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From PlanetHalfLife.com on the review in PC Gamer.
PC Gamer Declares Half-Life 2 "The Most Important Game You’ll Ever Play"
(Brisbane, CA) October 20, 2004 – PC Gamer, the world’s best-selling PC games magazine, got a world-exclusive first look at hotly-anticipated Half-Life 2 in its December issue, which hits newsstands October 19th, 2004. The game was given an "Editors’ Choice" award and a review rating of 98%, the highest rating in the magazine’s history.
PC Gamer was the first publication invited to review Half-Life 2. The December issue of PC Gamer features a 9-page review written by Senior Editor Chuck Osborn, exclusive screen captures, and a four-page technical Q & A with Gary McTaggart, Valve’s resident tech guru.
"Half-Life 2 is arguably the best game ever made to date. It is a groundbreaking experience in interactive entertainment," states PC Gamer’s Senior Editor, Chuck Osborn, "While some games have groundbreaking visuals, or intellectually-challenging gameplay, or perhaps a cinematic story with good voice acting, not one has ever delivered the complete package. Half-Life 2 nails it, surpassing the original in every way."
Sales of the groundbreaking, next generation first-person PC shooter Half-Life exceed more than 10 million units worldwide to date and devotees have waited six years for the sequel. The release marks the debut of Valve’s revolutionary new Source engine, which enables cutting-edge graphics and takes advantage of the newest video cards and processors.
Well, im glad they're including the original Half life in the game cuz i've never actually played it. lol.
But i am getting excited for HL2, and HL1 that i'll get also.
25 days left. :)
i'll post more reviews as i find em.
I don't know if they are to be trusted on HL2... Weren't PC Gamer the first people to put that "It's Coming" or something ad with a crowbar in the shape of a 2? They were the first to know that it was coming out, apparently they have some ties with Sierra.
Or maybe I'm just paranoid.
And I'm still buying the game. :D
I don't know if they are to be trusted on HL2... Weren't PC Gamer the first people to put that "It's Coming" or something ad with a crowbar in the shape of a 2? They were the first to know that it was coming out, apparently they have some ties with Sierra.
Or maybe I'm just paranoid.
And I'm still buying the game. :D
yea, i always question the first review in general of any game, i want more reviews.
PC gamer was the first ones to review the first half life when it came out. This is why they 'claim' they were the first invited to review the 2nd.
Obviously they have some kind of friendship with each other. But not being one that reads PC gamer, i dont know if they are ones to let that friendship influence thier job to do a fair review or not.
But some how i think most the reivews are going to come out the same way, and this is just a taste of the reviews to come. But i shall indeed be wiating more reviews in the next 25 days.
Jonbo298
10-21-2004, 11:17 AM
Check www.hlfallout.com they have other reviews posted that are right within that range. Although one magazine was extremely pissed that it won't have a deathmatch mode right out of the box (User made mods will fix that) and gave it a 90%. They had no other major complaints except that and they dropped it 10% for 1 little thing.
But other then that. Reviews are slowly coming in and are between 96-98% or 9/10 for most reviewiers.
Jason1
10-22-2004, 08:56 PM
The best game of all time?
That I highly doubt. But maybe...just maybe it will actually live up to the hype. Very few games with this much hype actually do. If its as good or better than the first, then I'll be completly satisfied. The first was absolutley amazing, probably the best PC game ever IMO, so obviously it has a lot to live up to.
DarkMaster
10-22-2004, 09:01 PM
What exactly was so great about the first game? I played a port of it on Ps2, and it was a pretty decent FPS as far as I can remember. I mean, HL2 looks hella awesome, I just don't know how Half Life became such a huge thing, cause I don't really remember anything too amazing from the first game...unless the port was different than the PC game?
What exactly was so great about the first game? I played a port of it on Ps2, and it was a pretty decent FPS as far as I can remember. I mean, HL2 looks hella awesome, I just don't know how Half Life became such a huge thing, cause I don't really remember anything too amazing from the first game...unless the port was different than the PC game?
you cant play a FPS on a console and expect it to be as good as the PC version. just wont happen.
Part of what makes the PC half life the living legend that it is. is its online play.
to put things into perspective for you....
online multiplayer games for Console will maybe ....maybe, have a couple hundred people playing its most popular online game at once...
the 2nd place PC game, will have 7000 people playing at any given time. (like right now... in 2nd place, is Battlefield 1942 with 7300 people playing at this very moment...
