Posted: 11/22/2004 4:39:43 PM EDT
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I broke down and bought this game, after I promised myself I wouldn't. Once I got past the mammoth 5 disk install, and the infuriating 10 minute validation process, I finally started playing it. It starts out kinda slow, and gradually picks up. The level I'm in now has all kinds of freaky deaky shit hell bent on killing me lol....it's kinda like being in my own personal zombie movie...it rocks! Some of the old favorite monsters have returned, along with a couple of new ones (so far). I hate those head crab bastards that jump out at you all the time...and they're back. Graphically, it's amazing, although it's taxing my system to the limit. I don't think any game I've played in years...not since System Shock 2...has made me jump or get goose bumps as often as this one, and I can't be more than 15 or 20% done with it. If you even remotely enjoyed the 1st one, you'll love this one. |
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+1. I'm at the point where I'm going after the Citadel... To me, the game now creeps me out. Why? Cause I'm looking at cities and areas not unlike here...and it's devoid of life. It's freaking creepy! They got the lighting SPOT-ON, too. Brilliant lighting. To give an example, Saturday night I was at my buds place (who also plays HL2) and we looked down an alley...orange safety light, etc. It looked exactily like an area we had both just played through. I was half-expecting some leaping zombie skeleton-thing with a headcrab on it's head to start bounding over the shacks and fences...I mean, the game got the physical world attributes perfectly. The physics engine is awesome, etc. Highly, highly recommend it to a gamer who thought Doom 3 was cool, but lacking in story. This picks up where that left off, IMO. |
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I am currently on the dirt buggie with the damn sand spider fly thingys crawling out of the ground and chasing me. Bastards. AMD 64 bit 3000+ with Geforce FX-5100 is working fine. A couple lag hiccups when first starting, but after a couple seconds there is no lag and its smooth as silk. |
It gets fun from there  You'll love the Crane  One thing I discovered around then: Grenades are your friends... ETA: Oh! Also, and this might spoil things so don't read... You WILL need your grav gun. Remember playing catch? Well...you get to play catch some more. Among other things. Hey, just trying to help a brother out... |
| Great game, but I hated the ending. I don't think it was the revolutionary game that so many thought it was going to be. It's got great physics, and great graphics but not FANTASTICAL graphics (maybe fantastic character faces/animations though). Story is pretty lacking and so are the vehicles and weapons (except the gravity gun, which was awesome). WTF is Valve's obsession with using a crossbow as a "sniper" weapon anyway? Overall I'd say it's a 9.2 out of 10. I thought FarCry was better overall, except story/background and in the voice acting area. |
You can make the gravity gun a lot stronger by going into the console and bringing up the gravity gun attributes by typing in physcannon Just type that in (don't press enter) and it will show you a little window under the console with all the gravity gun commands/attributes like max mass, max force, distance, etc. |
More than adequate...I'm playing on a P4 2.5ghz, 1gb ram, Geforce 4 4600 Ti..bought the box in 2001. I'm playing at 1280x1024 with the graphics set on "High". The only problems I have are sound-related stuttering, and thats because of the USB headset. If I play using my SB Live! card, it's smooth as all getout. Two things that'd really help me is more ram (2gb and setting the heap size to 1.5gb would really help I bet) and faster disk (my old 40gb 7200 rpm disk really chugs during cutscenes). |
Actually almost everybody is having that problem, including myself and a buddy of mine, both with great setups. |
| Really? Hm...maybe I need to bump up my glob size then...400mb is what I'm playing at. My bud with 2gb ram doesn't have that problem at all...for him it's all smoothe (and I watched him play for a while, so yah...I'm for-real). I think he has his set at some ungodly huge number. Guess he's caching it all...he only plays with speakers, btw, not headphones. |
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I am also loving Counter Strike Sorce. I have been an avid CS player for a about 4 years now. I played a ton in college. Off and on since last summer when I graduated. It took me a while to get used to it. I was getting my ass kicked constantly, and I am NOT used to getting beat hard at CS. But today it finnaly clicked and I was doing some ass kicking myself. It needs more maps and BOTS!!!! Don't know why they did not include the bot program from CS Condition Zero. Its not a bad bot program. |
I've seen on a couple of gaming related forums/websites that there will be a fix released tomorrow that will supposedly fix the stuttering. |
Actually, no it won't. Well it will, but until Valve comes out with a stuttering patch, most of the high end machines will stutter every 5 seconds like they don't have enough ram. The people with lower to mid range machines are having the best luck with the game. Check this out. It's up to 165 pages and over 1/4 million views. www.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=176237 Think of all the poeple having this issue and not being vocal about it! This is the biggest bug I've ever seen for a game that took 6 years to make and has a $55 price tag. Valve messed up BIG TIME. 
