Graphics are pretty. Not a technological feat like Doom 3 was, but they are functional. Nothing here we haven't seen before.

Atmosphere; AA+++*++. It's like Soviet Union circa 1981 with aliens in the future! ( http://angryflower.com/only4d.gif )

Physics are awesome. Period. Not sure if they are "better" that what we've been seeing in Doom 3, but so far they've certainly been put to much better use. (Albeit there are a few overly obvious setups.)

The facial expressions thing that people are gawking about is truly gawkable. Impressive stuff, looks totally convincing.

Gameplay is kinda ok-ish atm. So far I've just made it to the end (I think) of the canals section, so I've got quite a way to go yet. There are some great moments when you're running around and you're like OMG GUARDS, and you hop off into somewhere and like OMG MANHACKS and then you run into some exploding barrels and you like OMG EXPLODING OMG BARNACKLES! Excellent!
But inbetween those moments, sadly, it's walking along some place, oh hello guard, bang dead repeat.

Finally, Barney is fucking sexy ^_~ 

bah! 

I have minimum spec to play the game. Weeeeee. Maybe I will buy it after all. ;) 

CZG got fanbw0y0xr3d! 

I don't think it's fantastic. It's good tho. 

is in need a hottie. Is it possible to have attractive (read sexy) MALE videogame heros? Is Valve note only breaking gameplay barriers, but also the social barriers of our very exsistence? 

To start up dammit! I start it up and after about 2 minute's of hard drive access it stops and freezes up. Fucking steam can bite my ass. 

i wonder... will this work on a 1.80ghz celeron with no "real" video card? (just a 64mb intel graphics thing) hehe. damn :( oh yes, 512mb of ram. :)

*me goes to die 

It'll run I'm sure, just don't count on it being as pretty as the screen shots you've been seeing. Your intergrated video system is probably only a DX7, maybe 8 class card. As a result you won't get the reflections to look that great as all the 9.0x cards. I would suspect you would also have to turn down most of the details and resolution, and forget about AA and AF. Still it might run, I get the feel that it is a fairly scalable engine. 

Errrr, how have people got on with the "You must download an entire HDD full of Steam technology and suck steams dick for 24 hours before being allowed to play" stuff?? Seeing some bad reports from Blues, and as someone who has no interest in Steam and never will have any, is it possible to get the game working in a simple conveninent manner?? 

Only way to avoid steam.

Me personally haven't had any trouble with steam, but it sitting in my systray, me knowing that within lies the possibilities to play CS...
It makes me feel so dirty! 

Gotta find a no-steam crack then I guess. I find it offensive that Valve think they're so fucking special that they can force paying customers to go through some tedious extra rigmarole just to promote their damn Steam service. 

I've seen that HL2 will be proposed on X-Box near May 2005, but what about other console platforms (PS2 particularly) Does Anybody know if HL2 will be proposed on PS2.. or not ?? 

Be realistic. PS2 is just too old and has weak hardware for that kind of a game. Doom 3 ain't coming to PS2 either and neither did Thief 3. 

It seems that either I have to buy a X-Box, either to wait about E3 2005 and the PS3 release... grrrr... another good idea should be to "boost up" my PC adding more RAM.... well.... well.... well...... let's go for a PC upgrade, that the less expensive solution... 

just go and buy proper new pc dammit 

My PC is only 1 year old, and only need more RAM to be able to run both Doom3 and HL2... it's not a big deal to upgrade it so ... 

forget about consoles ffs 

Had absolutely no problems with Steam - I preordered HL2 through it shortly after it and preloaded all the files as it suited me, and the game uncorked itself happily yesterday morning, with none of the problems connecting to the authentication server that lots of people reported.

Personally I far prefer online content delivery and product authentication to the kind of pointless, fucked up CD/DVD copy protection that has blighted 90% of the PC games I've bought on physical media in the last year or so.

Oh yeah, the game was pretty impressive by the way. Engine is more functional than spectacular, story sagged in places (a lot of spending ages getting from A to B without really knowing why you want to be at B), nice facial animation. Oh, and check your graphics settings before you start playing: Wierdly, the game defaulted to medium texture quality on my 256MB graphics card, but has no noticable slowdown when notched up. WTF? 

For thos of you who have played it already: how well does it run compared to Doom 3? Is it around the same or is it noticably faster? 

I have serious issues with HL2. The game stutters every 5 seconds or so, sometimes the game will hang for 2-3 seconds before returning control. It seems to be audio releated, but nobody knows (lots of others reporting the same problems at steampowered forums).

I also reject to this whole "let's force Steam on every paying customer" idea. It's repulsive, to say the least.

Besides, so far, the game doesn't even reach Doom 3 to it's ankles. 

Not that I'll have HL2 anytime soon but I prefer to buy my games on physical media. If I bought the game on CD or DVD, is Steam required or is the on-line authentication something else (like XP)?

How are level sizes and load times, BTW? Also, are the environments interesting and compelling? 

STEAM account and activation are required even if you only want to play singleplayer. Yes, you heard that right. 

Tef Johs: Check you aren't preloading HL:S or (even worse) CS:s in the background, gameplay seems to be much smoother for me now that both of those stoppped going.

Scragbait: Steam is basically built into HL2 completely, it's how it browses for multiplayer games, how it authenticates you, how you get patches/localisation. It even has a backup facility so you can burn a copy of the game to CD or DVD, which is kinda sly of valve seeing how everyone's reason for buying the hard copy is so you have said disks : - ). So yeah, you authenticate it through steam, and you need to have a steam account. But it's not as bad as it seems, steam isn't anywhere like as buggy as it was, and you only need to authenticate once, then you can go offline. 

Try putting snd_mixahead 0.4 (or something) instead of 0.1 in your config file. (Or write it on the console.) This has apparently helped some people with the sound issues.