In 1st place is Half life... Right now there are over 66,000 people playing half life online.
the more that play, the more mods they make, which comes up with even more original gameplay for them to play. As far as the single player goes, i've never played...
I'll have to play it to see for myself. which is why im happy it comes with HL1 also.
But the main reason this game gets all the attention is the sheer mass of people that play it online, it has over 100,000 people playing online at once sometimes.. HL2 MAY be the only game that ever has a chance of getting up to thoes numbers. But personally i doubt we'll ever see a game again that gets that number of people playing online.
Jonbo298
10-23-2004, 02:41 AM
Also, HL1 has had sooooooooo many mods, that fans can't get away from it. They love the mods and still come back to play the original thing that started it all.
Jason1
10-23-2004, 10:31 AM
And youve got to remember, Half Life came out in 1998. It was pretty groundbreaking stuff back then, not so much when you played it on your PS2.
KillerGremlin
10-23-2004, 03:52 PM
I've been playing Half-Life since 5th grade. I was in 5th grade back in 98', when it came out, meaning that I've been playing the game for roughly 7 years.
I'll call myself one of the biggest, if not the biggest, Half-Life fan here, because, I've played through most of the mods and I've seen about all that there is to be offered by Half-Life. :P
Half-Life was groundbreaking back in 1998, mainly because of the way the single player game was set up. It wasn't all that ground breaking in itself......it took a doom-type scenario, and it tied it together with a nice story, and added some awesome scripted events. If you dissect Half-Life, you can pull out several fairly simple First Person Shooters, but it was the unique way the game tied all the elements together that made it revolutionary (Another game that isn't as revolutionary as it's credited to be is No One Lives Forever; NOLF is just tied together by the BEST STORY IN ANY SINGLE PLAYER FPS,[considering its time] and has enough scripted dialogue and events to make it enticing).
What kept Half-Life interesting was really the variety...you where constantly being thrown into new situations, and you constantly had to think what you where going to do: you'd go from crawling through air-vents, to getting attacked by marines on the surface, to swimming through underwater tunnels with water-aliens in them. That was pretty damn intense, especially for 1998.
But I'm not going to lie...and there are plenty of cases like me out there...I didn't get Half-Life for its single player. I got it to play online. I had so much fun playing Quake, when I heard there was a new game coming out using a super-charged Quake engine with graphics that would blow Quake out of the water I was captivated. And that's where I started. I was playing Deathmatch and TFC before I was playing Half-Life's single player game. TFC was and still is one of the most fun mods for Half-Life. In fact, I'll go as far to say that TFC is the best Capture The Flag game that has ever been made [considering its age].
I did get around the beating Half-Life though, and I had A LOT of fun doing it, and I've played through the game several times since, because it's so damn fun. Half-Life is hard to play though, because it's beginning to show its age. I'd much rather play through No One Lives Forever.....but Half-Life's single player still holds a place in my heart.
I still play the many Half-Life mods online to this day. I play a lot of Counter-Strike, and I still play a consistent match of Team Fortress Classic. And every once in a while I dust off Day Of Defeat, Battlegrounds, and Natural Selection.
No other game has gotten multiplayer right the way Half-Life has. I'm not sure why that is, but it is.
I hate STEAM though, and I really have lost lots of faith in Valve since 1.6. I understood the reason to make the push to 1.6, for the downloadable content and whatnot, but I do not think it was necessary to phase out the 1.5 servers.
For starters, Half-Life remains the cream of the LAN, and connecting to STEAM to play a LAN game of Natural Selection is Grade A Bull****. Second, it's retarded that I need to fire up STEAM to play a single player game of Half-Life, but that's just my opinion. And third, STEAM has an ass-load of problems, like:
1. The hacker problem has not been solved
2. It is considerably slower (more laggy) then 1.5 servers
3. The Downloadable content is Bull****
4. STEAM likes your RAM
5. Valve focused on STEAM and updating a 4-year-old mod opposed to focusing on HL2, ultimately delaying it for a while
6. It's harder to run 3rd party mods on STEAM: AKA Desert Crisis. I'll give free BJs to the person that can tell me what Desert Crisis is, because I have a feeling I'm the only one who has played it
---------------------------------------------------
Regarding Half-Life 2, I think it will be good. I'm not sure that it is going to be worthy of a 9.8/10.....because that would have to be a pretty damn revolutionary game, but who knows.
One thing to keep in mind is that there are a ton of Half-Life 2 fanboys reviewing the game right now. You need to wait a few weeks so you get some less biased reviews.
