The Squeeky Wheels of the World Unite!

:) 

my very first impression was "WTF NO MANUAL?" then I looked at the 5 haphazardly thrown in cd's in their loose paper envelopes. I'll admit I was very dissapointed. They did however make sure to include a fat variety of advertisements to gaming magazines and other crap I don't need/want/afford. Then I found the ALL USEFUL quickeys sheet... wonderful, that served me for 3 or 4 keys that I didn't reassign.

So, No manual, tons of ads, worthless quick keys sheet, ass steam forced authentication system. This was utter tripe on the publishing end. This however has little to do with the actual developers as the publisher is a seperate entity in its own.

Once your in the game however.... oh the deeeeeeeeelight! 

however has little to do with the actual developers
Vivendi would be quite happy for Steam to just disappear. It's Valve that are behind it. 

...is great if you have a fast net connection, I have to say. It pisses me off that I can't play at home (no internet), but my home pc is a bag of shite anyway, so it would probably not run HL2 if I could install it.

Steam should block the shit heads intent on spoiling the fun of others with cheats in multiplayer games, whilst providing a very simple interface for keeping HL2 up to date and adding mods (and perhaps maps later on.)

I have no big issues with Steam so far, although it was a bit slow on launch day, and it took me about half an hour to get HL2 authenticated after getting the cache files (from another machine on the work lan.) 

So you need to buy cases to protect your original game CD's? Cases that get provided with blank CDRs that are less then $1/pc.

That's just cheezee. A great way to discourage piracy is to provide a sense a value for the buyer. No manual or cases and ad grabs for more of your money is not respectful to the buyer. If the game wasn't so great (I'm sure it will be anyways), a lesson could be learned if gamers rebelled. As it is, I'm sure HL2 will be a great success and with it will go the continued deterioration of the buyer as someone worthy of gratitude. 

Right now I am at the latter parts (I think( of Water Danger episode (or whatever it's called, you are riding that water/ground vehicle). So far, the game looks pretty "meh" to me. The graphics do not rival Doom 3, though some of the enviroments look very nice. There is nothing in the A.I. of this game that I haven't seen before either. The physics are the most interesting part so far, I was driving that vehicle near a burning barrel and the explosion sent me high up spinning the vehicle in the air multiple times AND my POV with it. That was cool.

I also find some spots in this game to be ridicuosly annoying. Like where you are in a room and you think you've looked everywhere for the exit and then you notice that valve/switch whatever that does not stand out in any way and open the way to another part of the level. 

Yeah that bit annoyed me too.

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Just wait til you get to the bit in nova prospect where you're supposed to defend yourself with turrets from wave after wave of combine troops. After 7 tries I fucked off and turned on godmode. (I'm impatient)

Also there are some parts where you think you've got to stay put and fight off an attack, but actually there's just a slightly hidden exit and an infinite stream of enemies. Yeah, highway-underpass-in-anticitizen-one-with-neverending-stream-of-manhacks-flooding-from-
above, I'm talking about YOU!


--------------END SPOILER-------------

BTW Barney is so sexy! 

how r u? 

Their decision not to include the manual could has been made only for saving costs.... it's the only logical reason i can see. 

Oi, I wasn't expecting to be really blown away by HL2 ... and I wasn't. Basically what I expected. 6 years for cool looking water and physics puzzles that are not at all hard to solve and are just to fill up time. The action scenes are cool, scripted sequences are great. Story is pretty good. My biggest complaint is that there is really no correlation between HL and HL2; Nothing is ever explained. I loved the ending. Though most people won't. But enough about that.

Other complaints (don't read if you don't wanna know about this stuff)

----------OK-------------
Combine Soldiers: repetitive
Where'd all the cool Xen monsters go to? We get fuckin headcrabs and ant lions? Bull shit.
The aresnal, like Doom 3, was sorely lacking. Nothing special here at all, cept MAYBE the Zero-Point Force Manipulator (whatever its called), but that got old pretty fast.
Puzzles are simple, not very fun.


