This is the official Binary Bonsai Half-Life 2 entry. Leave your comments about the game in here :)
Please keep your comments generally spoiler free.
About Me
This is Binary Bonsai, the online journal of Michael Heilemann — a Danish expat Interface Director at Squarespace, ex-Computer Game Developer and Film Lover — coming to you out of New York. It contains thoughts on games, interface design, movies, books, science fiction, Star Wars and various other subjects as befits the author, who is available for comment on Twitter.
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Wooooooooooooooooow!
Never played it. But I read the GameSpot feature on it yesterday (http://www.gamespot.com/features/6112889/), which made it sound really interesting.
Bleh. I’m still trying to get to level 2 on Pong.
It’s pretty damn unstable, having crashed on me 4 – 5 times now. But it’s pretty fucking cool!
To be honest I didn’t manage to see the full version. Only some leaked beta. It seems to be a good game tho.
Michael, do me a favor and clarify your spoiler position on the entry. If this thing is turning into a spoiler thread, I’ll stay away until I’ve played it.
Took about half an hour to be playable…
But now it’s running OK, haven’t crashed a single time.
I just wish I had a better graphics board, since I’m playing it at sub-optimal settings (no wonderful water reflections, 800×600 resolution, etc.).
Is someone willing to donate me a new videocard? And a new CPU? Perhaps a new motherboard? More RAM would be really good too :)
No crashes here and it could be the best looking game i’ve ever seen. It really pulls you in to. 5 stars from me :)
Played it for an hour now, no crashes, and so far one of the bestlooking games ever!
I’m not sure what all the gaming magazine where whinning about, this game is stunning. Fortunately I purchased a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and I’m able to crank all the visuals to high, but even the sound is incredible I love the radio chatter.
The only complaint I have is the lack of multiplayer in the realm of Halflife 2. I would love to run around and frag people in City 17.
Damn it’s good.
No crashes for me at all, btw.
Whew. I’ve played for 10 hours straight. I just began the chapter called Entanglement. (That should be spoiler free…)
I didn’t have any problems at all, but I see there’s a large thread on the Penny Arcade forums (I’m a mod there) about various problems.
This is the best game I’ve played this year.
Could use a better video card, though. My Geforce FX5200 doesn’t live up to its name, (But I got it for free, so I won’t complain too loud.)
Ten minutes past nine this morning, when Half-Life 2 was unlocked across the world, I finally started it up and I played almost non-stop until half past six… Yeah, we didn’t do a lot of work today, most of the level design department went out and bought it before noon, and work slowly grind to a halt.
My impressions so far are:
Having played 80 – 90% of Halo 2, I am downright appalled at Gamespot’s decision to rate Halo 2 9.4 and Half-Life 2 9.2. Halo 2 is boring. Boooooring. Half-Life 2 looks to become the game of the year for me. But we’ll see where it goes from here.
I wish they had done something about the weapons system. I really think Halo 2 got that right. Wading through the menus in HL2 is cumbersome and error prone.
First impressions, spoiler free. Well, almost … I’m going to make a comment on what I think of the story, without saying anything about what the story is. It will be marked properly.
Very, very impressive and very fun. The pre-compiled radiosity lighting they use give the scenes a completely otherworldly look.
Very fucking cool setting. They manage to get you up to grips with it within the first level, and they haven’t had Basil Exposition come in..
Poly count is lower than I imagined. Seems they have gone the rich shader route. Absolutely stable for me. Played it for 5 hours now and no crashes at all.
There’s is nothing that isn’t up to par, and most of beyond what others are doing today.
Characters are awesome, both design wise and technically. In fact, best I’ve ever seen.
Plays solid on my rig (2.8Ghz, 128 MB 9800 Pro, 1 GB RAM, 1024×768×2x).
Minor snags: Movements seems a bit … weird. You swim way too fast and quite often get stuck on geometry. Nothing major, just a “hrmm, get … up … there”. Some weapons lack a bit of oomph … nothing rattles when you shoot at anything, not even your camera. Design choice, I’m sure … I just don’t agree with it. AI is good, but so far I haven’t seen anything that really made me go “whooooa!”, like the first time soldiers tried to frag you in HL1. AIs don’t seem to react to sound … you can stand behind a corner and shoot all you want, if the enemy doesn’t see you, he won’t react. Having said that, though, AI that doesn’t seem stupid is considerably better than all other games … and it doesn’t seem stupid.
There’s not that much story, actually. You don’t know why you’re here, before you know it hell breaks lose, and it isn’t too well explained what your intentions are.
