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REGISTRATION NIGHTMARE

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 23
Date: August 01, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I spent hours,...hours trying to acivate this game, shutting of software, virus control, firewalls deleting programs, all to no avail. could not activate the game. What a drag, I keep reading that the game is great, but this corporate, headless, inconsiderate, inhuman, non responsive entity wont let me play the game. so the game is probably good if you could activate, but good luck if you buy a used game. Beware if you buy a used game .The first owners have probably pirated the game and you are going to be stuck with a inoperable piece of software. Good luck!

I'm sure it's a great game.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: September 09, 2007
Author: Amazon User

But after spending about 12 hours trying to get my computer to run it I'm pretty sure HL2 will gather dust on one of my shelves. Even after folowing the paper and website directions, I could not get my computer to even run the disk. Steams website runs you all over the place with download links that don't work or are linked to nothing. I understand that Valve is trying to prevent piracy, but it should not be this difficult to get a brand new game to work. I had an easier time helping a friend put together an ultra-light airplane kit than trying to get HL2 to run. Here's my advice for anyone thinking of buying HL2

1. Be willing to spend hours at Steams website configuring your computer to run HL2.

2. Make sure you will not be too upset about blowing $20 on a game you may never play.

The people at Valve had to be aware that they were releasing a game that many of their customers would never be able to play because of all the technical problems. Shame on you guys!

STEAMED UP!!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: March 08, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I know that this game is magnificent but I agree with one of the reviewers. "Steam" keeps popping up and kept telling me that my game was pre-installed and not ready to be played offline. I don't know what to do anymore because my sister bought it for me and mailed it to me abroad. There goes my refund.

The long awaited sequel was worth the wait...barely.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: July 30, 2006
Author: Amazon User

So, I'm here a bit late, but another review can't hurt since a lot of people might buy this game in wake of the new, decent, expansion.

Developers outta keep quiet about release dates. Premature talk breeds media floods. And media floods pigeonhole developers into making deadlines. Deadlines are meant to be broken. When the bomb was dropped that a lot of the Source code was stolen, Valve pussyfooted around the subject of Half-Life 2's release and used the theft as an excuse to delay the game. Fair enough, Valve taught the hackers and us a lesson, but with all the preloading of Half-Life 2, and the free Half-Life 2 giveaways with video cards, Valve was really doing the gamers a disservice by creating hype. Hype tends to equal bad, especially for a sequel.

The good news is Half-Life 2 rocks. Half-Life 2 rocks like Half-Life, and a lot of the great FPS games that have come out over the past few years. Amazingly, Half-Life 2 doesn't do too much in terms of changing the formula from Half-Life. In fact, Half-Life 2 has a scarily similar formula and story to Half-Life. But that's no deal breaker: Half-Life has been the best first person shooter to grace this planet (in my opinion, anyway), and it still holds up today with the exception of its graphics. Very few titles managed to push the envelope and expand upon the style that Half-Life created (No One Lives Forever is definitely one of the games that should get mentioned). Half-Life was a linear game, and Half-Life 2 is also linear. In that respect, there have been titles that have changed the genre, but very few linear FPS give a bump like Half-Life.

You know the story; you're Gordon Freeman, scientist, middle-aged guy, general bad-arse. You have a cool protective suit, a crowbar, and a few nifty weapons at your disposal. Half-Life 2 plays out a lot like Half-Life 1, though I won't ruin any of the story. A little bit into the game, you pick what has to be the most entertaining piece of First Person Shooter history, the Gravity Gun. This bad boy allows you to pick up, move, and propel objects at your enemies. It's a great replacement for shotguns and pistols, and it's tons of fun. All of a sudden, useless stuff that acts as level detail in other FPS games become deadly projectiles. It's pretty much the most awesome thing ever. The Source engine has some of the best physics you will see in the genre. Objects break, crumble and move. It's satisfying when you tear stuff apart, and there's never that cold dull feeling you get in some of the levels in other games like Doom 3 and F.E.A.R.. The enemy A.I. is okay, not great. Years of Counter-Strike has, apparently, made me pretty good at killing the Combine. And if you go from playing F.E.A.R. to Half-Life 2 you may find the A.I. a bit disappointing. Still, the A.I. will give you a run for your money if you crank the game up to the hardest difficulty, and I recommend you do just that so you can take more time to immerse yourself in the wonderful world that is Half-Life 2.

