I definately trust the Valve team to outthink the id guys in terms of just mindblowingly creative ideas for weird and wacky gameplay options. They do cooridor shooters, and they do them slick and well.
But heck, the animations in the DOOM movie were pretty darn amazing too: it looked like an episode of Starship Troopers, only darker. When the soldier was slowly zombified, the animation and texture morphing was simply fantastic. And the enemies clearly have lots of interaction with the world, even if you don’t seem to, though so far all we’ve seen is “look: a new way for some creeping horror to bust through the wall or the floor!.” So I think id is definately going to outdo itself for what it does, and be lightyears ahead of the sort of game Q2 was in terms of gameplay and story.
But HL2 is definately something else besides. I’ve watched that soldier battle over and over, and the only fault I can find with it is that the crowbar looked a little too wimpy to be crushing those boards at the end (and I might have seen an enemy clipping through the huge metal container at the end: it shoulda gibbed im instead). I still can’t even believe that the strider battle could actually happen outside a completely pre-rendered scene. It was sick how cool that was, especially that… indescribable effect.
Just downloaded and watched all nine videos from gamespot. All I can say is :eek: If Valve can deliver half of what it’s promising, it’ll be the pinnacle of video gaming. Technologically, how do you improve on that? Barring radical advances in holographic or cybernetic science, I think this is as good as FPS can get. Between this and Doom III, we may have perfected the genre.
I’ve been too cheap to shell out for their membership, but then, I’ve payed for it with slow, hard to ind downloads.
Just seen the character vid: this raises the one element in which they could fail in. Once you create fantastically realistic characters, you’ve put yourself in the position of actually having to start worrying about the acting. Alyx is an amazing creation, but this bit struck me as just a bit overdramatized (not that affectless, like so many other characters in games, is necessarily better): they’re showing off their ability to vividly animate her I guess. She looks a little hunchbacked. Of course, it wasn’t really bothersome, and the really neat thing the demo showed off was the “random response comment” thing that HL1 played with just a little: when you accidentally knock over a monitor (again, not a script: the player decided to do it), the scientist looks up at you, frowns, and says 'Oh, do be careful."
And did you catch the magnifying glass sitting on the table. It was ACTUALLY MAGNIFYING WHAT WAS BEHIND IT. A fantastic subtle touch, hard to believe from a shooter. And the… thing that comes for them.
The key to your equation here is the Video Card, it is waaaaaaaay behind the times, and will be doing the bulk of the work. Right now the best deal in Video Cards is the ATI Radeon 9500’s, as they are barely detuned 9700’s, the 9500’s are being phased out for a new card that actually doesn’t perform any better.
You are a bit short on Ram too, with how cheap it is, another 128 megs of Ram will make a difference.
Another solid card is the Nvidia 4200 series. Here is a nice one on sale.
Newegg has some of the best reviews anywhere, and their prices are great.
Heh, you and me both. I am already looking into what video cards will be a good deal in late August. . .
Got the Barney video. Craparama. Every video they’ve released is like a whole genre of game in itself. They’ve had a driving Carmageddon-type game, a regular FPS taken to the extreme with realistic physics, character-driven sequences, and now a tactical assault game where you and Barney lead a whole squad of people against a solidly dug in force. The way your own soldiers crouch behind cover, sneaking around to shoot around corners before dodging back, waiting you for to cover them or even asking you to, and then running off when you do cover them… it’s just awesome. Even after the 30-40 hours of gametime in the actual game, and even after replaying great stuff like this over and over, I can see how easily mod developers could create not only whole new sequences like this to try out, but whole new combinations of elements.
Another good option - one that I might get - is the GeForce FX 5200 Ultra. It doesn’t have the Uber-Giant heatsink/fan of the FX 5800, but it outperforms a GF4 4200 in most respects and costs about the same, too… $150.
Although I may allow myself to go absolutely nuts and get the 5800, gigantic cooling system and all. Or maybe I should get another 512 megs of RAM…? Or maybe a faster hard drive…? Or what the hell… how about all three?
I’ve heard VERY bad things about the 5800: not jsut a huge heatsink, but extremely noisy (nicknamed “the dustbuster”), running at sub par clock speeds even out fo the box, and self-bottlenecked. They just came out with the 5900, which Tomshardware says is a big improvement, and corrects a lot of the problems.
A GIG of RAM you say? That’s like, server class: total overkill.
As for links to the movies: you can either get them officially by subscribing to gamespot, and then getting them here:
or you can now find them popping up around the web (if not openly, in various fan forums and irc)
This site claims to have them (read down the news items), but I’m not sure what speed. Everyplace that has them is getting slammed.
But seriously consider NOT getting them if you can. I’m too greedy to have passed this opportunity up, and I’m sure there’s tons and tons more to the game that I haven’t seen, but I now sorta wish I hadn’t seen so much already. I’m actually going to go into a HL2 news blackout mode soon, because I don’t want to see or learn any more about the plot, enemies, features, etc. until I get the game, and to give what I’ve seen time to cool off.
Ironically, Unreal was the reason I liked the original Half-life so much. I’d recently decided that the graphics in Unreal couldn’t be competed with and there was no way that a game made with the Quake 2 engine was going to be any good.
I was on of the many people that accidentally bumped the mouse halfway through the opening tram ride to discover that I was already playing. Since then, Valve can do no wrong!
If you’ve seen the teaser video, you’ve seen a certain scene at the very end where something blue does something very nasty to something gray.
Well, that scene, in the teaser must have used an old build, because the same scene is in one of the gamespot vids, and it adds all sorts of stuff, from getting rid of the blocky terrain to adding incredible “splash/ripple” effects.
In my opinion, as long as it’s less than $300 in my system, it’s not overkill. Another 512 megs of PC-2700 DDR RAM will run me about eighty bucks (seventy if I find a good sale, fifty if I want shit RAM… which I don’t), so I don’t see it as too much overkill.
I’d LOVE someday to be able to max out the amount of RAM a motherboard can handle (my current one can deal with 3 gigs), but… that day ain’t today. Or anytime soon, for that matter.
RAM is pretty cheap. I just meant for this game. Of course, ridiculously bloated Windows Xp apparently takes up about 128 megs on average of memory swapping…
I was enthralled to hear Gabe Newell on the HL2 developer interview talk about why the recommended specs are so huge: he was talking about how you really can’t target the bleeding edge down to a certain point as easily anymore, because the market has widened so incredibly: from P4hypterthreaded nutballs with Radeons down to, well, basically my system. And he said that they were really happy that the main thing you lose as you scale down in systems is prettiness: you can still have a great game experience on a low-end system. Hopefully, however, I’ll never have the chance to try.
The interview was actually really neat: worth a listen (too bad it’s 400megs!) Gabe has really put on some pounds though since HL, but he’s gotten even wiser in his old age. Both him and the chief software engineer sound like they really put a lot of thought and passion into trying to create something really new and innovative for the FPS genre.
Try downloading this short WMV movie. It features the g-man character being used as an example of the sort of facial muscle system they have for dynamic expressions, as well as their lip synching technology.
For some reason, whether they jsut haven’t gotten it down, or the video isn’t quite synced up with the visuals, so the lip-syncing looks a bit off, but you can see his mouth mostly forming the right shapes for what he’s saying. Apparently, the system simply looks at a .wav file, recognizes the familiar waveforms of the all the different human phenomes, and acts accordingly: meaning that it isn’t limited to doing just english.
