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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.

Worst game I Never played

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 41 / 119
Date: November 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

HL2 is now officially the worst game I NEVER got to play. I bought the CD version of the game in a local retail shop and trie to install it. After sitting through 5 CDs worth of installation, it then goes online and asks me to create an account with something called Steam - after which I am informed I will be able to authenticate my CD key and "unlock" the game.

Well it is now 7 hours later and Steam is still only 35% finished. I am going to stop the installation and delete it, then return this junk to the local retail store. It baffles me that after I legitimately purchased a copy of what could have been the greatest game ever, that I have to go through this kind of frustration. Not only have Valve lost me as a customer for this release, but for all future releases. Unbelievable.

For those of you interested in the current state of affairs of lots of other users, check the forums over at steam:

http://www.steampowered.com/forums/

SPYWARE AND ADWARE ALERT! Valve thinks YOU are a criminal.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 38 / 55
Date: January 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I'm about ready to cut up the CD's into little sharp pieces and mail them to Valve, with explicit instructions on what they can do with them, and with their game.

Great game, blah blah blah, read the other reviews. Yes, it's outstanding, but it's definitely not worth the aggravation, or the insult. To get it running, I had to endure the longest, most frustrating, and most invasive software installation in the history of gaming. I question whether anything short of a fully functional Star Trek Holodeck could possibly be worth the aggravation of this experience.

It took me two and a half hours to install the game. Seven, maybe eight minutes to transfer the files to my hard drive; then four or five minutes to extract the files for installation. So far, so good. Then the fun part started - well over two more hours, all of it online: uploading (what?), downloading (what?), and waiting my turn in the Valve queue for the server to give me permission to proceed to the next interminable step. After twenty minutes of unidentified data moving back and forth between my PC and Valve's server, I began to ask myself, "At what point will they permit me to play the game I paid good money for?" I asked that question again at thirty minutes, again at forty, again at an hour...you get the idea. Many, many megabytes of data passed back and forth, and Valve has done God Knows What to my system. Spyware? Could be. Trojans? They won't say. Reformatting my PC to be a transfer node for illegal pictures? I'm ready to believe it.

To add insult to injury, a shell program (appropriately named "Steam," because that's what it produces on the back of my neck) connects to Valve's server when you turn your computer on. That's right: Valve assumes you're a criminal, and treats you accordingly. They want you under their watchful eye, even when you're playing the single-player version, even when you're not playing at all. They've created, within their own little virtual universe, a surveillance state mirroring the one in the game (John Ashcroft and his replacement, that Gonzales thug, would be proud). I wouldn't be a bit surprised to see a flycam show up over my desk.

OK, you've got the game installed and running - now you can play the game and ignore Steam, right? Wrong! Every couple of weeks, you're forced to go online for a large download, the visible portion of which merely updates Steam and its ad server - which is placed, for your convenience, right on your desktop (how thoughtful!). What the rest of the download accomplishes is, of course, unknown. As far as I'm concerned, the Steam shell is nothing but spyware and adware.

Last year (or was it the year before?), Valve got robbed. I was sorry (then), and sorrier still when that robbery further postponed the already long-delayed release of Half-Life 2. In their zeal to protect themselves, however, Valve has created a despicable monster. Hard to believe, but Microsoft now has serious competition in the customer-enragement market. I hope the pirates rob Valve blind and put them out of business. No, I hope Valve gets sacked by the Visigoths, burned to the ground, their source code distributed free on street corners, and the owners sold as slaves to China, processing spent plutonium with their teeth. It's better than they deserve.

Bottom line: a truly terrific game, but I will never, ever, *EVER* buy another Valve product. I'll keep my money, and they can keep their Holodeck.

I'm going to try to play my game now. Maybe I'll get lucky, and Steam will let me.

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.

More BS delays

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 29 / 59
Date: June 23, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I love how when you review a game on Amazon, it asks you how much fun it is based on 1-5 stars.
FUNNY HOW IT ISNT OUT YET, ONLY A SELECT FEW OF YOU MAY HAVE ACTUALLY PLAYED AN ADVANCED BETA COPY OF THE GAME, AND YOU'RE ALL GIVING IT 5 STARS!!!
Why not wait till you actually have a copy of the game in your hands (like that will ever happen any time soon) to write a review. Hell, if you're gonna review this game, while you're at it, you might as well write a review for HL 3 at the same time. Get a jump posting a pointless opinion on something else you've never played.
Wouldnt it be ironic if this game sucked as much as the infinite amount of pointless delays. Alright, Im bored with this. Im done. Enjoy reviewing your game.

Buyer Beware!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 28 / 36
Date: November 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I'm sure you've heard a lot of great reviews about this game, but before you throw away $50+ dollars, you should be aware of the fact that you may not be able to even play it.

In order to play the game, you are forced to download a program called "Steam." If you're lucky enough to be able to download this program, you must then create an account, and then you have to "unlock" the game.

Maybe you're thinking that these little hurdles are worth it for a game that is supposed to revolutionize the entertainment industry. Well the problem happens when you try to create the Steam Account.

The company's servers are all dead. They've been down all day. So, all across the world there are thousands of players who have purchased perfectly legal versions of the game, but are unable to unlock them. If you'd like to join this group of disgruntled fans, then by all means you should click the add-to-cart button immediately.

But if you think its ridiculous that you have to jump through all these hoops to play a video game, then my suggestion is that you wait for Valve or Vivendi or Steam or whoever is having the server problems to get their act together.

Its a very arduous process to get this game working, and what they've done is probably illegal. When you buy a car, you don't have to drive it to the Ford office to have someone check to make sure that you are actually the purchaser do you? And even if you were willing to put up with that, how would you feel if the road to that office was shut down because of an accident? And if all the employees had gone home? What would you do? Sit in the dealership parking lot staring at your new vehicle?

That's the scenario you'll be dealing with if you purchase HL2. The box art is pretty. It's just too bad you won't be able to unlock the game.

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.

ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 27 / 37
Date: November 17, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game REQUIRES authentication to a Source server to play ON A LOCAL MACHINE. This means that you are slave to Valve and their technical status every time you try to play the game, alone, on your machine. That's bad, because their network SUCKS, and renders this game virtually unplayable. DO NOT BUY IT. Now I see why software pirates do their thing, this is the reason why! And it wiped out my graphics settings, on an XP machine, to the point I had to do a system restore.

STAY AWAY!

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