Cube - I'm not sure what your hardware problem is. My PC was less powerful than yours (but with half a gig more RAM), and I never had a single problem. Most likely it is a hardware clash. I read that incorrectly configured sound devices with conflicting IRQs are a problem here. Valve put out a stream of patches for the retail version, and I found it worked fine a few weeks after release.
As for the game, I loved every single second of it. I found thge linearality to be quite refreshing and focused, and it has just enough give in it to make the player believe that they're chosing what to do, not the designers. The Coast levels are a perfect display of this. The first time I player it, I barrelled through and completed it very quickly, but for the second time I stopped at every house and nook and cranny on the way, and it's great. Lots of contained, creepy firefights. Very fun.
*Mild Spoilers*
I found the super-grav gun fantastic fun. Tossing around the soldiers was the release I'd waited the whole game for. You feel like a God, all powerful and untouchable (at least till you get to those bloody choppers at the end). I only wish we had it for the rest of the game, it was too cool for school, innit.
Tech wise, I still find the game pretty amazing. The faces and animations are eerily real - it's all in the eyes, it totally weirded me out when I first played it, and I'm looking forward to other games using this kind of emotional interactivity. I would be even cooler if you could reply al a Deus Ex, but maybe that's something for a mod team to play with.
Speak of mods, anyone else familiar woith Garrysmod? I haven't played the recent versions, as my computer recently had a break down and is now a functional moron, but the mechanic at the heart of this mod is pure gold - fuck with the physics. You can play with ragdolls (sounds pointless, but you'll be engrossed with arranging Alix and the G-Man into some perverted pose for at least the first hour of playing), spawn enemies to fuck up, make machines, blow shit up (my favourite. Get around 50 exploding barrels, stack 'em up, then tie a body to them and blow it up. heheh. Extra fun comes from welding a camera to the body, so you can watch from the corpse-eye view as the barrels explode).
You can build cars from scratch, or take the buggy and stick things on it. I once stuck a buch of boosters onto my buggy at stategic points, and after a bit of practoce you have yourself a superfast flying buggy (or hovercraft, they fly easier). You can also take it online and confound little kids with your infernal machines. I had a game once with these peeps where they kept stealing my modded hyper-buggy, but every time they jumped in it, I could control the thrusters, and I'd fly them around the map. When they got bored, it's fly it back to myself. I've also played an awesome game of fort wars where you build a fort out of bits and bobs, then make a cannon and try to kill the other players, or destroy their forts. Excellent fun, I could go on about it all day. I've easily spent more time in Garrysmod than in the original HL2. Get it. |
