14 out of 14 people found this review helpful.
Would be a lot better without the "copy protection"
Date of Review: Nov 24, 2004
The Bottom Line: Good game, fun to play, be prepared to spend an hour or two installing it. Four stars instead of 5 due to the overly onerous copy protection and install scheme.
I got half-life 2 right after I finished playing doom3 at each difficulty level, and almost the same time as halo2, so expect some comparisons!
The biggest downside to this game gets you right up front, the installation and activation process. I dont mind companies trying to protect their wares, but lets be realistic...some 15 year old kid probably already has a hack to bypass the complex and detailed scheme thats been put in place. A burden is placed on honest consumers, while the people who want to steal software probably arent being thwarted.
The installation on my machine (2.4Ghz P4, 1GB ram, 7200rpm seagate drive, ati 9800, 48x cd-rw) took an hour and 5 minutes, and that was sitting in front of it feeding the 5 cd's in the moment they were asked for. The installer then 'converted' half-life 2 to 'steam format', whatever that is, taking another 5-10 minutes.
From what I saw and have read about, Steam is software on your pc combined with the game makers web site that allows you to buy new software and have it 'delivered' to your machine with protection that keeps you from copying it to other computers, then re-download it later if you need it. It also provides a central authorization/registration mechanism to prevent piracy, and facilitates on-line game playing.
Sounds great.
Except it installs a 'tray icon' on your machine...and I have way too many 'tray icons'. Be nice if someone came up with some s/w that didnt do that...right now I have realplayer, quicktime, virus, graphics card, sound card blah blah blah. Gimme a break with the tray icons. Steam also pops up ads on your desktop for other software products. To be fair you can disable the tray icon from starting with windows and turn the ads off. But I didnt like it...i'm not fond of excessive unnecessary software and in-your-face popups.
Some people had trouble getting their game to 'authorize' when they installed it as the main web site was choked with traffic. I didnt have that problem, but it shows a lack of planning on behalf of the game maker...with the huge number of pre-orders, they had a pretty good idea of how many people would be trying to register in the first 48 hours. I would imagine a decision was made that spending the money to handle the initial surge wasnt worth it. My message to them? If you're going to insist on onerous copy protection, do the right thing and make it as transparent on your customer as possible...dont put it in and then cheap out on the hardware to handle it.
The software also requires a long cd-key be typed in, which took me 3 shots to get right...which hackers have already bypassed. And it has some special protection 'baked in' to the physical cd to prevent copying (which of course has already been circumvented by hackers). And the game requires that the original CD be in the drive to play the game.
Good grief.
If you manage to actually install this beast and get to play it, its a hoot. The game is much lighter on the hardware than doom 3 was. With doom3 on my pretty darn good pc I could only get solid frame rates with the settings at about half mast...you have to ante up $400 for a 6800 or x800 card to turn it all the way up. Half-life2 on my rig ran at the highest quality levels. Nice textures, pretty running water, its a visually pleasing game. The controls are pretty similar to half-life-the-original, you adapt to it pretty easily. The one downside I've seen during gameplay is that there are frequent 15-20 second stops in the middle of moving down a hallway or steps where it has to load the next chunk of level. It REALLY disrupts the games continuity. You're just getting immersed and suddenly "Loading..." and you're out of the game for 20 seconds. It would have been VERY nice to have Valve spend a year working on fluid level loading in the background instead of this ridiculous copy protection scheme thats already been bypassed. Doom3 and halo1/2 do their level loads when you're on an elevator or have reached the end of a phase or stage...these loads are right smack in the middle of active game play. Yuck.
Its linear, like doom3, in that there arent a lot of 'wandering' options like you might find in halo. Perhaps it comes later (I havent finished the game), but its mostly walking in a hallway, walking in a street, going from room to room. I sort of like the ability in games like halo/halo2 to wander around a large open space. That having been said, its a lot less monotonous and confining than doom3, and the level designs and layouts are a LOT more imaginative and attractive. Doom3 is verrrry monotonous...one corridor after another.
The bad guys seem to be a bit smarter than the ones in the original. Theres a bit more character interaction than the original, or doom3 and definitely than halo/halo2. Other characters talk to you, interact with you, and some help you. A good example is in the opening of the game, you get off a train and theres a 'security officer' with a stun stick walking around. He periodically tells you to 'move along'. If you bug him at all (throw a bottle at him), he'll chase you around a while and whack you with the stun stick, then tell you to move along and go back to his roaming around.
