f13.net

It's pre-ordered, pre-loaded, and sitting on my hard drive as we speak, waiting to be unlocked.  I'm looking forward to this one.   :-D

Official site here. (http://ep1.half-life2.com/)

Played a bit of it. Really cool so far. The Source Engine can still put out some great visuals, that's for sure.

Edit: Oh yeah, it runs like shit. I'm packing an Athlon X2 4400+/1 GB of RAM/GeForce 7800GT and I'm barely pulling 35FPS on average. A choppy 35FPS. I dunno what's up with that.

The |reactor core| is pretty much the textbook definiation of 'teh shiney', IMO.

One of these days I'm actually going to reinstall all this Steam stuff, and actually play through HL2.

Finished it last night.  It was maybe a bit too short, but I loved every minute of it.  Lots of great scripted bits and gratuitously fun fights and beautiful locations and stuff.  Yeah.  And I'm really loving what they're doing with the story.

I will most definitely buy Episode Two when it comes out.

Wonder how many "episodes" there will be, and I wonder if you will be able to buy a bundled collection of them at some point later down the road.

Started playing this last night - got to the core.

It's really rather cool.

I have just recently (this week) reinstalled HL2 and Steam and, after patching and now with my super broadband, I'm actually quite impressed with it all.  You may remember me from previous rants such as 'Fuck Steam', 'HL2:Where's the AI ?'  and 'Suck My Overlarge Cock, Valve Studios'.

But Now I say 'Meh, It's All Right'.

Which as good as it gets in Scotland.

Does it continue the story appreciably?

I need help with it.

Spoiler in black.
| The part where you are fighting off the bugs, and they are coming out of 3 holes in the ground, and you are in a destroyed parking garage, underground. You have to walk up 3 levels on the destroyed support beams, and at the top is a gate where you have to spin the handle to get it to open. The stupid bugs keep flying up and hitting me before I can get it open. I have looked all around, and cant see what im missing. Please help. |

If any one could give me the answer to that, I would really appreciate it.

Answer in black.

Block the holes with cars.  This is the answer to ANY scenario where bugs are flying out of holes.

Thanks, I tried that, but I guess I didnt do it right.

|It's not too finicky about how centered the car is over the burrow, but if in doubt, look at the burrows and see which one still has bugs flying out of it.  Note that there are three burrows on the ground floor and three movable cars scattered throughout the area, so you'll need to hunt down all three cars to block all three burrows.  Then just squish any bugs that are still flying around and you should be able to deal with the valve thing in peace.|

I was stuck at the same point yesterday before finding the solution. 

Learn that trick as it will need to be repeated later. 

I am currently stuck with the AntLion Warrior.  I have died a lot.   :-(

It doesn't answer the really big questions about the story that carried over from HL1 to HL2, but it provides some cool foreshadowing and great visuals.

My all-time favorite line from any of the series is now...

"Is Dr. Kleiner telling us to...get busy?"

It inspired a very excellent YTMND (http://hl2orgy.ytmnsfw.com).  (Visuals SFW, audio NSFW, but the audio is the funny part.)

I started replaying it last night with the commentary tracks turned on.  Some of it is meh, but some of it is really interesting.  It's neat seeing how much thought they put into each "scene" of the game.

Just finished this in one sitting. I liked it a lot. I wish HL2 had this much polish put into the story and what not. Can't wait for episode 2 to come out. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

Short.

Good God, some people have way too much time on their hands.

Hilarious.

Indeed. I roffled.

Does steam now not take 3 minutes to start the damn game, and continuously download enormous patches to *itself* that I have no interest in?

I had no problem with HL2 the game.

Steam on the other hand was an abomination of such ferocious ass-mongery that at the time I seriously considered whether it would be possible to surgically remove the physical hard drive sectors hosting this vile apparatus of the enemy just to make absolutely sure the infection would not spread.

I had the broadband before, that didn't seem to make it any more acceptable.

No, as I stated, I was of the exact same opinion as yourself.  However, the first thing it does now is update itself to what appears to be a new version of Steam which is A METRIC FUCKTON better than the old one.

A LOT.

REALLY? Hmm. I might have to reinstall HL2 and play it then. I played it briefly before my HDD went tits up and had all kinds of trouble with Steam.

Steam is really awesome now. The problem is that stuff that annoys people (autoupdating for example) is typically on by default. Right click on any game in your list and go to properties I think and you can disable updating for any one in particular.

Also tell it to not startup on boot if you don't like manually killing it.  But it's not bad.  Almost as good as Stardock's thingy.  Almost.