I should preface this post with “I didn’t play the first Half Life at all” (though I did play a ton of Counter Strike), so I can’t compare the two.

Since I now have the horsepower to run pretty much anything a game can throw at my rig, I finally got around to purchasing Half Life 2 (HL2, the so called “daddy” of all games out at the moment)…at first I was surprised to find 5 installation discs (Doom 3 only came with 3, and it’s a pretty spectacular game graphics-wise); the sheer number of discs combined with the auto-patch feature resulted in an hour long installation process (!!!).  Oh man was it worth it…this is without a doubt the best PC game experience I’ve ever seen.  Period.  Even though my video card is considered middle of the road, it has no issues running HL2 pretty much wide open (for the geeks, that’s 4xAA, 16x antriscopic, full reflections on water, everything else at the highest setting)…it’s unbelievable.  On more than one occassion I found myself running around just to look at textures (or zooming in on stuff in the distance).  The most incredible part are the characters (actually called actors in this release); the facial detail is like nothing I’ve ever seen.  I’ve also never seen water effects like the ones in HL2…at one point whilst being chased by a chopper the water was whipped up into a froth all around me by the rotors…a very nice touch.  Everything has detail, whether near or far…the screenshots I saw on various websites do this game absolutely no justice whatsoever.  My biggest complaint (related to graphics) about Doom 3 is how dark everything is.  HL2 is the opposite, everything is open/bright/airy…just flat out beautiful.

As for the gameplay, it’s equally as nice as the graphics/sound (unlike Doom 3 where gameplay is downright boring and very repetitive); this is more than just a first person shooter…lots of puzzles to figure out, and the maps are huge, plenty of stuff to explore…and plenty of ways to get lost.  At around 2AM I finally found the shotgun, that thing sounds f’ing sweet (whereas the weapons in Doom 3 sound downright pathetic and tinny)…very gratifying pulling the trigger on it.  I gave up on a puzzle around 3AM; I couldn’t find my way out of a room after 20 minutes or so of searching.  Regardless, this game has exceeded my expectations ten-fold (or more).  A few hours into Doom 3 I was bored, a few hours into HL2 and I simply can’t wait for more…I’m not looking forward to the game being over actually.  I also can’t wait to try Counter Strike: Source (which thankfully shipped with HL2, it was an add-on in the first version)…hopefully it’ll be as dazzling as HL2. 

This is what PC gaming is supposed to be like, huge ups to the folks over at Valve.  The next big game I’m looking forward to is Black & White 2 (the first release was great and is still one of my favorite games), unfortunately the release is scheduled for March of ‘06 so who knows what kind of hardware it’ll require to run…it looks very promising though.

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