I didn’t play the original half life all the way through, actually, only maybe 2 hours into it.
Should I play HL:S first to get the backstory? Would that add significantly to my immersion in the game? Or should I just play HL-2 and get the whole experience at once?
Btw, do we have a lot of CS:S players here? I assume that’s the default multiplayer component to the game. If so, I could make an SDMB game server for it.
I was promising myself that I’d play HL:S first and do the whole thing in order, which is what I recommend to you. But then I said, “well, okay, I’ll just play through that first bit of City 17 that we saw in the E3 preview.” And now I’m about a half hour past that. So I can’t really recommend playing the first game again, but I bet there are some cool differences. Most of all I’m eager to see the Anomalous Materials lab and the centrifuge. Ooooh, and the Rocket Test Stand level. I am stuck here at work and all I can think about is Combine guards rushing up the stairs, and I’m stuck here in my cubicle and they’re gonna hit me with the zappie-sticks.
I’d be up for an SDMB server for CS:S, because on the regular servers I continually get shot in the head every time before I know what’s hit me. It’s like this:
“Go go go!!!”
Okay, I’m going, I’m going – oh crap! There’s–
BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG
Whooooo, I’m a gho-o-o-o-o-ost!
“Terrorists WIN.”
If my team is doing well and I can employ flash-bangs and grenades, I tend to last a lot longer.
I’d love to play some Doper CS:S. I organized something like this before and it worked out moderately well. The major problems were: trying to get a server setup with adaquate bandwidth, finding a time when everyone could play, and making sure someone had remote admin access so that we could change levels or, god forbid, kick someone.
If you’ve got the server, it could work out famously. Perhaps I’ll post a little something in your other thread as well. You can certainly count me in.
By the way, CS: Source is FANTASTIC!
Chime in then if you’re interested in the idea… we can try to get everyone together maybe once a week, say, a weekday night at 8pm or something… or more frequently if it works out that way. I can leave the server open 24/7 and make it public, in any case, so people could hop in and make the server “home base” even without scheduled games.
I don’t think the Anom Mat Lab is going to look much different in HL:S. As I listed before, these are the only major differences:
-occasional shader effects, like air warping near steam
-3d skyboxes
-ragdoll deaths
-water
-some environmental effects like smoke
-physics (though because of game design, you don’t get to see that much of this in action)
-sound is noticeably a lot beefier and better quality
But if you haven’t played HL1 past 2 hours, you’ve missed most of the best parts of the game. The “story” you miss isn’t quite what you’d expect, because the way Valve tells the story is very subtle. So far in HL2, and even up to the end, as I’ve been hearing, nobody just comes out and tells you what’s what. You have to piece things together from all the little scraps of info you get in the game, all the little side references and so on. To enjoy the second game, all you need to know is that (spoiler for HL1 only)
you are a recent MIT used to work at Black Mesa labs in Nevada(?), and one of your experiments seems to have ripped open at least the space part of the space-time continuum. Aliens started to warp in, and you fought your way to safety… or so you thought until your rescuers start trying to kill you. After lots of glorious three way alien/soldier battles and other assundry events you finally find a way to transport to the alien home world and, you think, kill the source of the invasion. But it’s never quite as clear as that, and at the end a sinister figure who was watching you all throughout the game congratulates you on, apparently, doing his bidding, at which point he hires you. You step into the light of his teleporter and… Half-Life2 begins.
Does it matter if I haven’t played Half Life: Blue Shift? I’ve played Half Life and Opposing Forces.
BTW, what is HL:S?
My family has a long tradition of “play-testing” the games we buy for each other (open it up, play with it “to make sure it works,” 
box it back up, wrap as appropriate). Is this going to fly with Half-Life 2, or is Steam going to give my brother-in-law trouble about installing after it’s already been installed and uninstalled on my PC?
Honestly, I’d just buy myself my own copy from the beginning, but I want to make sure it will run on my PC at all. I’m well below HL2’s minimum system requirements. I’m similarly under-powered for Doom 3 and Sims 2 and they run okay on low settings, but I know there’s going to be some breaking point where I can’t do that anymore.
That and I already have the copy I bought for my B-I-L sitting in my closet.
As I understand it, you will be installing HL2 and then creating a Steam account (email address/password). Using this, you then activate your copy.
As far as I know, you should be able to uninstall it on your computer and install it on someone else’s comp (or another of your own), but you will need to login using the same email/password. Obviously, you can only be logged in in one place.
Seems like you should be able to “play-test”.