Good things:
Interesting, windy level design. Cool to see an area then come up on it time after time... this I thought was very good, seemed like a real place, but it was "convenient" there were so many fences and gates, etc...
Uhhh... there's a bunch of generally cool stuff, everything overall is welldone.

So, I thought it was good, but definitely over-rated by most people imo. I would give it somewhere around 90%. After all that time, they got rid of all the cool alien organisms, the cool organic weapons, and gave us "soldier, shotgun, car." But still, it's pretty good. Ravenholm was the best fun I had in the whole game.

Good stuff. 

90% would count as a great game rather than a good game. 

not on a scale from 0% - 5000% 

90% would be an extremely crap game and not a good game :) 

not if you skip from 100 - 4800% 

don't get in an argument with Zwiffle when there is math or stats involved. He has some real good ones up his sleeve. 

The only things I didn't really like about Half Life 2 were having a team with you. Even more than that, the fact that you just couldn't blow their heads off when the annoyed you(which was all to frequent for me), they just get in the way to much, I would much rather not to have had them. I know you could send them away, but they always come back.

And there were places that were just frustrating, and places where I just didn't know what to do next, easy enough to just plug away and work it out, but frustrating for me none the less.

=============================================
===============SPOILER================
=============================================

czg
That place with the turrets was a bit annoying/frustrating. Until you realize what triggers things off etc. If you don't set up the turrets first, and just look around, you have plenty of time to notice a dead end type thing on the 2nd floor, you can stack the crates up so you can climb up there. Place the turrets at the bottom, then just lift them up with the gravity gun, place them on the second floor, sit back and let them do there thing, toss down a few grenades................

==============================================
==============END SPOILER==============
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LOOSE CD's
An all to common thing these days, but I guess with the amount of discs in some games, and the trend towards smaller boxes etc..........
I get DVD versions when I can, but even then you get that DVD type case, I prefer the old CD cases, so I can stack them in my CD towers.

Familiar Names
Did anyone notice any familiar names (names known to people around here) in the credits at the end of Half Life 2 ? 

Dario Casali
Yahn Bernier
for example ;) 

err. the gravity gun got old? wtf, its the most versatile weapon in any fps ever! The gameplay possibilities with it are potentially endless, either you missed pretty much everything you could do with it or... well I dunno :) I just cant understand that comment...

HL2 rocked my world, all other shizzle out of the way, its amazing and should be played religiously by every fps fan. apart from a few duff areas (nova prospekt turret fight etc) its great all the way through. 

I'm pretty surprised people generally found Doom 3 to be a better game, or even better looking than HL2. 

Iikka Keranen, of course. 

Pick things up. Shoot things. Of course, you could pick things up and stack them. Mmmmm... fun. 

I guess the grav gun can get boring after a while. FallOut 2 let you shoot heroin, does Half-Life 2 let you shoot heroin?

If not, perhaps the interactivity isn't all it is cracked up to be and falls way behind even a 1997 title. 

Not sure I know what constitutes a better game, but although I really, really liked Half Life 2, I think I will be still playing DooM3, and Quake's for that matter, long after Half Life 2 is just a memory. I guess I am just old and stick with what I like the most.

A meandering wander into the seemingly unrelated
To me it's like the standard answer that gets given when people ask the question, "Whats the best telescope to buy?"
Answer "The one that you will use the most"

The Grav gun was a blast, I especially liked carving creatures up with those saw blades

Did anyone think that the sound that they used for the Buggy, was, well better than most sounds you would get in a dedicated driving game. I thought it was just awesome 

You'd have to be joking... right? 

Don't forget Ikka Keranen, teh Fingered One =D

Finished the game yesterday, btw -- and it was great. Have to agree with DaZZa on the Nova Prospekt standoff with the Combine, but overall the game was engaging without being too simplistic or difficult. I'm replaying it again, and waiting on that damned SDK...