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Half-Life 2 Finally Activated
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.
Duke Nukem Forever will be better !!
ahem...
Yeeeeeehaaaaaa!
So much for the rest of this college semester. Between this and Halo2, I'll be lucky if I even come in contact with a female during the next 3 months...
I've seen a number of reviews say that Half-Life 2 is the best FPS of all time. After playing it even for only the hour that I have (I have a Social Psychology mid-term tomorrow morning ;), I can tell you that it is, hands down.
I have to commend Valve for doing it right. They didn't rush. They didn't over-hype. They didn't fuck it up. =)
I believe Valve deserves a round of applause. Half-Life 2 is a masterpiece.
*Applause*
You still can't play it without connecting to steam during the installation.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I remember all the previews and special edition magazines that had the same theme, "Who will come out on top: Halo 2, Doom 3, or Hal-Life 2?"
To be honest, I was rooting for Half-Life 2. I always respected Valve's commitment to their community in their support of their game(s). Halo 2 was more of the same (yet somehow more fun than the first). Doom 3 was pretty, but had the personality of a tray of ice cubes.
I guess what I am trying to say in my own biased way, is, I'm glad I was backing Half-Life 2. So far I am not disappointed.
And by the way, has anyone noticed the excessive use of exploding barrels yet? It's like City 17 is a giant nitro nitro plant and they can't seem to keep track of the product.
I started up Steam precisely at 3:00AM, and had it tell me it was 'unlocking' (decrpyting) the files for the game. Minutes later, I was in game.
I played about 45 minutes when I swore to myself that all I would do is the intro. The game is just plain amazing, and runs pretty damn well on my computer with detail turned up (this is a 1.5 year old laptop).
Been playing it for the last 2 hours, simply Amazing.
;)
AMD 2600/ATI 9700PRO and I'm getting 60-100FPS with 2X AA, at 1024x768. Smooth as silk, fast, and great.
Only problem, Its a tube chaser so far, just run and run and run. But damn if it dont look amazing.
BTW, she looks cute in those Jeans, Good job Valve..
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...
I'm not quite sure how you've got first post then ;)
...So I guess you're a Halo 2 fan?
Couldn't sleep and I was sick of infomercials so I decided I would try this steam thing...seeing as it was unlocked today. I dusted off the copy of HL1 a few months back and got aquainted with steam. Steam got HL1 down and playable on my machine in notime. They must be getting SLAMED. I have 4 meg down and steam (when used for HL1) saturated my bandwidth. As it sits now I bought the game and started downloading it at 4am. It's now 4:45 EST and I have 6% of HL2 downloaded. Ready to play in aprox. 321 minutes. So maybe this stint with insomnia will be spent watching the progress bar. If you are planing to buy HL2 as much as I'd rather the money go to Valve I would have to suggest you get a boxed copy....and leave Valve content server 18 alone...:P
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while installing Valve products, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Valve product that has run faster than its ID counterpart, despite the Valve products faster optimised code. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram installs windows faster than this 800 mhz machine can do Half-Life at times. From an ease of installation standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Valve is a "superior" company.
Valve addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Valve product over other faster, cheaper, more stable games.
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
I was on #halflife2 on IRC for the countdown. Then I started playing. In the hour that I have played Half-Life 2, the only thing I can say is that I am in complete awe.
First off, If you've played CS:Source, you don't even know the half of it. Half-Life 2 is one hell of a single player. It manages to scare you in broad daylight. It scares you not just by monsters, but by the dystopia/authoritarian thing going on. It's really freaking scary.
The voices, facial movements, physics, "Civil Protectorate", it's all awesome. After just one hour, I've forgiven Valve. Half-Life 2 is just as revolutionary as the original Half-Life was. You really have to play it to believe it. I can't even begin to describe in words the euphoria and the terror it strikes in your heart.
Not bad for a company's second game.
Without a proper flamewar, Anonymous was undecided on what shell to run.
Replying to my own post incase anyone else has this same problem:
Apparently steam didnt download all the files. What files are missing varies from machine to machine. Valve is working on a fix.
Official GOD FAQ.
You sure he wasn't accidently playing Half Life : Source?
The problem with working at an IT company, is all the managers know HL2 just got released.
:)
Time to take some leave I think.
East Coast Brewers
I feel like I am truly alive for the first time ever. It's like my life itself was finally fully activated at midnight PST on November 16th, 2004. Infanthood, toddlerhood, preschool, elementary school, middle school, puberty, high school, these were just pre-loads.
And the opening train ride took less than 10 minutes! Thank you, Valve!
So mygame kept crashing loading the very first level. I wanted to cry. Not knowing what to do, I did the only geek thing I could think of: I simply posted my tears on Shacknews. But within minutes a Valve guy showed up asking if he could help. Then Erik Johnson himself popped in and started troubleshooting. I practically had Valve guys fighting over who could help me fix the problem first. And all this at like 2am in the morning. That's some pretty sweet support kids: they tracked ME down instead of me having to beg them to help.
The only reason I am typing this is because during the first 30 min my system locked while playing - I had to hard reset. No big deal (I am one of those dangerous overclockers ;)
But *WOW* This game has already destroyed Doom 3 in the FIRST HALF HOUR OF PLAY!
You will excuse me, I have uh, important uh, stuff to uh, go and do now...
*starts steam again*
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
...did they have to release HL2 on my girlfriend's birthday.