Overall, first impressions are that HL2 is a cool shooter that looks awesome. Setting, music/sound and characters are astounding. Absolutely astounding. Graphically, HL2 floors anything else in the lighting department. Level design is incredible, so is texturing. I have yet to complete it, so the story might be fleshed out later, but I would have liked a little bit more about why I’m in the setting. AI is very impressive.
So far so good. It looks awesome, and I absolutely love the eastern-european-esque setting. I find it much more engaging than Doom 3.
My PC is not the latest rig, 1.6Ghz Atholon, but I did upgrade to a Radeon Pro 9700 a little while ago. No crashes so far, but I do find the scene loading to be slow, some stuttering sound problems etc… Otherwise, it looks great, but I’m only about 2 hours into it…
Here’s a nominee for stupidity award of the week: If you buy the Bronze package off of Steam, you can’t then decide to buy the Silver or Gold package!…
Which means that you’ll be unable to play through Half-Life 2 and then say to yourself, oh, I wouldn’t mind playing the original Half-Life in the source engine, because you can’t!
Schooo schtuupid!
No, but you can download the components individually, can’t you?
Nope. If you buy the gold edition, yes. But if you’ve already bought bronze edition, nope.
About Gamespot:
I’m convinced that those guys are on the take. There’s no way they can be honest and impartial game reviewers with the scores they give.
They gave Max Payne 2 a 9.0 and rated it Editor’s choice. Payne had the worst voice acting, piss-poor story and for a game attempting to emulate cinematography it sucked, sucked, sucked. A 9.0 it wasn’t. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the rating was off for both Halo 2 and HL 2.
Edge reviews are the only reviews I trust.
I second that. EDGE is the only magazine that i trust blindly.
I don’t know… I’ve heard things… But then again, I’ve heard things about a lot of things, so who knows… Though fact of the matter is, Gamespot thinking more of Halo 2 than Half-Life 2 is loco!
I don’t think I can come up with a game that has been so thoroughly entertaining since, oh, the first Halo I suppose.
Everything is just awesome!
I love the dropships. They’re so badass!
There is one minor snag however. I am now considering buying the upgrades nexessary for me to be able to make maps…
While I’m waiting for Half-Life 2 and the SDK to stream down to my home PC, I’ve been checking out the various level design sites I used to frequent ‘back in the day’ (it’s been a while), and at first I was taken aback at hwo little people were writing about Half-Life 2’s capabilities.
Until it dawned on me, they’re of course all busy with the engine ;)
Man, I really need to find more hours somewhere if I’m to have any hope of doing even some quick and dirty levels for HL2…
Heh, check the latest comic from the guys at PA here ( http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2004 – 11-17 )
That’s exactly what i kept doing when that guard asked me to pick that up, until he got a little irritated ;)
Michael: I’m excited to see what kind of levels you can cook up for Half-Life 2. Also, when I purchased it over Steam I went for the Silver package because it included the SDK and Half-Life: Source.
Half-Life: Source is interesting. Valve said that it was proof of concept to port the original Half-Life to the Source engine. However, even though it’s more or less a direct port they did manage to add a few things, documented below (rather hastly):
First of all, they remastered all of the sounds. The limitation in sound when Half-Life was running on the modified Quake 2 engine is no longer an issue. Valve has, from what I can hear, replaced many of the door noises and the conversations between NPCs are clearer.
Next, all of the textures are sharper. While they don’t have the same clarity from that of the Unreal engine, you can still tell they’ve been tweaked. The resolution looks the same, but with the adding lighting it just looks cooler.
Lighting is improved. Out with old lighting from the original engine and in with Half-Life 2’s lighting, which looks pretty damn cool.
Physics have been applied to the NPCs and enemies. Even though they still remain the same blocky looking characters, Valve has applied physics to various objects and as I said the NPCs and enemies now flop around like fish when you shoot them.
It’s also reported that the particular level where you jump from the hanging crates, physics has been applied to the crates so as you jump on them they sway a bit. Cool.
Shadows, in addition to lighting, are now on NPCs and enemies. I forgot that the original Half-Life, in it’s initial planning stages, had a “fake” shadows, but now with the use of Half-Life 2 like shadows, the characters seem more grounded.
Reflections have been added to certain walls, in addition to reflections on glass and other surfaces. It’s subtle, but a welcomed change.
Water has been replaced. A great change considering the original liquid textures, if you want to call it that, were crappy looking, even in 1998. The water in Outcast looked better and that was using a pixel-based engine.
Also, similar to Half-Life 2’s GUI, Half-Life now loads a random scene from the game.
Overall, I prefer HL:Source to the original Half-Life. Even if the changes are subtle, it just makes the experience that much better. Anyways, thought you’d like to know what the fuss about HL:Source was all about. ;)
Two corrections. Outcast uses a voxel engine, not a ‘pixel engine’ ;) — And Half-Life was, contrary to popular belief, based off of the original Quake engine. Valve themselves added such things as colored lighting and what not.
