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HL2, Jump to Lightspeed Demos
HomeLAN has details on newly available demos of two of the most interesting late-2004 releases. The folks over at Valve have released a Half-Life 2 demo, available where you download stuff, and FilePlanet has available a demo version of Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed should you want to try it out for 10 days.
Where's the "Steam, for the most part, fucking rocks, but hell will freeze over before I contribute to its success as an authentication mechanism" option?
If it was quick (and free) to transfer a single game from one account to another, maybe (making separate accounts for each game so they can be transferred to another party is just lame). If they promise to remove all remote authentication schemes from it completely after 5-10 years (perhaps kept in escrow, so they can't renege), maybe. But a system that neatly kills the "pre-loved" market, the buddy system (borrow games from friends), and will eventually stop authenticating new installs (when I get all retro sometime in the future and want to reinstall), can go and get fucked.
I have the original Half-Life (released pre-steam of course), and have since installed Steam for it (free), so I'll be playing the HL2 demo for sure. But I won't buy the full game.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
I've got an old TI4600 and an XP1700+ CPU with only 768mb RAM and it runs really smoothly (certainly better than Doom 3)
Funny, i'm more interested in single player games lately. Don't get me wrong, HL spawned some fine multiplayer games, like Counter Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress and so, but i dunno... maybe i'm getting old or something, but i still preffer playing by myself better sometimes. And it's not like i can't enjoy an online fragfest :) it's just different. I don't know if people were that interested in HL2 as a game or as an engine for mods, which, let's face it, was what kept HL going to this day - i serioulsy don't beleive every single CS fan played HL. Mods it's what made Valve what it is now.
Anyway, i did play HL2, more or less half of it until the end (at a friend's), and it's good. Not the second coming of Christ, just good. The ending completely destroys the game IMHO, and while some parts were funny and incredibly dinamic others were plain boring - just like with the original HL. I honestly had more fun with Doom 3 (yeah, yeah, flame me) and Painkiller. I still would've bought it though (definitely, in fact), if it weren't for Steam. I like to be the owner of what i buy.