Neg!ke, so far I *have* to run post-processing at full, otherwise I get huge amounts of see-through textures in the landscape - yay, go G3, go! Full PP is okay, the distance blur is interesting but I can take it or leave it - do you know any way around that particular bug?? 

Yeah, POP:WW and Dues Ex 2 (PC) are still in the shrink wrap. So was Q4 until this summer, and POP:TT until a month ago.

And I still haven't been able to play HL2! 

dunno about the third (full) setting of PP as it doesn't work for me - all sprites/shaders turn into black rectangles or something. likely related to my graphics card (only have a radion 9600pro). what about the lighting on full setting? is it still overly bright around torches/candles? 'distance blur' as in standard fog-like effect or something more sophisticated? not sure about the distance rendering setting either, i guess i have both sliders on medium, since max distance would slow my rig down too much, or i'm just too scared to try it, or whatever - with 2gb RAM it should work better, i guess. on the other hand, i'm using 4x AA / shadows disabled. performance isn't really the problem in this game, the preloading is (and the fucking long quickload/save times).

btw. do yourself a favor and play on hard difficulty. there are only few frustrating moments. monsters might be quite hard at first, but at least orcs/npcs are a little less weak.
we'll see what the next patch (next week?) brings...

oh, and a little gameplay tip: if you beat up enemies they only drop wornout weapons, but if you knock them out with those headbutt-arrows, they drop a fully functional weapon. this way, you can make proper use of the powerful orc weapons or even the best weapon in the game: an ogre hammer (with the appropriate amount of strength points of course). ;) 

Lighting is a little bit bright in a few places - the only time it's looked bad is in the Cape Dun fighting ring.

The distance blur really is distance blur, i.e. everything in the distance is blurred. Like the artificial depth of field you get tweaking a picture in photoshop. I think I might stick with it as it stops the funny effect where the terrain "pops" into more detail as you get closer.

Funnily enough, although both the new card and new ram definitely help matters (woohoo, shadows on, woohoo, teleporting into a town without 30 seconds of pausing), I have got some random slowdowns in funny places - going into Dun after 1 hour of play, it chugged like a bitch until I restarted.

BTW, how do headknocks work? I presume you have to aim at the head, and that they work on humanoids?

And can you change difficulty in game? I'm already a few (useful) hours in... 

headknocks work on any creature (npcs, monsters). i don't know if you have to specifically hit the head, although it can't be wrong as headshots do more damage anyway, but i think it's important to deplete their health entirely with headknocks. i recently tried to knock out some ogres by first hurting them with regular arrows and doing the final shot with a headknock, but they just died.

difficulty can be changed in game at any time. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JxS-njEUVc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mjh4f4p43kU 

I never played Cave Story. :( 

I lol'ed. Shamelessly. 

Yeah, that was great :) 

The original was great and this one doesn't look half bad:

http://poke646.com/ 

is the steam version of half life ? 

It is the Half-life 1 available through Steam ;) 

but how is it different half life retail ? And why would you need th steam version? 

but the half-life 1 engine has been updated lots since it moved to steam, while the non steam version has had no patches for years. Maybe there is some incompatibility there. 

the original was very pro and well designed, but was kind of annoying because the weapons just had new art resouces - they behaved exactly the same as the origials. 

Is Poke 646? Reminds me of Pokemon. 

From the Poke646 website:

The true meaning of Poke646 goes way back into the early 80's were the C=64 homecomputer was very popular. I wrote my first games on it in Basic and Poke646 was the command to change the font color on the screen. I thought it would fit the title of this mod as this is the first complete game I designed since my early days in the computing business.
:) 

what does that mean ? Do I have to repurchase half life through steam to reap the benefits ? 

is half-life ported to the source engine. there are no major differences apart from water and maybe physics though, afaik.
but if poke646 is developed exclusively for this very version, it unfortunately means hardly anyone will be able to play it - at least i doubt too many people have bought hl1 again only because of the source features. if the team is smart enough, they will either (also) do it on classic hl or hl2. 

do you get the half life 1 steam version with it ? 

When I bought HL2 on steam it was a pack that included HL1 (along with ep1, multiplayer, etc).
Not sure if that kind of pack still exists, probably. 

If you still have your half-life CD key, you should be able to register it with steam, and then half-life and all the associated games will be added to your list of games on steam. You may have to download lots of content from the servers to get it working, but you shouldn't need to buy it again. 

IIRC you can use the "activate a product on steam" window and input your hl1 cd key and it will unlock the game for currently logged in steam account, you can then download the game OR if you have it installed already it will copy the files over to steam and download all the updates automatically.

I haven't used this though, so it might not work that way 

Neg!ke, you are talking about Half-Life:Source, which is a totally separate game from half-life. Half-Life on steam is the same as HL without steam, valve just released a source version so you could have pretty water and effects :)

/clearup 

fucking steam ...