Now I'll be looking over a candle in a romantic restaurant picturing gordon freeman's beardy mug.
I wonder if macdonalds would do...
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.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
The point is that millions of gamers will be left in the cold when they realize the game they just bought is a painful paperweight. Which is exactly how I feel, and I'm sure many others do around the globe at University networks too strict to allow Steam to update. I personally can't believe the lack of proxy options on Steam so we could have at least activated the freakin' game!
my band is more brutal techno punk than yours
The first Half-life only stuck around so long because there were so many mods for it.. Valve has surely made HL2 mod-friendly (I think the SDK has been out for at least a month), so if you're tired of the original game, there will be several more new ones you can play for free.
And what the hell am I going to do with that? Does it at least run in wine/cedega? Or does it look like this:
- Half Live 2: 59$
- Windows: 250$
- Having to repartition harddisk: fuck you.
Even the additional cost of windows (Microsoft-Tax), is very discouraging, but the general behaviour of said operating system raises the cost even more. I can't for instance just install windows on the third disk.
--
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
Here are some videos of me playing (captured with fraps, encoded in DiVX):
Half Life 2 Opening Sequence up to security guard interrogation (4m 56 sec, 36.1mb)
Half Life 2 Chapter 1 "Point Insertion" up to beginning of Chapter 2 "Red Flag Day" (19m 25s, 120mb)
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.
Water looks sweet, but the humans look a bit flat compared with the dynamic shadowy bump-mapped goodness of Doom 3.
Maybe I'm just biased because this bloody game is Windows-only.
Don't you hate meta-sigs?
actually I think the half-life humans look like crap. It's their skin - there's no pores and it's too smooth. Doom 3 did a whole lot better representing humans, though there wasn't many of them.
However, I haven't played the game, and if the animations are done properly it may account for the bad texturing.
tell 'em you shit your pants, no-one ever wants to check that one.
sadly I can verify that
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Now it has taken ALMOST 2 hours since this came online, and no other stories in slashdot coming. Is this coincidence, or is there some correlation between those too.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
6 more hours at work before I can get home. This is going to be the slowest day ever...
Dude, 6 hours is nothing. I accidentally marked the wrong date on my calendar for Half-Life release, and spent Sunday afternoon anticipating it. Midnight came and I was ready to burst, but then I was wondering why it wasn't activated. Then I noticed I was off by 24 hours ;(
Is it Valve's fault if you cannot read?
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
It's because ever since that creepy mannequin arm in Tresspasser, I've yearned to be able to bitchsmack dinosaurs with more and more realistic physics!
It's been a long time.
Actually, what a 1st world country centric view you have. Many people I know have PC's at home, but only have Internet access from the office. That is how they post to /. :)
:)
Even dialup is still VERY expensive in a lot of countries when you factor in ISP costs, minimum term contracts and metered phone calls. And believe it or not, millions of gamers live in these countries. So yeah, millions of gamers out in the cold sounds about right
But don't worry, he respawns!
Hahahaha Steam is so slashdotted...
Oh wait... maybe it's not slashdot, I suppose it's *MAYBE* possible it's the million people trying to download multimegabyte files to activate HL2?
Naaa... gotta be slashdot.
Yes, there is a backup option. You select what you want to backup then it asks you what media you are going to put it on. It then creates files of appropriate size.
The cd you buy from the store is basically a backup of the steam cache files without a hl2 executable to run the game.
Any decent AAA game has extensive modding capabilities and Epic have done well in encouraging mod-makers to expand upon UT2004. The NVidia-sponsored "Make Something Unreal" competition has resulted in some really impressive mods, from Alien Swarm to Red Orchestra and UnWheel, Clone Wars add to the fun. Hell - there is even a Golf game built on UT2004. Doom III will get it's top quality mods given time but for now UT2004 will continue to command my Linux gaming attention.
And while I spare a thought for Half life 2, I'm not going to fret too much. If Valve doesn't want my gaming money I'll continue shovelling cash towards Epic, id software, Grimm Software, Garage Games, Epic Interactive, Running With Scissors and any other company out there who feels that Linux gaming is worth the trouble.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
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.
1. Yes, for online games. Single player and LAN games don't require you to be logged into Steam.
2. Presumably you can do this using offline mode. Of course, you must authenticate the game during installion on each PC--so your little brother will have access to your Steam account, and will be able to get you banned from online play (say, by cheating).
More annoying, Steam has to be run as an administrator. When will Windows programmers get it through their thick heads that this is not a good idea! *sigh*.
I PAID FOR THE GAME. I AUTHORIZED THE GAME AND UPDATED STEAM (ANOTHER 20MB IN ADDITION TO THE 5 CD'S.) I UPDATED HL2 TODAY (ANOTHER 20MB) SO I COULD FINALLY PLAY IT. I CLOSED MY CONNECTION (I DO NOT LIKE MY GAMING PC ONLINE.) I DOUBLE, TRIPLE, QOUDROUPLE, ETC, ETC, CHECKED MY SETTINGS SO I COULD PLAY IN "OFFLINE" MODE. I CANNOT. THE EXACT ERROR IS ...
Steam - Error
This operation cannot be completed when Steam is in offline mode.
I will never buy VALVe software again, I don't care if they make a game where Trent Reznor comes to my house to party while Britney Spears* gives you head if you buy the game.
*fill in your hot chick/guy
AGAIN, I PAID FOR THE F'IN GAME.