box?

Apart from the slow access speeds, they are still a squallion other things that can go wrong and usually do- as evidenced by the amount of bitching on steam's online forum.

Personally, I will never buy anything from Valve again, dont care how good it is.

[a_unique_person]

Actually, i thought you could play it without having to connect to steam at all. The CDs come with a key, and the program. If you aren't connected to the internet, it requires the CD in the CD drive, if it is connected, you can play the game without the CD in the CD drive.

[Vitnir]

I had zero problems both installing and playing. I can agree its slightly annoying that it always downloads updates when I just want to use the singleplayer mode. As I understand it they implemented this system to prevent piracy so if this experiment is a succes in this regard, expect to see more games using this in the future. It requires you to be online during installation at least, I havent seen the option to play offline anywhere but I use broadband so I dont care.

[Donks]

Originally posted by a_unique_person
Actually, i thought you could play it without having to connect to steam at all. The CDs come with a key, and the program. If you aren't connected to the internet, it requires the CD in the CD drive, if it is connected, you can play the game without the CD in the CD drive.

AFAIK, you need to conect at least the first time you play, to "unlock" the files. After that you can play in offline mode.

[rockoon]

It doesnt seem to be stopping piracy.

[wipeout]

Originally posted by Jon_in_london
Anyone Bought it?

Anyone hate STEAM?

Anyone been battling for 16 hours to play the game you paid ***** loads of money for?

:mad:

You are not alone in hating Steam. For many people, it's been a disaster that has prevented them playing the game.

A lot of people had problems and the game was cracked and pirated in less than 24 hours, showing Steam's superb anti-piracy measures to the full. Yeah, that was really worth all that pain for the consumer.

A lot of people are annoyed that "requires internet connection" was in tiny letters on the box and also that online authentication can be so slow and have so many problems.

What's ironic about the Steam-free pirated version is that many people say it works better than the official version, not just in terms of not having to suffer Steam but with in-game framerates and other things.

Half-Life 2 worked okay for me except for the infamous stuttering problem during the game itself and the ludicrous load-times. This stuttering problem is the bug where graphics freeze momentarily and the sound loops. It ruins the atmosphere and immersion.

Valve claimed to be unaware of it before release but I pointed out to them that it's actually visible in their own pre-release demonstration footage, so ---> :p to them. They also tried to make out it was a problem of only a few people. I'd estimate more like 10 to 20 percent have it to varying degrees, ranging from mild annoyance to actually making the game unplayable on even state of the art systems.

[rockoon]

Its still the best First-Person Shooter ever