Interaction is very good with this game, and better than the halo's or doom3. You can pick up and fiddle with a lot of stuff thats laying around the game. You can stack boxes and drums to reach extra goodies. You can pick up bricks and blocks. You can bash a lot of stuff with the crowbar to break into boxes and into corridors and doorways.
All in all I find myself playing half-life 2 more than halo2, although I started halo2 a couple of days before i got half-life 2. Now past the onerous installation/authorization process I find that half-life2 has a better pace, is less "arcadey" than halo2, and has more stuff you have to think about a little bit. Halo2 is pretty much run like hell, shoot everything that moves, and keep moving forward. Half-life 2 has some "hmm, whats behind those boxes...whats up there on that ledge and look at those boxes over there I can stack up to have a look". Doom3 was "stuff will jump out at you and you kill it, usually its stuff that was in an area that was so dark you cant make it out or see whats going on half the time".
If I were going to rank the three recent releases:
Doom3: I'd say unless you have a very powerful graphics card and processor, you're going to miss out on most of doom3's visual attractiveness...and the games so dark most of the time the beauty is wasted. Thin plotline, but its all you need for this sort of game. If you want unimaginative, very little thinking, blast the bad guys with lots of weaponds...its a good choice.
Halo2: A nice serial shooter that can be a little arcade-ish sometimes. Attractive layouts. Ability to use multiple weapons simultaneously. Sometimes you control the good guy and sometimes you control the bad guy, which on one hand is a nice way to mix things up, on the other hand it takes something away from the continuity. A lot of drama based "storyline" film clips tell more of a story than the thin plotline in doom3. The graphics engine is less complex and powerful, but it actually runs on the 3 year old xbox hardware just fine, its fun, its more imaginative than doom3.
Half-life2: Another nice serial shooter with more flexibility and imagination than doom3 or halo2. More character interaction. No clear storyline at this point, making it comparable to doom3. Maybe more of the story becomes apparent further into the game. Attractive appearance with reasonable hardware. PITA install process and periodic unexpected stalls to load in next chunk of game really take away from what would otherwise be an excellent game.
Its well worth the $47, and i'm sure i'll get my moneys worth out of it. But I'm going to think twice before buying any more games from this company due to the onerous installation and copy protection schemes.
Update:
I finally finished the game. Overall, it feels to me to be a LOT shorter than the original Half Life. In fact, when I hit the ending, I said "Thats it?!?". Not to say there wasnt plenty of pleasurable gameplay...its a good game. But the original really gave you your moneys worth.
Other things to note...in the original, you teleported through different worlds and faced different creatures. Not so much in this sequel. Your primary enemy is storm troopers, with a couple of big bugs and an occasional helicopter or other machine to blow up. Nowhere near as diverse as the original.
Steam did prove to be a pain in the butt on several occasions. One time when I started the game, it was seven minutes from when I clicked on the HL2 icon and the game actually started.
Some people also reported a stuttering effect in the video and sound. The manufacturer says they cant find the problem, but I had it as well. Periodically you get a 1-5 second 'stuttering' effect on the video and sound. Sort of annoying. I tried turning the video settings down, and even lowered the resolution in the off chance the stutter was from overloading the video card. No improvement.
Maybe its one of these other pesky tray icons...
I'm starting to fondly recall booting up games in DOS with each one having its own game boot disk...
Second update:
Okay, the game has irritated me pretty good. Way back in the old original nintendo days, there wasnt much in the way of challenges to present to a gamer other than what I call "the old hop, skip and jump"...IE, timing a jump from one place to another or having to hop from one skinny platform or rock to another. The original half-life had a bit of this, as do the doom variants. As I just discovered, on the more complex settings, the game developers decided that the way to make the very end part more complicated was to make the floors all slippery so you have to dance on the keyboard keys to avoid sliding off the edge of one precipice or another. I just spent a half hour dying every 1.2 seconds, about a hundred times, before I decided to give up on the last 10 seconds of actual game play.
This is NOT a challenge. In fact, it sucks. We're a little past where using the old hop, skip and jump is one of our better tools for making game play interesting or challenging.
The crap ending, the lousy approach to making the game "harder", and the regular 7 minute startup times while steam, half life, and the game updates and loads result in my dropping this another star. The more I play the game, the less impressed I am. Six years for this?!?
