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In a word: Perfect!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 440 / 479
Date: November 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I stopped keeping time after 2am so I can't be sure what hour it is, nor can I tell you when I ran out of the cannister of Malt Balls and Peanut M&M's I brought as supplementation. What I can tell you however (in the humble opinion of a dedicated PC gamer for 15 years), is that Half Life 2 is the the most mind blowing game I've ever played.

I was at E3 with my pyscho gaming buddy cleaning the Pizza flavored drool off his chin when we got a preview of HL2. Like most, I counted the days, cursed Valve and Sierra for delay after delay, put all my faith and hope into Doom 3, was underwhelmed, went back to playing Desert Combat...basically went insane with anticipation.

In the brief moments before firing up HL2 for the first time, I was hopeful, but expecting to be dissapointed.

And I was.

Really, no multi-player! I'm one of those that have an absolute allergy to single-player games. Small beads of angry sweat began to form on my back...

But I soldiered on, and in:

10 minutes I was impressed,

at 30 minutes I was completely immersed,

at 1 hour chills were running up and down my spine, and occasional girlish yelps of horror began emanating from my pitch dark office...

...by the third hour I came to the conclusion that HL2 was/is the most impressive game software I've ever had the privilege of living in. Some highlights:

1. The engine is truly revolutionary. Doom 3 has a darn good engine, HL2 in my opinion is vastly better. Indoor AND outdoor environments are near photo-realistic (I have a 3.2GHZ w/ 1GB RAM), the physics are jaw-dropping AND deeply integrated into the play of the game, texture and lighting, faces, water, you name it, this engine is now The Standard.

2. Vehicles. Well, not only do they have them, they're really fun to operate (or be chased by as the case may be).

3. The Gravity Gun. This weapon comes later in the game, and in my humble opinion, is easily the most fun weapon I've ever used. Picking up and throwing items, using it to activate latent elements of the environment (often as weapons) is unbelievably fun. Which brings me to:

4. Humor. This game has some really funny moments. I almost busted a gut when I ran out of heavy/sharp things to fire at zombified creatures that were teaming up on me in close quarters. I desperately pulled over a large can of paint, fired, and splattered huge gobs of white paint all over their (now more upset) faces. I died, but I died laughing. And finally:

5. Immersion. The screams were obvious signs of immersion, but beyond that, I noticed myself making facial expressions of anger, empathy, anticipation...all throughout the game I found myself genuinely caring. That's a first for me.

I really could go on and on, but I can't, literally, I fear that dawn isn't far from my window and I'd like to pretend that I myself won't be a zombie tomorrow.

Enjoy,

Christian Hunter
Santa Barbara, California

Buy the regular edition

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 400 / 517
Date: November 21, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This review is for the collectors edition only (the actual game is awesome).

The collector's edition - quite frankly - is a rip-off!

To make sure you understand what you are getting:
1) Half Life 2 - The game
2) Half Life 1 Remake using the new Source Engine
3) Counter Strike Remake using the new Source Engine
4) Prima Official Hint Book
5) A T-Shirt

The game itself is awesome, no questions asked. The remake of Half Life 1 is cool too, but you can download that for free when you buy the regular version of Half Life 2. The same is true for CS. So basically, you get a t-shirt (which is actually a nice shirt) and the prima thingy.

The Prima book IS NOT THE STRATEGY GUIDE! Instead, it is a tiny booklet with excerps from the strategy guide and the "making of" book ("Raising the bar"). It is an advertisement for these two books at best and by itself almost completely useless.

So basically, you are paying an extra 30 bucks for a t-shirt. Oh, but perhaps you want the nice big box? Think again! The box itself is crappy both in quality and in design. In fact, at first I thought the box got damaged and mangled during shipment, but it didn't. It just looks that bad!

This is probalby the worst collector's edition of any game I have ever seen. It delivers little value, unless you want a t-shirt. It doesn't even have a printed game manual for crying out loud!

This is the REVIEW area, not the promotion area.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 114 / 164
Date: June 03, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Why the hell are people REVIEWING this game when it's not even out yet?? Now when it finally does come out, people will look at the currently 56 or so 5 star reviews and think it's a great game when it might not be. Amazon needs to prohibit people from reviewing until a product is released, if not what in the hell is the purpose of this section??