HL:S is half life: source, the half life 1 game/story ported to the half life 2 engine, but with the same textures and such so it doesn’t look dramatically better.
Thanks. That’s what I was afraid of. I’ll pony up for my own copy then. A game with an obviously already-opened box is one thing, but having to include a note with the gift along the lines of “I already played and registered this game-- use xxxx account” is too rude even for me. 
I suppose it will be difficult or impossible to find a used copy via eBay, EB Games, etc if the registration is permanent. Too bad for those looking to resell or buy cheap, but I’m sure Valve doesn’t mind.
If you do get yourself a copy, I’d highly suggest purchasing it through Steam. Multitude of reasons – many in this thread.
The issue with Steam is this: once you tie a game into your account, there is no way to separate it from the other Valve games you also have. You can, of course, pass the account around simply by giving him the name and password. But all the other games will come with it. And you can’t play two games at once with the same account.
If it’s your CPU and memory that are below, I’d say that you’re probably not in good shape to handle it. If your graphics card is Directx7 level and your CPU is over 1.5Ghz, you should be okay.
I would however, suggest the Steam version (and silver at that, if you want DOD:S which I desperately do). Takes awhile to download, but it’s a much cleaner, neater process in the end. I think the authentication servers are working better today too.
Already I’m disliking steam.
So I download steam, buy the game, go to play, and it gives me a download bar. I wait an hour, and it says “complete” and gives me the option to launch the game.
In the meantime, I’ve downloaded new video drivers so I reboot… come back, try to launch the game. Freezes. Launch the game again, freezes. Launch the game again, I get the valve intro video, gets to a picture of a blurry city, says “loading”… and remains that way indefinitely.
So I right click half life 2 in the valve software, and go to properties. Says “Aquired: 58%”… I assume that means I have 58% of the files I need for the game to run. But if that’s the case, it should never have told me that the transfer was completed nor given me the option to launch the game. Ugh.
That’s exactly what happened to me last night. Eventually, I’d try to alt-tab or ESC out of it, and when that finally worked I’d run task manager and lo-and-behold, HL2 was “not responding”.
However, the third (or fourth) time was the charm…I just let it keep sitting on “Loading…” and about 15 minutes later, the game started.
My guess is that although it told me the download was complete, it wasn’t, and it still needed a bunch of files.
The Steam system in its current implementation basically sucks. Not to say that down the road it won’t be pretty cool, and I’m glad I have all these other games to play as well.
The game itself…cool.
I got the DVD retail version, installed it (after 3 hours of installing it and Steam authentication) and played it happily for 6 hours. Went to play it this morning, and now my DVD/RW drive won’t read the disc! (keep on spitting out “please insert disc”, and it takes ages for autoplay to kick in)
Apparently there’s been a few complaints on the Steam forums about this. Brilliant game (I got up to the grav gun bit), but shame about the copy-protection bug.
Just played my first 20 minutes of HL2. Wow. Just the “finding your way around” intro is awesome. The atmosphere of a run down detention-wide city-sized concentration camp is immersive. Walking around and seeing the guards randomly interrogating people, whacking them, busting down doors - creepy as hell.
When you run through the first apartment building… it really conveys the sense of squalor these people are living in. A single mattress on the floor… broken doors, holes in the walls… great stuff. When the police raid the building, you can look outside the window and see them surrounding it and moving into it… just tons of detail.
Gonna go back to HL1 now though I think and get caught up.
The cool thing about HL1:S is that they reproduce the whole “select a chapter” thing from HL2, so you can start off wherever you want.
I finished it.
Whoa. I’m not spoiling anything by saying that the final two levels are, er, different. Quite different. A blast, yes, but completely crazy.
People have been complaining about the story, but you have to understand that the storytelling in HL2 is much like in HL1: you have to piece together what’s going on from snatches of conversation that take place almost out of earshot as you hurry into a new room. You learn things by watching, listening, and by inference, rather than characters coming out and telling you exactly what is what and what’s going on.
I will spoil, out in the open, something though about the game in general. There are a least TWO scenes in the game where you are given ample and almost bizarre opportunities to stare up at Alyx’s ass. 
And Alyx’s best friend? Good frickin grief he’s kickass.
To switch gears slightly:
Anyone interested in an SDMB game of Counter-Strike: Source?
I’ve started a thread here to try to recruit some players. Hopefully we’ll get a persistent, dedicated server set up just for us.
Please post in that thread if you’re interest.
I feel like I’m just about through Nova Prospeckt. Man that place is creepy!
Observation: How much less annoying are those flying buzzsaw dealies once you have the gravity gun!