Half-Life 2 review

Got my PC Gamer (UK) this morning, complete with HL2 review. Suffice to say the main criticism was that it had no proper ending, Gordon still doesn't speak, a huge robot is the best bit of it, it got 96% and that you'll see screenshots either here or somewhere else soon!



PS Release date is "autumn"...

Links to new screenshots can be found here:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=438393&postcount=13

Grab em' while you can :razz: !!

I already posted about this in the other HL2 thread. Search before posting. :razz:

Though please transcribe or scan! :biggrin:

Might get that on the way home...I've no hope of playing hl2 on my joke of a computer at home, but I can always drool at what I'm missing out on. I'll put it with my 'special' magazines under the bed! :razz:

Mephs, the magazine doesn't actually come out until the 5th. They had
to push the date back from the 1st due to NDA reasons or something. I
assume Lep is a subscriber.

At least, it's not in my local WH Smiths. :smile:

Oh yeah, this game is gonna be so sweet whenever they get around to releasing it. I'm tempted to start calling shot gun on map ideas just so I have something that no one else will be able to make. I think thats gonna be the big thing with HL2. The game itself is gonna be awesome, but its the potential for modding and mapping thats getting everyone really excited.

I swear, Vivendi Universal are the newest evil empire around, with all this legal bulls**t their pulling. But thats me with my long running grudge against them. :ar15firing:

Oh, and nice avatar Mephs, man I love the League of Gentlemen, damned creepy bastards that they are :biggrin: .

OMFG!!!!! this is like Doom 3, it must be done, and that means its being released in about a week (wishful thinking).

Is it just me, or does that HUD look like complete ass?

I was hoping that it would just be a temporary thing that they put in during beta/testing stages, but now I'm not so sure...

I like the HUD its kind of minimalistic and it dont get in the way as much as in some games

Vivendi has always been pulling the strings, they just recently (last few years) started publishing titles under the parent company name.

Is there any chance of getting a typed copy of the review? I don't think it's possible for me to buy a PCGamer UK in rural Pennsylvania...

I dug up the old copy of PC gamer when HL1 came out, it gave it a 97% (I guess people's expectaions of games has reached to very high levels).

You should dig up the really old PCGamer that has the HL1 preview in it with all the ugly pictures and a sidebar about these newfangled things called 'prefabs'. It's a fun read, and it's sad to think that I thought prefabs sounded cool even back then...

Yak_Fighter said:
You should dig up the really old PCGamer that has the HL1 preview in it with all the ugly pictures and a sidebar about these newfangled things called 'prefabs'. It's a fun read, and it's sad to think that I thought prefabs sounded cool even back then...

I wonder if there is an Alpha-Life for download somewhere on the internet...

going by the fact half life is based on the term whored from the
physics field of science, id doubt it severely :razz: your tutors will
probably teach you about it soon, if not already :wink:

Gwil said:
going by the fact half life is based on the term whored from the physics field of science, id doubt it severely :razz: your tutors will probably teach you about it soon, if not already :wink:

What? O_o

Dictionary.com for 'half life', Balls.

Isn't the general formula for an elements half-life on the cover of the original release of the game?

i dunno, the original, original release (over in the UK at least) was a
right scrubby affair - a rusty orange effect with a grey/faux silver
lambda character on it.. having said that, it might have had some real
faded text in the background layers...

actually, just dug it up - yes it does, right along the top :smile: still
has the price sticker on as well, heh :smile: weeps with fond memories

Gwil said:
i dunno, the original, original release (over in the UK at least) was a right scrubby affair - a rusty orange effect with a grey/faux silver lambda character on it.. having said that, it might have had some real faded text in the background layers...

actually, just dug it up - yes it does, right along the top :smile: still has the price sticker on as well, heh :smile: weeps with fond memories

Can we see it D:

my original disk and cd bought, februrary 1999

[edit] the cd is the same shade of orange as disk cover, the scanner lightened it a bunch. [/edit]

The first platinum pack edition box is the sweetest Half Life box.

Damn, Orph beat me to it. Oh well.



The black underlined part, and the part at the top of Orph's screen is the relationship between the rate constant of the decay (k) and the halflife of the decay (t). Of course, now that I look at it, I see that they got the equation wrong on the box. It is suposed to be:

k = -ln(1/2)/t = ln(2)/t

This is a little confusing since in physics the rate constant is usualy denoted with a lambda rather than a k, which if course is why lambda is the symbol for the game. They just didn't write the equation to be consistant with that, and used what is traditionaly chemical rate constant instead of a physical rate constant.

