The long awaited missing level from Half-Life 2 was finally finished this week; you could download Thursday, although, I couldn’t till Friday.
Gotta say, not impressed. I understand the amount of work they put into levels; dabbling a bit myself, I’m amazed they actually completed Half-Life 2 in my lifetime.
However, I failed to see how the new lighting effect (HDR?) was cool, some of the reflections on my box were off, and the level itself had some issues. Re-spawning, Combine soldiers you had killed previously would be stationary, standing models upon reloading the level.
While the level itself was one of the most challenging, it was extremely short. After crashing 5 times, I couldn’t believe it ended that quickly.
I hope the CEO of Valve sends another email like he did the first time and asks why I never log into Steam.
“Because bro, I beat all of the games, and it’s time for something new. Releasing a new Half-Life level, while cool, only occupies 2 hours of my Friday night. Even if I were to play it again, that’s 4.”
While I believe Steam is a great program to purchase and deliver games, it’s only 1 engine; Source. And all of the games are extremely old. While I still enjoy the occasional Day of Defeat game since Battlefield 2 has lost it’s joy, I fail to see how Steam has longevity on my computer other than forgetting I had it installed. I feel they should spend more time making additional games and levels than re-skinning the interface. Spending time on improving/fixing the friends network is dumb too; you all already missed the boat, there are better programs out there to faciliate finding friends in games, and you should use existing presence communities like AOL, MSN, and Yahoo instead of creating your own.
At least I didn’t have to pay for it!
Probably the biggest joy I’ve had recently (related to games) has been in uninstalling Steam. I haven’t even bothered about Lost Coast even though I’m supposed to get it free.
Thanks Valve, but I like when my games don’t take 10 hours to load because of an horrid distribution system. HL2 was great, but only thinking about running it made me shiver.
Here’s to hope ‘Games xStream’ will be better. I sure as hell don’t need 10 different steams for 10 different publishers.
‘Lost Coast’ only took 15 minutes to finish, minus the commentary. It did not even seem like a demo. Still glad they are showing what they are working on.
No crashes for me, I thought it looked awesome. Marked improvement to the experience but as you say way too short.
Not to sure about steam yet, if it dealt with my saved games across machines it might start to get my vote, but it does save trying to find the game cd and have it in the drive to play.
Hell it’s a tech demo to demonstrate HDRI – they didn’t even have to put any gameplay in there…..Did you try it with the commentary on?
Judge it for what it is – it wasn’t sposed to be a ‘level’ in that sense – and hell it was free.
It was cool, but not jaw dropping. It said my 2.6ghz pentium wasn’t up to the job, but it seemed OK to me.
Anyhow since I got broadband steam had been relatively painless, but before that it was a complete nightmare.
When I first purchased HL2, I couldn’t get Steam to work. Now that I’ve been able to get Steam to work I can’t find my box that contains the serial numbers to activate the game! Oh how I would really love to play it.