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Argh

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: December 29, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I've lost count of the number of times I wanted to throw this game out my window.

First, the lengthy battle with Steam (ggrrrr...). After finally installing the game, I played for several hours and was absolutely amazed at the graphics quality, but then frustration with the stupid puzzles set in. These are not interesting puzzles, but rather the, oh, I didn't see that little grate hidden in the corner in the last hallway. I eventually gave up on some of the puzzles and downloaded a walkthrough in anticipation of some action later in the game. After hours of crawling through sewers the pace finally picked up. Then, my friends came over and wanted to check it out, but they loaded up levels from the middle of my autosaves, which for some reason wiped out my later saves, forcing me to play for about an hour to catch up. Also unpleasant were the periodic stutters that lasted around 15 seconds and essentially froze the game. Things finally did start to get interesting toward the end, with rebels joining up with me to battle the police. I find it ironic that the bastards who wrote Steam made a game about hippy looking rebels fighting uber-police. Someone needs to make a mod that swaps all the police graphics with valve logos. After having finished the game (I spent $55, I had to play it through), I can say with certainty that I'm never playing it again. At least my cursing provided my friends with entertainment.

Best FPS Ever Horrible Install Very Buggy

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: January 06, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Five Stars for the game fun factor if you can eventually get it loaded and bugless but unfortunately really deserves the one star overall because of the horrible, horrible installation requirements and because of many awful installation specific bugs that grossly interfere with game play.
The game itself truly is excellent, with the graphics, game play, controls all setting new standards. I personally don't like the plot and setting as much as the first Half Life and find it unnecessarily dark and depressing and I thought the ending was a little abrupt and unsatisfying, but in comparison with Doom 3 it is really a fun romp. Truly a great game.
As to the really bad part. I am a computer programmer and have half a dozen assorted computers. I spent 16 hours trying to get a working install on My new XPS with PCI express buss and 256mb ATI ultra video board. The Steam On line install system is a mess!!!! First it insists on installing Steam, then an update (over one hour on Dial up), then decrypting another hour plus. then registering and the list goes on. Then when it's done it doesn't work. I get a disk not installed message. So OK go to steam and planet half life web site and look at bug FAQs I find one that tells me if I get this message I need to uninstall my Sonic DVD driver and reinstall Half Life 2. I don't really want to remove my Sonic Driver, but I do and way and spend another four hours reinstalling Half Life. This time, up comes the starting half life 2 message, but half life 2 never comes up either on or off line. So I go back and look at the rest of the FAQs, all 170 of them, NONE of which cover my problem. I try one more remove and reinstall of Half Life 2- four more hours. Same result. Finally give up and go and install it on my old Dell Inspiron Lap top four more hours. Works perfectly Play game in standard mode and works perfectly. But wait there's more. On a hunch I try a remove and reinstall one more time on my XPS system four more hours, this time removing Steam as well as Half Life 2 first and it works fine and I play it through on Hard mode and it is HARD. You'd think I'd be done now, but no there's more. I though I'd play the redone Half Life Source through on hard mode since I'd only originally done it in standard mode and it should have been all installed when I installed Half Life 2 right, wrong , three more hours installing Half Life Source and it works, well, sort of. Each time you start the game it works fine for the first ten or fifteen minutes, then it starts taking little fifteen second breaks (picture and sound freeze) every minute or two. After another ten minutes or so, the breaks stretch to 30 seconds and after another ten or fifteen minutes they stretch to 45 seconds, eventually reach more time frozen than playing (within an hour of starting each time. I sort of recall from the FAQs that there is a fix dealing with this that is accomplished by disabling the advanced stereo features of your sound card and you guessed it reloading all of Half Life 2 and Source from scratch again, but some how that wasn't too appealing to me any more so I played it through in hard mode as it was freezes and all. Half Life Source is still low poly but appears to be substantially improved over the original Half Life and is really quite hard in Hard mode.
Last level Half Life Source strategy. For the Nihilanth, go into the level with your rocket launcher armed and take out the 3 crystals on the wall before you are dumped to the ground then immediately run behind the spiky rock nearest the wall and snipe at fatheads head and brain till he dies. In hard mode getting hit with the white balls is equivalent to instant death and the green ball sends you to a really unfriendly space avoid them both at all costs. Skip the jump onto the ledge thing in this version.
The games are both great, but Valve has made such an utter hash of the installation procedure and of leaving in totally unacceptable bugs that they should be boiled in oil or stuck in with their own Nihilanth. They have made this mess because of getting their code ripped off last year and are making their paying customers now pay for their own stupidity then. I would really like to see a Half Life 3, but at this point, I would really prefer to see Valve go broke instead.
A final thought is skip the limited edition, it is truly not worth it. The supplied Prima Guide is a joke only covering the entry to the game and is really an add for Prima guides I wouldn't use one anyway and the supplied shirt is uninteresting in the extreme. The DVD ROM Version is the only thing of value that is supplied and it isnt worth thirty bucks more than the CD version.