The first platinum pack edition box is the sweetest Half Life box.

Bwuaaaaa?

BWUAAAAAAAH??????

BLASPHEMY!

points to Tracer Bullet

Got mine out of the November `98 run. Woo! Well, not until christmas, but it was at least purchased in November :razz:

got mine in 98, 2nd hand albeit off a friend who "thought it was s**t".
turned out he couldnt find the hazard suit to proceed past barney.
roflz :razz:

was a snatch at ?20 as well, good as new :smile:

Gwil said:
got mine in 98, 2nd hand albeit off a friend who "thought it was s**t". turned out he couldnt find the hazard suit to proceed past barney. roflz :razz:

was a snatch at ?20 as well, good as new :smile:

I got it exactly the same way, except I got it for free. I had a friend who never even got to the weapons. he was running it in software mode and thought that the graphics sucked

Me played the PS2 version of Half-Life in 2002. Got the full game for my birthday :smile:

I got my copy from a Game of the Year edition, after being introduced to Counter-Strike. Woohoo!

I bought mine in a bargain bin at EBGames. It was when the game of the year edition was coming out so they were trying to get rid of all their other copies. $10 bucks.

mine came out of the bargain bin for 19 dollars.. best 19 bucks i have ever invested too.

I firsted played counter strike :razz: I didn't even know that it was a mod, I was such a n00b, finally bourght it about 8 months later when my parents got a pc.

My mate stupidly joined one of those "mail order games" clubs, where
you initially get 5 games at ?1 each or something, but then have to buy
2 games a month for a year. After a few months he was running out of
games he wanted so I said I'd pre-order HL on it, and in return for the
favour he gave me Fallout (one of his initial games, which he didn't
like). Two excellent games for ?25, can't be bad :wink:

/me drools "Fallout"

White Legion showed me the game at first on his computer, but since its was a old computer (original voodo card) I said Meh.... So then he let me barrow it from him so I could play it on a old crappy PC in software mode (it had a 2mb video card :biggrin: ). Then I was hooked when the g-man gave me that offer...... Then the mapping began....and thats how I ended up here.

/me hears groans from the other members of snarkpit

I played the Uplink demo... many times... even mapped for it. Then in July '02 I bought the platinum pack.

I got a copy of my mate's copy about a week after it came out. Bought it about 3 years later for ?10 when the CD broke. :biggrin:

I can twait till pc gamer is in the shops! i wanna read! those scans are broken...

oh, i got the half life generation box, not v3, the ORIGINAL generation box, it is a helluva nice box! black box, included tfc, hl, opfor and cs. I still have it, in very good condition :biggrin: no scans, my scanner is broke :sad:

PC Zone UK have given the game a whooping 97%, which apparently is the highest they have ever given to a game.

So far, HL2 has managed a 96% from PC Gamer UK, a 90% from PC Gameplay
(points deducted because of no multiplayer, apparently), and now 97%
from Pc Zone. Sounds like a pretty good game. :smile:

What? No 100% ? D:

Update:

It's just been confirmed that PC Gamer US have given HL2 a ridiculously
huge 98%. No, that is not a typo. 98%. Whether it's justified
or not remains to be seen.

I await the 7/10 Edge review :wink:

Funnily enough, there are rumours that Edge gave it 10/10. But that's just a rumour, take it or leave it. :wink:

That'd be something...I think the only other game they rated so highly was Halo...which I found quite average :smile: Edge are a funny bunch though, I think they gave Ico a slightly above average rating, but now they can't stop singing its praises...

Because no one plays it. I can't remember what magazine it was, it was a console magazine, EGM maybe. But they had an award issue every year and every year ICO has won the ICO award; they'll keep giving out the ICO award until people play it. To be honest, there's only a handful of people not in Japan who really like the game.

And a fair few of them knock around here :wink: I shall treasure my copy (bought on its day of release in the UK) for ever and ever!

GamesTM lists Ico as its number 1 PS2 must buy title, and says it will
until people buy it :smile: It really is an awesome game though,
so...beautiful.

I'm the only person I've ever had any contact with, besides you two obviously, who even liked the game.

Sadly, I've only played through it once, need to play through again to see what the s**t Norda is saying.

I'd get it if I had a bloody PS2. They should port it to PC or
something. Well actually, it would look kind of bad on PC; you would
notice how low-resolution everything is. But still, I want to see what
all the buzz is about. :smile:

HL2 received 9/10 in Italian gaming mag GMC. Apparently, it would have
gotten a 10/10, but due to the magazine's policy, it couldn't.