Half-Life 2 facelift

[fragger]

Attention Half-Life 2 fans - if you haven't played this one for a while, you might like to know that it's been given a bit of a graphics makeover. I haven't played it for quite some time so I thought I'd fire it up again for old times' sake. First I logged on to Steam to see if there were any updates for it, and there were. After waiting a couple of hours for the update to finish (although this was largely due to my presently stodgy net access), I fired up the game, and it looks sensational. It always was a great looking game, and now with the latest graphic tweaks it looks fantastic. Mostly it's the static texture files that have been updated, with refinements such as improved specularity and more realistic-looking detail, but stuff like water, fire, energy effects and shadows have been improved also. In fact, the shadows cast by your flashlight now look amazingly realistic. Character graphics look the same as before, as far as I can tell. None of the changes are really major, there's just lots and lots of them - little tweaks all over which aren't hugely noticeable by themselves,  but all contribute to make the game look better than ever.

I believe the graphic updates are available for Episodes 1 and 2 as well (not sure about Portal), but as these require more lengthy (for me) updates from Steam, I think I'll hold off on those for a bit.

I don't know when these graphic updates became available at Steam, as I said I haven't touched HL2 for a good while, so for all I know this may be old news. But since it was news to me, I thought it may be to others too and they might like to know about it.

I had great fun with HL2 last night. I'd forgotten how entertaining this game could be, despite its linearity. And - it still has the best explosion sound effects in any game I've ever played :-X

[mandru]

Thanks for the news fragger, I'll have to check it out.   :-X

[eor123]

Your timing is interesting. I just finished playing it for the first time. I ended up enjoying quite a bit.

[fragger]

I hate to tell you this mate, but the update is for Half-Life 2, not Far Cry 2. Or did you mean HL2 in your post?

Whichever, I fully empathize with your Steam woes. I can't play my HL2 Episodes 1 & 2 until Steam finishes updating them (it's paused on both of them, until I start them up again), and as it took 2 hours to update HL2, I'm looking at waiting about another 4 hours before Steam will let me play any of the other episodes - 6 hours if it does Portal as well. Assuming I can stay logged on for that amount of time :D

[mandru]

It turns out you said HalfLife2 and I went looking for FC2.

The frustrating hour and a half with failed logins and creating a new account just to have the new login fail immediately was my own fault for misreading what you'd said in the first place.

To top it off I'd written up a lovely rant and had to remove it once I'd posted it here and went back over your initial post and realized I'd gone looking for the wrong game.   :-[

Edit additional:  Ah I see I wasn't fast enough on the recovery to fix that before it was noticed.   ^+-+

[fragger]

Sorry mandru, I should have given you more time to destroy the evidence ;)

But take solace in the fact that your terrific rant wasn't written in vain. One person at least had a good chuckle over it ^+-+

[mandru]

Does seem a shame though to lose that bit about being able to grab a real life clerk by the shirt front and jerk them across the counter when they try to give me the run around.   ;D

[Art Blade]

good read, boys  ;D (shame I didn't get to read that rant)

[mandru]

You didn't miss much Art.

My last two posts pretty much covered all of it minus the heat it takes to make a good rant.  ;)

[Art Blade]

ah, OK. Phew  :)