The Steam idea is terrible.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: December 30, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I overlooked the one review that rated this game as a one Star game, and paid the price. I have never been as frustrated as I was while trying to install this game, but this one took the cake. The experiance with Steam is absolutly terrible. This is the worst way to sell a game. Forcing a person to wait 2 hours to play a game, one that costs a lot of dough, is a sin. I will never own another Valve game ever. I have played hundreds of games and been pleased with most results, I am not hard to please and am very patient, but after almost two hours of trying to play Half-life 2, I gave up, took the game off my computer and sent it back. All in the same day of receiving it!!! Never again.

Steamed

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 17
Date: November 23, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Internet life is already intrusive enough. Enter the second major accomplishment from Valve/Vivendi, Half Life 2. Although I too felt Half Life was perhaps the best PC game ever, I will never know if Half Life 2 lives up to its predecessor. The prototypical corporate parasite, Steam, has finally crossed the line with its blatantly intrusive requirement for internet registration. It's already nearly impossible to keep your computer free from insidious spyware, SPAM, unsolicited e-mails and other advertising and hacking headaches. Now, an icon for superb gameplay stoops to a new low for unnecessary corporate harassment: STEAM. I was so appalled by the registration process to play the SINGLE player game that I have returned my software for a full refund.

Congratulations to those ignorant enough not to know any better or stupid enough not to care. I hope you are enjoying your game, while the corporate ad machine whittles away at your right to privacy and solitude.

"There's a sucker born every minute." - P.T. Barnum

junk

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 17
Date: December 02, 2004
Author: Amazon User

should never been released all kinds of problems with there steam thing and game they say they are working on patchs at 54$ you would think you could get a game that would not crash on you can,t beleave they can get away with it

A cool game that is flawed beyond belief

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 12 / 17
Date: December 07, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Half Life 2 could have been an all around excellent game. Unfortunately its flaws bring it down into the levels of mediocrity for many players.

First off, let's start with the bugs in this game. No matter what brand processor, motherboard, videocard, or soundcard you have, no matter how fast your system is, there is a very good chance you will suffer from crashes, sound stuttering, and frequent 5-10 second freezes in this game. There are many things Valve will tell you is wrong with your system that is causing the problem, but in the end it is a problem with their programming of the source engine - which has some unforseen compatibility problems with a wide spectrum of hardware. Valve has still not delivered a satisfactory patch addressing the bugs in the game.

Next up is inefficient shader programming. Though the game runs beautifully on modern Nvidia GeForce 6600/6800 videocards, at max detail, buyers with older cards are not so lucky. If you have a GeForce FX 5200/5600/5900 card, you will be forced into using a lower quality DirectX 8.1 mode even though the GeForce FX supports DirectX 9.0. This is because Valve coded the shaders inefficiently, and failed to use partial precision (FP16) in their game unlike all the other DirectX9 games available. By using a mixed precision path, which Valve stated would be in the game and benchmarked over a year ago, they could have made DirectX9 available to owners of older GeForce FX cards. However, much like the rest of the game, the graphic implementation here appears rushed, and again we have less than desirable results for a large amount of people. So don't expect anything approaching the best quality unless you have the latest $300 videocard.

But the disappointment does not end there. Most games you type in your CDKEY, hit install, wait a 10 minutes, and you are done. Not Half Life 2. After doing the initial standard 10 minute cdkey/install, you then have to install a program called steam on your hard drive and setup an online account. This takes another 10 minutes. After you have setup the steam account, you then have to wait for the files to be decrypted on your hard drive. This takes about 30-45 minutes for the games on the CE. So now you are talking an hour+ just to install the game. You think, boy, after all that, it must be real easy to play, right? No way. You have to keep the CD in the drive like any other game, and on top of that you have to launch the steam program, wait for it to connect to the internet, then you can play Half Life 2 - every time you play the game. There is a hassle you can go through to play HL2 offline, but you still have to install, activate, and decrypt the files on steam at least once. Major, major, major intrusive pain in the rear that no buyer of a retail CD should have to endure. This is a case where anti-piracy measures have hurt the consumer more than the pirates.

If you are not fed up with the game after the long and intrusive install, the missed opportunity in terms of graphic performance, and the bugs that may bring your game to a grinding halt on a frequent basis, then you may actually enjoy this game. But that's a *big* if.