Warning - Steam licence agreement

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 41 / 44
Date: November 16, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I did buy the game but I did not play it. So I cannot comment on the game itself.

I can only advise everyone to have a close look at the Steam licence agreement. You are required to sign it before you can install the game.

The licence agreement tells you that by signing it you open a subscribe account. It also says that for some services - that are not specified - they may charge you - how much it does not say either.

You are not told what services you get for free. In the extreme you will be charged for all services.

As far as the conditions for the termination of your account are concerned you are referred to the steam homepage. There you do not find any information on termination. Neither do you find an email adress for further questions.

So I contacted Valve. They did not answer.

Maybe you will get an answer to all those questions if you sign the agreement - but then you have already opened the account without knowing what you will get, what it will cost you and how to terminate it.

If you can still run the game after terminating the agreement I do not know.

On the box you are only told that you need an internet connection to run the game. There is no hint that you have to open a steam account to play it.

As for me - I will give the game back to my dealer tomorrow with a big complaint. I am not willing to accept those marketing practices - no matter how good the game is. Valve has lost a customer.

Activation terrorism

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 20 / 20
Date: January 07, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The game is great, no doubt about it. However, if you are behind a router (e.g., on a home network or dorm) or -- God forbid -- a proxy server, then be prepared to be blindsided by activation terrorism.
I work for a software company and have no problem with activation. Here, there is a fatal flaw in the connectivity component of the software that makes HL-2 activation an exercise in extreme frustration.
The connectivity/activation portion of the software "Steam" ("...ing Pile") is the stupidist piece of connectivity software to come along in quite a while. It will not -- unlike all the rest of the software in this world -- let you specify a proxy server and it will not pick up any of IE's settings.
The hurdles that people have to jump thru, therefore, are pretty darn high. Just Google "Half-life 2 HTTP tunneling" to see how many hoops and hours you are looking at to get this to work, if you have anything other than your computer directly connected into cable/DSL modem.
Turns out that even the HTTP tunneling workaround didn't work for us -- kept crapping out about half way thru. Final solution was to dig up an old modem and do a dial-up connection. That allowed us to play the game, but even then we had to leave the dial up on for several hours to let the game authenticate for off-line playing (and took a few hours reseaching the 'Net before that, to uncover that that was the final piece of this rather bizzare puzzle).
This is a great game -- but NOT that great. I will go out of my way to steer clear of Valve/Steam games in the future. There are plenty of other fun games to play out there from vendors that don't abuse their paying customers. Suggest others likewise vote with their wallets.

STEAMED over Steam

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 27 / 31
Date: November 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

As some reveiwers have already mentioned, Half-Life 2 requires registration on a program called Steam. Well, to make a long story short, I've spent my entire day salivating over a mere taste of the game I just forked over $55 to play, but instead of battling aliens in City 17, I'm battling network problems that Valve should have anticipated... but that's absurd because I want the single player campaign, and my internet connection (etc etc) shouldn't even be an issue.

Most games average $39.99 new, but no, Valve demanded $55 (as did Doom 3 and Diablo 2 and all those overhyped "we're doing you a favor letting you buy this masterpiece at all" games), and to add insult to injury I can't even play what I paid good money for. I don't know what the game is like, so I can't judge it -- but I can vent my frustration, as others have done (and are doing in increasing numbers), by informing potential buyers of all the pains that come with owning Half-Life 2. You shouldn't have to jump hoops when you've already paid, and to say I'm "steamed" (forgive the pun) is quite an understatement.

I'm showing Valve how much I appreciate this mess by selling my copy of Half-Life 2 and turning my back on it. I don't care how great PC Gamer thinks it is -- my principles of a consumer demand it.

Wow!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 43 / 59
Date: November 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

As far as I'm concerned, a game is nothing special unless it has a story.

The use of story was what made the original "Half-Life" revolutionary to the FPS world. The story was top priority, THEN the mass quantities of aliens to blow up and all the things that go with it. Compare this to, say, anything by Id Software or the "Serious Sam" series, which are fun games in their own right but have absolutely no substance to them. You get a bunch of ridiculous weapons and blow up wave upon wave of humanoid monsters ("Serious Sam" was better about making enemies unique, but still the same idea.)