Thanks for the overview of HL:S. If they put it up for sale at a reasonable price, I’m likely to buy it.
And while we’re at it, let me just touch up on the menu in HL2. It looks good with the scene running in the background, but the load time is hooooorible!
Isn’t the SDK included in the bronze package, or did I misread a comment? I bought the silver package myself.
Anyway, I just finished the game on Hard, in about 15 – 16 hours. Great stuff. Now give me more!
You can disable the 3D start menu, so that HL2 loads faster. Edit Steam/SteamApps/USERNAME/Half-Life 2/hl2/cfg/valve.rc and comment out the last line.
Hm. I can’t think of a better person to head-up a Jedi-themed mod of HL2. Let me know if you do. You might need a graphic designer/illustrator/writer/texture artist — and hey, I’m all of those! ;)
Paolo, If I were to do anything, it probably won’t be working on a full mod. I have way too little time for me to do something like that.
Even so, if it were, I probably wouldn’t want to work on someone else’s IP again.
Johan, you’re my hero :)
Yeah, thanks for that tip Johan. The start menu, while extremely cool looking, just takes forever and a day to load and I’d rather devote that time to playing Half-Life 2.
Hopefully with a patch or two Valve will be able to optimize the loading time with the 3D menu enabled. Until then I’m going to use your fix.
Okay, HL2 so kicks Doom3’s ass. HL2 is way creepier – kinda the difference between the shock-gore flicks and a really well done psycho-thriller. Your guess as to which is which.
HL2 multiplayer, try the following commands through the console (very unstable but works)
net_start
sv_lan 0
deathmatch 1
maxplayers (whatever you want)
map (mapname)
restart
The game runs pretty well on my system (P4 @ 2.8ghz, GeForce FX 5950, 1GB RAM), and I haven’t experienced any crashes.
My thoughts are as follows.
Gameplay:
Pretty good. Pretty DAMN good. I could throw barrels at bad guys all day. And I have to admit that I smiled when Gordon first puts on his suit and you hear the Valve theme play.
The sections where you get to drive vehicles are a lot of fun. The only thing missing is an announcer saying, “Vehicular manslaughter!” when you run over an enemy ;)
Sometimes it gets frustrating, though. At least, for me it does.
Part of the frustration stems from the fact that Valve seems to love putting enemies best dispatched by different weapons in the same room. Imagine trying to switch to the shotgun so you can take out the manhack about to slice your head off, while at the same time trying to avoid the fire coming from the shock troopers (or whatever they’re called). Ordinarily, it’d just be part of a fun, intense firefight. Then imagine trying to do this with the original game’s clunky weapon selection system. Now, instead of fun you get killed, since by the time you’ve taken out the manhack and switched back to your SMG those shock troopers have taken you out.
As for scaryness, it’s hard for me to say whether or not it’s scarier than Doom 3. I don’t think it’s fair to say that Doom 3 was going for more of a “slasher movie” type of scary. Some parts of HL2 are scarier, but after the 2nd or 3rd time one of the “dead” headcrab-zombie guys gets up and comes after you, you learn to just put a few rounds in every “dead” headcrab-zombie you come across. Some of the “scary” parts are just annoying, such as large sections of the Ravenholm chapter. Of course, I thought that whole chapter was completely out of place, like I was playing Night of the Living Headcrab-Zombies instead of Half-Life 2.
Visuals:
Visually, the game is beautiful. In some ways it is better than Doom 3. The water effects are extremely cool. The animation is outstanding, especially the facial animation. The models look good, and I haven’t noticed any that looked blocky around the edges.
However, in some ways it looks worse than Doom 3. Buildings and terrain are still blocky. A lot of the textures are pretty bland, mostly in the outdoor areas. The fact that all the lighting data is precomputed really stands out sometimes.
All in all, the game is good. I’d give it 9/10.
Sean, I had the same feeling about Ravenholm. I liked playing it and hat a lot of fun, but I was sure happy to return to City 17 in the daylight and fight the Combine troops again.
I must say that the last levels (_spoiler removed_) are awsome.
I have to disagree with you guys about Ravenholm. I thought that was the coolest level in the game. Well, that one and the one where you get to fight all the Striders. Those things look plain tardish when a rocket bounces off their dome.
And like everyone else, I was completely amazed by the level of detail and fluidity of movement in the characters of this game. The opening sequence had me awestruck; I had no idea that a GeForce 4 could do all that. I can’t wait to get this game running on the Radeon 9800 box when I get back home… makes me drool just thinkin about it.