Half-Life – Mostly Harmless

October 16, 2007

Half-Life 2: Episode Two

Half-Life 2: Episode 2 G-Man

I’ve bought Half-Life games since they first came out so naturally I had to buy Episode 2.

I’m about half way through in only a couple of hours. The play is okay and unlike Microsoft games (Halo 2 is still dead on Vista; what a waste) it works very well with my Vista 64 system.

When Half-Life 2 came out it in 2004 it was fantastic. Now 3 years later the graphics are getting a little dated. The problem is that other platforms kept up. Gears of War is visually stunning. Seeing the sharp polygons of the end of Gordon Freeman’s shot gun is distracting and not in a good way. I’ll play with the settings to see if I can get the images to look more realistic.

In the meanwhile the play is good. I’m glad that Valve still puts that ahead of the wiz bang effects.

June 3, 2006

Half-Life Blues

Half-Life 2: Episode One keeps crashing.

I figured it would be related to my Audigy sound card so I removed it and turned on the built in RealTek AC97. While I was at it I removed the wintel PCI modem. I never used it and wanted to make my PC as friendly to steam as possible.

I optimized my hard drive, ran the whole Symantec Norton tools, etc. I was able to play further but still eventually keeps crashing.

Sigh. Need to get a new PC, this one is becoming a pain to support.

Update: Last night I booted up into Ubuntu Linux, ran the latest Transgaming Cedega application and installed Episode One on it.

Amazingly it installed and ran. Still locked up though. The only difference was that it locked up the application and not the whole desktop. I was able to kill Cedega and not have the whole computer sieze up.

Transgaming rocks. Up until the game locked up Half-Life 2 ran at full speed.

I so need a new PC. The only thing I have not tried is swapping out the video card.

June 1, 2006

Half-Life 2: Episode 1

First person shooters are great fun (usually) and I have purchased and completed all of the Half-Life games. Half-Life 2 ended with a cliff hanger.

The next game in the series Half-Life 2: Episode 1 was made available today. I had pre-ordered and had the locked gamed downloaded and ready to be unlocked for a week now. After playing it for less than an hour it looks like good fun and continues the game.

The LOADING… portion is a pain. My PC is a few years old but it’s a P4 3.2GHZ with HT, has one gigabyte of RAM, a Nvidia 6800 AGP w/256MB, etc.

The loading of data is death and kills the flow of the game. I’ll do the usual optimization and make sure nothing is competing with the game. Once the loading screen is done the game plays very well but this is a pain.

Tag: Half-Life (page 1 of 1)

Half-Life 2: Episode Two

Half-Life Blues

Half-Life 2: Episode 1

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Jan Dembowski

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