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Half-Life 2 Gets Episode 1
Valve has announced that, instead of entitling their first downloadable mini-expansion to Half-Life 2 'Aftermath', the pack is now simply Episode 1. From the Gamespot article: "When asked whether the name change is indicative of a change in direction for the Half-Life 2 franchise, Valve marketing director Doug Lombardi replied, 'episodic.' When asked the follow-up question of whether the new name meant that beginning of a regular flow of content, Lombardi replied, 'yes.'"
I would just like to remind people that earlier interviews noted that retail stores would sponser "episode packs," a combination of 3-4 episodes, rather than each individual episode.
Not that I plan on buying retail, but I thought I'd just throw out that possibility just to freakout the retail buyers.
Demented But Determined.
Yeah, yeah, if only Half Life 2 didn't require an Internet connection to play a single-player game . Most people who buy it probably don't even realize it, except the hundreds of unlucky souls who bought it the first day and went home only to find out that the activation servers were overloaded.
To clarify, apparently Half Life 2 requires Internet connection even after it has been activated. It needs to talk to its servers at least once every couple of weeks, or ir refuses to start.
I remember reading a complaint from soldiers on a military ship - they didn't have an Internet connection while at sea, so they couldn't play the game. Too bad for them :-)
IIRC, Half Life 2 also requires opening a tunnel through the firewall. Again, this also applies to the single-player version.
This is totally unacceptable and it is really sad that the consumers and game reviewers at large have completely ignored this problem. I am looking forward to the day when the tiered Internet will require people to pay for the single-player game that they bought one year ago...
When will you people realize this isn't the case? Yeah, you need it the first time you install, but after that, you can play with Steam in offline mode. Its not that hard.