Half-Life 2 hasn't been all that revolutionary, or groundbreaking, or life changing. It plays out so much like Half-Life that it's easy to accuse it of being unoriginal and uninspired. But the truth is, why fix something that isn't broken? Valve has added a lot of new things that make Half-Life 2 worth playing, and fans of FPS owe themselves to check this title out. As far as linear FPS go, Half-Life 2 continues to raise the bar. For what it's worth, to me, Half-Life is a more fun game, because when I played Half-Life 2 there were a few moments of, been there, done that. But, Half-Life is getting graphically old, and the gameplay is starting to show its simplicity. And Half-Life 2 rocks anyway. So, do yourself a favor, and check this game out.

However...

I passionately dislike steam, although it does have one or two perks for its 20 flaws. In case you are wondering, Steam is Valve's handy tool to help you organize and play all of your Valve games.

If you have a broadband connection and credit card, I recommend downloading steam and just buying the game through steam. Non-broadband users should get the game from the store, because they can install most of it off the CDs or DVD.

The pros of buying the game from steam include, being able to just buy Half-Life 2, not Counter-Strike: source, and saving a trip to the store. The cons are you need (well, you don't NEED, but you should unless you don't mind waiting for a long long time) broadband.

For non-broadband users, the pros of buying the game are that you avoid the hassle of downloading it. In fact, it's pretty much impossible to get the game on a 56k connection, without aging a lot. The cons are that you have to buy the game...which comes with CS: Source, so you end up spending more money. Also, the game doesn't come with any linear information or booklets, just the CDs/DVD and CD-key. The biggest con is that you STILL NEED STEAM to activate and play the game. And in order to play it, STEAM will put you through the painful process of downloading patches, something that will still take a long long time.

For what it's worth, STEAM has become a marketing tool. Steam will alert you when new games are out; be sure to have a credit card at hand, most of the new games are only 20 dollars. Steam also will ask if you'd like to participate in surveys, and steam will occasionally crash. Steam also does weekly updates...which make me question A) the integrity of Valve's product, or B) the integrity of the updates themselves.

If you can get over the mountain that is Steam, you are in for a real treat. A game that does what it sets out to do, live up to the Half-Life name.

Crash Prone

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: November 26, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I have had no hardware problems with games that have been recently released until I played this one. All it does is crash and crash and crash and crash. Sometimes I get a "can't read memory" error, other times it crashes so badly it re-boots my PC. I run a 2.53GHZ Pentium with a 512M RAM and a GeForce Ti4200 vie card which should be enough to run the game reasonably well. Unless you have a high-end system, beware.....

Returned Item

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: March 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I never have had such a hard time with a game before. The online game system, somehow managed to change the settings that I set for it to not automatically update. Each time it tried an automatic update it failed around 88%. This of course caused me to lose my progress in the game each time. It would not have been bad if it happened only once. However, it happened four (4!!) times. This was compounded by the fact that no one ever contacted me to help. I sent messages and problem reports. I asked them for help every way possible. I even scoured message boards and followed their advice. I really liked the game, and it was disappointing to me that I could not get the problems worked out. I am not sure about this method of gaming that forces you to login to the internet each time. It really causes a hassle. Half-Life turned out to be 1 of only a few games, that I have ever returned in my 20+ years of gaming.

Fun, but SCARY

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: February 05, 2005
Author: Amazon User