Proceed with caution with this title. What could have been a great gaming experience has been marred by sloppy general programming & bugs, inefficient graphics programming for older graphics cards, and a horribly intrusive and painful install procedure that persists past the install and into your gameplaying experience. If you think you can deal with these issues, this is definitely a cool game. On the other hand, you just might want to skip it and go for Doom3, which is just as fun and doesn't have all the technical issues this game does.

Might be 5 Stars if it worked.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 11
Date: January 10, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I would have given this game a zero if I could. I could not install the game. I spent hours online reading work arounds for various errors but not for error 1305 which I had. I tried to unzip the file from the disc and the file was corrupted. I got the game on 12/25 and e-mailed VU games the same day for help. Three days later I got an e-mail back telling me to try all the things I had already done. I replied that it still didn't work. I never heard from them again. After two weeks of owning this game I returned it without ever being able to install it. I will never buy a VU game again.

Out $54.00

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 13
Date: February 15, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Played game for about a month, then suddenly steam doesn't recognize my PW. Nothing works. I can even access steam support via my browser and steam will confirm my username & PW, but when I try to log on through steam no go. Emails to steam support get no response. My game is now being held hostage by steam. Even before this happened long load times and constant freezes took much of the fun out of the game. Too bad, HL-2 could've been a great game, but as it is don't waste your money.

Played it at a friends...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 13
Date: December 03, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Maybe I was just not in the mood or something but this game dissapointed me alot. First of all, I've only played through maybe half of the game and the story so far has been just okay. At first it seemed interesting as it seems to pick up right where HL1 ends, but overall I was really expecting alot more.

The level designs seem great but it feels like there is never alot of time to explore and take it all in. The water effects are pretty cool. I must say though that you'll really want to run this on a high-end card to take advantage of anti-aliasing as the game looks just horrible with all it's pixelation. The character design and animation is okay, there is a great ambience to the game, but like I said it's like you never have time to appreciate it.

The sounds are good, but there is a serious bug where it stutters alot. They may have fixed it allready but it was very annoying.

Loading times are just horrible. Never before have I had to wait for such a long time inbetween levels (which are relatively short btw) This is what really turned me off, it just got way too boring - perhaps this is a big reason why the story and environments had less effect on me. I mean, come on! I could've beaten doom episode 1 in the time it sometimes takes!

Physics are nice, but nothing that hasn't been seen before.

Overall there isn't anything *NEW* about this game. It's probably a good sequal and all but to me my first impression so far has just been horrible. I can only imagine the pains my friend went through just to INSTALL and REGISTER the game! He said it took a couple days of hours and hours of waiting to sort out - and that's just bad! The publishers who decided steam would be required should've respected loyal custumers a bit more, it's like a big insult, and more then likely just makes hackers happy as it creates a bigger *PROBLEM* for them to solve.

Expensive and disappointing

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 13
Date: November 22, 2004
Author: Amazon User

While I agree with the other reviewers' criticisms of the cripplingly annoying copy-protect scheme attached to this game, I won't dwell on that part of the experience. It's the game itself that disappointed me.

Half-Life was a great experience because of its wonderful atmospherics. The gameplay was adequate and the graphics were a little dated, but few complained about them because the game unfolded as a wonderfully immersive story. Players didn't just run through the game, but also spent a lot of time exploring the maps and just enjoying the scenery.

Half-Life 2 is a different kettle of fish. While it has a great beginning, it quickly devolves into a hypercaffeinated sprint through maps you only dimly perceive (your attention being elsewhere), and there are few places in the game where you can stop and admire all the wonderful artwork. (And it is wonderful indeed.) The bad guys in the aptly named "root canal" early segment of the game are really, really annoying. More annoying than Barney the dinosaur. Like cockroaches in a dirty apartment, it doesn't matter how many of them you kill, new ones will almost instantly spawn in the same spots. Forever. There's not much sightseeing in this game.

My impression of the game is that it's pitched at a slightly younger crowd than the original game, and is meant to be a non-stop, mostly brainless shooter. Sure, there's a story, but it's not remotely of the same quality as the original game. And there are puzzles, but the main challenge is developing the dexterity to run/jump/climb through the rooms while killing the endless swarms of enemies that harrass you. The old paradigm is dead. Since the gameplay is identical to the original Half-Life, the only area of improvement is the graphics, which everyone agrees are pretty fancy. The sound is good too, when it's not stuttering. However, better graphics and sound don't counterbalance the absence of the same quality of fun the original game offered.

In short -- if you're looking for a game that's a real heir to the original Half-Life, look elsewhere.

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