Well, I followed through with my plan, I woke up at 2:50AM …got myself awake and then sat impatiently waiting for Half Life 2 to be released promptly at 3:00AM, and then I impatiently sat through the 10 minute long unlocking process. Then all hell broke loose.
Let me first state that I am running Half Life 2 on a 1.8Ghz Pentium 4, 512MB of RAM, it’s running off of a 160GB 8MB Cache Maxtor HD, running at 1280×1024 2x AA on a PCI NVIDIA 5200 FX 128MB video card and I was getting anywhere between 35-60 FPS (frames per second). Yes, and it looked absolutely beautiful. Doom 3 has got nothing on this game. Doom 3 looked good, but Half Life 2 is the complete package. It looks good, it sounds good, the game play is a perfect combination of fun while being difficult, and it’s scalable based on whatever system you’re running it on. This is what Doom 3 and Halo 2 should have been.
Now, I’ve been a pretty decent Halo 2 “fan-boy” since…well, since Halo 1 came out. I can’t help it, I love my Xbox, it does eveything that my computer can’t. As any of you who have read this blog in the past month have witnessed I have been following the progress of Halo 2 with the utter anticipation of a 4 year old boy on Christmas Eve. I bought Halo 2 the day after is came out. I beat it within 2 days of owning it. It’s good, but it’s not much of a step from Halo 1. That was the very sad realization I am starting to cope with. I don’t play on Xbox live, I will hopefully get to play some multiplayer Halo 2 soon which may just save this game from being an total flop.
That said, Half Life 2 is everything that I expected, and is shaping up to be more. There is such obvious attention to detail it’s almost frightening. From the very beginning you can tell this game is different because of it’s ability to swallow your senses. You feel tense as you’re running down the halls and across the roof top from the “police”…you duck and jump when you suddenly hear bullets whizzing by the left side (yes, you can hear directionally) of your head. I am happy to announce that the wait was worth it.
If you don’t own it already, go buy it, If you do own it, congrads…you probably won’t be doing anything else in the near future.
Wandering the Interwebs 