After hearing many people say how awesome Half Life 2 was, I decided to download the demo. After the one hour download was done (Using DSL) I decided to play it. There was a creepy guy who kept talking about something and I couldn't make him shut up so I just waited for that to end. Then after the guys stopped talking, I began to play. The graphics were dazzling, this is partially because my video/graphics card is partially new. (I have an ATI Radeon x700) After playing the first level, I had been beaten down with a tazer, watched the beginning of a man being tortured, walked into a room with a bucket in it and a pile of blood in the room too next to a chair, and talked to some guy on a funky looking TV. I thought it would be really great. The second level comes....I'm in a creepy place at night and I am surrounded by ugly shacks. There's tall grass everywhere and then out of the blue a really gross and scary looking zombie attacks me. I kill the zombie quickly using a machine gun of some sort. As I continue walking I see a tree with someone's legs dangling from a rope. The legs had the same blue pants as the other humans that I saw walking around in the first level, but they were bloody and you could see the part that was once connected to his/her upper body covered with blood. After that I opened up this door to find the same thing only the legs are on the floor and the upper body is all bones and is covered with blood. After seeing that, I decided that this was too much for me to handle so I quit and deleted it just so I wouldn't be tempted to play it again.

PROS:
AMAZING graphics
Great gameplay
Good story

Cons: there are none unless you're a chicken like me, if so, this game is really scary.

I rated this game 5 stars because it's great if you're not chicken!

Valve has taken a turn for the worse

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 17
Date: October 22, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I was a huge fan of the original Half-Life when it was first released. When I heard that a sequel was going to be made, I was so exited that I felt like I was going to have a heart attack. I bought the game only to find out that and internet connection is required to play even single player. GUESS WHAT VALVE?! NOT EVERYONE HAS AN INTERNET CONNECTION! My home computer (which is the computer that I play games on) doesn't have an internet connection.

HL2 sucks. Steam sucks. Valve sucks. THE END.

Definately not worth the hype

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 13 / 34
Date: December 09, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I have no idea how this game is getting so much hype!!!! i mean its not even that good.

Pros
-Good graphics but not the best
-Some unique weapons (e.g. gravity gun)
-Midly interesting story

Cons
-STEAM You have to DOWNLOAD AFTER THE LAST CD FOR LIKE AN HOUR! then whenever you play the single player you are linked to the internet. Now this is a problem because it can leave some computers vulnerable.
-Ending was very bad
-WAY TOO LINEAR! I felt like i was being forced to do stuff by a "higher power"
-Whenever i was it felt very unconvincing and i couldnt get into this game at all

Overall this game is bad and defiantely not worth the hype it has gotten from so many people

I would suggest buying Quake 4 (if you have a good enough graphics card for it)

Can beat Halo 2 anytime.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 11
Date: November 18, 2004
Author: Amazon User

First things first, I HAVE ACTUALLY PLAYED THE GAME. Now, to the comparisons/review. Do not get me wrong. I love the Halo series; superb games. But Half-Life 2 is superior in every aspect. First: the story. It's some demonic blend of 1984 and Aliens. The monsters are far more HORRIFIC. When you see that Strider first walking down the avenue, you know things can only get worse...especially when you at benighted Ravenholm and in the depths of the Citadel. See, the aliens have figured out that lobbing massive amounts of missiles packed to the breaking point with headcrabs (think the facehugger from Alien), resolves problems very quickly. Though the aliens in Halo have far more personality (especially the Grunts), they resemble humans in many ways and don't have that truly alien feel that the monsters in Half-Life 2 do. Admittedly, the ending ends on even more of a cliffhanger than Halo 2 does, everything before that is spectacular. Second point: The characters/graphics. The opening scene prepares you for what's coming. As the G-Man makes his cryptic speech, you can watch all the muscles in his face move as he talks, his lips move like they should in the real world, you can see the moisture in his eyes, reflecting the light. A lot better than the MC's damned helmet. The characters move accurately, from a running soldier to a scientist limping on his prosthetic leg (apparently he lost in a fight with one of them bull-squids or bull-chickens or whatever the heck they were from the first Half-Life.) In one of the earliest missions, an enemy fell through a wooden bridge, and tumbled down to finally lie dangling off one of the supports. It was as good as motion capture. None of that buggy 'the dead guy lies halfway hanging out into space or through a wall' stuff. The Geo-Mod is really fun because EVERYTHING is now a weapon. First thing I killed was a spybot which I smashed with a paint can. There are some complicated puzzles, but all in all the game is excellent, and can continually make new levels, not having to rely like Halo 1 did and just reuse them all for the last half of the game. If you're debating whether to get Halo 2 or Half-Life 2, definitely go with HL2.

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