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Half-Life 2 Finally Activated

Posted by timothy on from the this-is-a-video-game-apparently dept.

Thomas Scovell writes "After over half a decade of development, stolen source code debacle, a promised deadline that was missed by a year, and a feud between the developer and the publisher that is still in court, Half-Life 2 has finally started to activate for those who have purchased online via Steam online or who grabbed the boxed version at the retailers that let it slip early. Go play!" Reviews are available via Gamespot, Gamespy, HomeLAN Fed, and IGN.

5 of 736 comments (clear)

  1. why $49.99? by vaylen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't understand why downloading it through Steam costs $49.99 when you can get it from places like http://www.yesasia.com/ for $39.99. I thought using Steam was going to cut out the middle man and save the buyer money while also increasing Valve's profits. So much for their great idea of direct downloading...

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  2. Re:Infidel by HeghmoH · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As for replayability being your major factor for buying games. What a weird choice. Do you only watch movies wich you can watch over and over again?

    He probably only buys movies that he can watch over and over again, like most people I know. Normally when somebody wants to watch a once-only movie, they rent it or watch it in a theater. These are not generally options for games.

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    Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
  3. Re:The 3 way battle: Halo, Doom, HL by Zilquis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Far Cry beat them all to it

  4. Planned Obsolence by Lucky_Norseman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As soon as the server is taken down, no one will ever be able to install HL2 again.

    Thus copyright on HL2 is forever.

    And as soon as they want their users to switch to HL3 they can pull the plug on HL2.

  5. Steam Must Die by koreth · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I played the game for an hour or so before I went to bed last night. Wanted to play it again this morning, but I made the idiot mistake of disconnecting from Steam in the meantime. Now (presumably because their servers are getting hammered by thousands of users) I can't connect to the Steam server at all. Which means I can't get to the list of games. Which means I can't play the goddamn single-player game I paid $60 for and that's sitting on my computer, already unencrypted.

    When I try to launch the Half-Life 2 executable on its own, I get an error that it can't find filesystem_stdio.dll, which indeed does not exist anywhere on my hard disk. There is a filesystem_steam.dll, though. How helpful!

    Is this what I have to look forward to? Buying a game and being able to maybe play it from time to time, whenever their servers happen to be up and not too terribly busy? Way to go, guys.

    I can understand requiring Steam for multiplayer. Fine. No problem at all with that. But I should not need to connect to their servers every time I want to fire up the game on my own.

    The first hour of my experience with this game was incredible. So far, the second hour of my experience is frustrating, annoying, and completely dissatisfying.