"Halo" had a story, but.. I'll be honest. I thought it was boring, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I have no interest in its sequel, either.

Anyway. "Half-Life 2".

You see, the Source engine succeeds where "Doom 3" fails. Basically, Id Software has used the same engine for every single one of their games, and by the time we got to "Doom 3" it was so bloated that you can only barely run it on minimum graphics even on a computer that has double all of the minimum system requirements.

Trust me. That's my computer right there.

The Source engine is an entirely new, streamlined engine that means I can run it on absolute maximum graphics--which, by the way, are above and beyond anything "Doom 3" can give you--on the same computer that will only barely run "Doom 3". The physics system is incredible: anything and everything a normal human could pick up can be picked up. Anything and everything a normal human could change can be changed in ways that it could normally be changed--seriously, I giggled like a schoolgirl after finding out that I could break a cardboard box and it'll unfold, or that I could knock over a table.

Until "Far Cry", "Deus Ex" was the only game that had anything close to this level of interactivity, in which you aren't encouraged at all to simply play the game but to experience it--experiment, try things. Can I pick up that barrel and throw it at that soldier? Why, yes I can! Can I pick up that little wooden platform and throw it? Why, yes I can, and it even catches the wind like it should! Wow!

I will admit that installing the game was a bit of a hassle. Nevermind the fact that, because it's a whopping 4.5 gigs and spans five CDs, it took about thirty minutes simply to install. But then you have to go through what, I think, is Valve's way of avoiding another premature leak of the likes that delayed this game in the first place; you have to go online to register it, after which the Steam servers will unlock the files. All four and a half gigs of them. Because the server was so overloaded last night, it was about an hour before I could play the game.

I played it for about eight hours straight and the only reason I stopped was because I had to go to bed. It's that freakin' good.

This blows "Doom 3" and the original "Halo" clear out of the water. I don't know how it'll hold up against "Halo 2" because, well, I don't intend on playing it in the first place because I thought the original was boring.

"PC Gamers" gave this a 98%--the highest rating they have ever given any game, ever. It's being called "the best game ever made".

Why don't you buy it and find out why for yourself?

"Halo 2" fans, you've one heck of a game to beat here.

Five stars.

Very disapointed

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 20 / 21
Date: November 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I've waited a long time for this game and picked it up yesterday. The game took 30 minutes to install, which is fine. But then this stream server wants to connect to it's web site and I spent another hour over a 56k connection unlocking my half life 2 files. Even after all this I could still not play the game. When I clicked on the play game button I was told it would take another 19 minutes till I could start to play. The doc said about clicking remember my password to play offline, which I never saw. I don't like spending $55 for a game to be made to feel like a criminal. I never even played this game, since it would not let me. I'll be taking the game back for a full refund. I will not support these kind of games. This may be a great game with great graphics, but I was never able to find out.

Steam activation process like a digital root canal

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 34 / 44
Date: November 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Do Not Buy This Game. I repeat; Do Not Buy This Game!
It is completely unacceptable to be placed on digital hold before I can start playing a game I bought for $55.
Bad enough when those Valve d***heads rolled out this steam garbage. Now, you have to buy the game, update it online, register, and be online to play?
I checked their support site, thinking, "Well, there must be a way to play offline now that I am registered." Instead, their support site lists a helpful tip to disable your NIC, make Steam think that you have no LAN, then enable it again.
I have a better workaround; I won't buy another product that uses steam, and you shouldn't either.
Hey valve, I promise you no-one will pirate THIS copy, because I am throwing it in the trash. 5 hours of install crap to drive a poorly rendered jetski in the sewers? Controls are so sloppy, I felt like I was steering just after Seann William Scott shot a tranq dart in my neck.
Halflife was one of the best games I have ever played.
What exactly were you all doing for the last 4 years?
Halflife 2 is good, but not good enough after your crappy authentication scheme.
Congratulations; you have ruined this title for me.

Very, very disappointed...!!!!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 22 / 25
Date: November 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

"Steam", I hate you. I don't say much more, just: save your money!!!!!

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