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Only stuttering I have is when it autosaves. If I could figure out how to disable that, i'd be fine. |
This is a bigger issue. People are finding that it's actually the sound that's causing the stutter. On some systems, mainly higher end, it doesn't pre-cache all of the high-end sounds this game has, and so they load on the fly, causing the harddrive and swapfile to pick up the slack. The game basically runs like you don't have much RAM, but when your running a gig or 2 of RAM, that surely isn't the issue. |
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I haven't had the stutter as reported. I do get a few seconds of stutter after the next segment loads, but after that, none. I run a 2 drive RAID 0 through SATA for my primary drive and that's where HL2 is installed, so bandwidth isn't an issue. My MB uses an nForce chipset with 5.1 sound and I have an Radeon 9800 Pro, Win XP PRO/SP2. Again, never had the reported problem. |
Or get a Geforce6800Ultra. mmmmmm... 
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"The GeForce 6800 Ultra performs very similarly to the X800 XT as long as antialiasing and anisotropic filtering are disabled. With those two features enabled, the X800 XT begins to show a performance advantage that is truly seen at 1280 x 1024 and 1600 x 1200 with 4X AA enabled. If you are running with AA disabled, the two GPUs perform very similar to each other. It is only at 1600 x 1200 that the performance becomes somewhat noticeable between the two, as the X800 XT averaged 8% faster than the 6800 Ultra. However, turning on antialiasing and anisotropic filtering gave the X800 XT between a 4 – 20% advantage depending on resolution, which definitely isn’t shabby. " www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2278&p=14 |
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what were you using before? And are you talking about speed difference or texture difference? HL2 will lower the textures and features (like removing some small items like cans, trash, bushes, etc) when there is a card with lower directX compatibility in order to preserve the speed. I'd like to get HL2, but with my current card, I don't want to put up with a game that doesn't look as good as it was meant to look. |
My mouse has three buttons, two regular and one wheel. THe left button shoots, the second real button does the 2nd gun thing (like put the suppressor on the m4) and the mouse wheel cycles through the avaiable weapons on spinning and on click it is set to do a reload. How many buttons does your mouse have? |
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My mouse at home has 4 plus wheel. Just a standard mouse I got at Wal-Mart for probaly around $30-40. Takes getting hit well to. Has 2 on top, and one on each side. I seen them with more then that. I used to have a kickass Logitech trackball but sold it with the computer, and it didnt work well for strategy games. |
Isn't there some input device that is made for this kind of game? maybe it has foot pedals or tracks eye movements or something. I gotta get somethign other than a keyboard... |
Well I used to use a gamepad with one hand for moving and mouse for point/shoot/junp (set so when you push wheel down it reloads). There are also a few special things out there I seen foot pedals and other similar things. Look around here gear.ign.com/hardware.html |
well, unless you want to bind crouch to your mouse, not really. It should be a rule in games that you can crouch be a toggle...hit the key once, and you're down til you hit the key again. I don't know, maybe there's a way to do that in the console? I really don't crouch that much in games that it's an issue for me....only time I can rememer crouching in this game was when you get to the red barn on the airboat level...there's a place upstairs with a nice piece of wood you can crouch and behind as you deal with the 8 or 10 bastards who come in from outside once you get up there. Other than that, I'm running from cover to cover lol. The problem I have is what to bind jump to...in some games, you dont jump much, so it's not an issue...but in multiplayer UT games and stuff, you have to pogo to stay alive. I prefer to have jump on the right mouse button, but alt fire becomes a problem then...too many games now have different fire modes, so it's always a PIA to figure out the best way to map the keys. My basid setup now is the usual asdw, plus: r=reload f=flashlight (or rate of fire in other games) q/re=lean in games that use it, otherwise use it to hotkey weapons shift=crouch space=jump right mouse=alt fire control=game dependent z,x,c,v, b, g, and alt=whatever else I need, also game dependent. If I get really squirrely, I've also got caps lock and tab to play with. That's 16 keys before I mess with caps lock/tab, PLUS the mouse buttons. If I need more than that in an FPS, the game's not very well designed lol. There are some setups that have detached keypads for the left hand, but the ones I've seen didn't look like the had enough keys to be useful. The other problems is some games won't recognize the input from extra mouse buttons, and I hate having to use configuration software to run games. |
In all of the FPS and 3rd person games I play, I set the following controls, which seems to work excellently for me: A - Strafe Left S - Move Forward D - Strafe Right X - Move Back W - Zoom (if available) Z - Crouch C - Prone F - Flashlight G - Grenade R - Reload Left Mouse - Fire Middle Mouse - Varies Right Mouse - Jump Thumb Button - Zoom or Secondary Fire |