I'm excited though, about Multiplayer. My PC can't handle Source or HL2 right now, but I'm building a new one next year, so I have no problem.
CS: Source looks amazing. I can't wait to get that running on my PC.
Jonbo298
10-23-2004, 04:06 PM
Your PC can't handle HL2/Source? What's the specs of it?
No other game has gotten multiplayer right the way Half-Life has. I'm not sure why that is, but it is.
that part stood out. not entirly correct. Many games have gotten multiplayer right. Quake, UT, Battlefield....
the difference is the sheer number of people. more people that are there, more mods are made to keep it alive, which draws in more people. once you get that cycle going, one of the few and only ways to break it is to bring in the sequal which often snaps the community into 2. oens who like the new sequal better, and one who dont.
Thats one of UT's main problems right now. UT04 was a great game, but theres many stubbern people who refuse to switch from the original UT, which cuts the amount of people in half. meaning less mods, and when a mod does come out, less people to play and keep it running.
and that and 80% of the 70,000 playing HL are playing the CS mod. it would be interesting to see what woulda happened to HL without that mod.
KillerGremlin
10-24-2004, 05:05 PM
that part stood out. not entirly correct. Many games have gotten multiplayer right. Quake, UT, Battlefield....
the difference is the sheer number of people. more people that are there, more mods are made to keep it alive, which draws in more people. once you get that cycle going, one of the few and only ways to break it is to bring in the sequal which often snaps the community into 2. oens who like the new sequal better, and one who dont.
Thats one of UT's main problems right now. UT04 was a great game, but theres many stubbern people who refuse to switch from the original UT, which cuts the amount of people in half. meaning less mods, and when a mod does come out, less people to play and keep it running.
and that and 80% of the 70,000 playing HL are playing the CS mod. it would be interesting to see what woulda happened to HL without that mod.
The original Quake was good, I'll admit, but I dislike UT. But then that's just me. Battlefield is fun as well, but it's a blatant rip-off of Tribes, and if I want to play a game on that scale, I'll bust out Tribes, or just wait a few more days till Halo 2 comes out.
Quake reigned multiplayer king for a while, with it's awesome rocket launcher.....because let's admit it, Quake's single player sucked. Quake 2 lacked multiplayer, which really gave Half-Life the opening to take over multiplayer on the Internet, and I think that is why Half-Life took off. And by the time Quake 3 and UT came out, the genre had already begin to shift towards more realistic gameplay (TFC,CS).
My gripe against Unreal Tournament, and even Quake 3 to avoid biases, is the sheer lack of realism. I'm not saying that I need to be playing a game where every gun can achieve a headshot, but I think it is retarded to run around the map and be able to blow someone up with every single gun. To be fair, I was hooked on Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 for a few months, but I eventually made the transition back to Half-Life to focus on TFC again. Unreal Tournament probably beat Quake 3 as far as balance went, because you could rip someone to pieces with just about every gun in Quake 3, and Unreal Tournament attempted to incorporate some balance with the guns. I probably wouldn't be so against UT if it wasn't for UT2K3/4, which I think is a horrible sequel that really lacks ambition, aside from the graphic power. I thought that UT2K3 and 4 both dumbed down gameplay of the original game, and brought very little to the table.
Unreal Tournament is still fun on the occasional LAN, but there is no way I would make that my multiplayer game of choice........
Battlefield can be fun, but it's by no means an original game, and I think it receives way to much credit for what it does.
I do respect the fact that it took the ideas of Tribes, and made them more mainstream however, because Tribes had a pretty narrow fan-base.
But hey.....who am I to complain about Battlefield. Halo leeched off of Tribes too......so yeah. That's been the gaming industry lately.......recycling ideas over and over again.
*sighs
Tribes wasnt original either. and IMO, battlefield does much more on its own then tribes did. battlefield did indeed take things from tribes, but tribes took things from other games, and newer tribes games borrow even more.
aside from original game elemets, idea's for this and that. All FPS games are a rip off of the first FPS game. They all take the same idea and add thier own twists. nothing can be done about that.
As for UT series, 2k3 wasnt much a sequal and was dissapointing, but 2k4 is very much better then the original. and had some very good creative idea's put into it. the whole Onslaught idea in 2k4 will have many games taking that idea for years to come. (only certain attack points open at a certain time.)
But ya, its very easy to go around each FPS game and point out what they took from another, and another. but most add thier own ways to make the taken idea's thier own in a way.
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