The inevitable Half-Life 2 post

So, it finally happened - Half-Life 2 went Gold yesterday. And am I excited? Despite over a year of falsely inflated hopes, poor excuses and lax security on Valve's part... Damn right I am!! It's actually kind of interesting to watch the reaction of the community to the announcement (from the Elite Bastards angle anyway) - There was a lot of frustration and (dare I say) hatred towards Gabe Newell and co after the delays and code leak before, but I guess time is the best healer - The enthusiasm for Half-Life 2 seems to be back with a vengeance, and the World and his friend are looking forward to playing it.

I certainly count myself in the 'looking forward to it' camp - Most recent FPS games that have been released recently have been more exciting to me from a technological (i.e. graphics engine) point of view than for the actual game itself (Doom 3 being a perfect example of that). The Source engine is, of course, a potentially fantastic looking one, so yeah I'm excited by the eye candy, but I'm also all geared up to play my way through the game as well. I remember my introduction to the world of Half-Life... Cue dream sequence...

I first encountered Half-Life through my job as an IT technician, back when I used to deal with retail PCs (I really should talk about those halycon days here some time, I still miss them). We started selling and fitting Voodoo Banshee boards to customers, and as part of the bundle (they were Guillemot boards if I remember correctly) they came with a disk labelled simply 'Half-Life: Day One'. Now, this was in the days before I frequented any forums or tech sites on the Internet, so I had no clue what this thing was, but of course I fired it up for a look. And wow.... Everyone in the office soon got dragged into this game, it was one of those moments where you fire up a game to 'test this video card I just fitted' (Heh, we did that a lot), and before you know it the entire department has lost an entire afternoon stood around just watching while you play. Everything about the game grabbed you - The graphics, the sound, the interaction with characters.. It was truly a complete package.

Of course, when the final game was released I grabbed a copy of that through work too. I do have a dark secret though - I never completed the original Half-Life. Shocking, isn't it? My excuse (and I'm sure I'm not the only one to say this) is that I got fed up of the stupid alien levels, the only red mark on an otherwise flawless single-player experience. I also remember a guy I worked with at the time having a Pentium Pro system running Windows NT 4, and I once went round just for him to show me how smooth the game ran on the NT codebase - Quite a precursor to what Windows 2000 and XP would offer from the dark days of Windows 9x I guess.


Anyway, enough reminiscing for one day, so back to the present. I finished my first review for Hexus... kind of. I ended up screwing up by missing some settings (Why do manufacturers insist on hiding these things?), but otherwise it seems to have been quite well accepted. A little more work, and hopefully that'll be published sooner rather than later.

I've also finally kicked off some of the testing for my 3DMark05 follow-up article - A little late, but oh well. I have a DVD-RW full of bitmaps to check IQ on with me right now... So, I guess that's my cue to wrap things up here.