Half-Life 2 demo impressions

[phait]

First, checkout some screens here:

http://www.phait-accompli.com/crap/hl2/

I also plan to get a few videos up soonish.


I just tried the demo for Half-Life 2. For the uninformed this is a first-person-shooter PC game that is a sequel to the original Half-Life, which was quite innovative for it's time: scriptable events, smarter enemy AI (though AI claims hardly ever live up), even more interactivity (break objects/crates)... Half-Life 2 is a whole 'nother chapter but this time around it is such an EXPERIENCE.

Here's some stuff I recall. You can pickup pretty much any liftable object - soda cans, barrels, food containers, boxes, etc. and throw them. Depending on their weight, you can throw them far or just toss them, like with cement bricks. You can chuck any of these things at citizens, who'll complain, or chuck them at guards who'll promptly beat you down with a stun baton.

Starting out in the demo I got off a train into a city known as "City 17" and wasn't quite sure what my purpose was there just yet. I can tell you walking around in the initial area is rather eery - there's these flying robotic devices that will stop and take something of you - supposedly a snapshot or some kind of... who knows, but the screen flashes very brightly in a split second. It's just something I thought was very mysterious.. the guards wear gas masks and are kinda creepy, hearing them call over their radios in a distorted voice, telling you to stay away, move along. At one spot, a guard whipped a soda can off a garbage bin onto the ground, and told me in a rude tone to pick up the can. I didn't, I just waited around. He told me another time to pick up the mess "you made"... so I picked up the can, whipped it at him and he came after me for a bit and I ran around, then he resumed standing at his point.

Talking to a civilian, their eyes move independently - they can look straight at you without turning their head, or move their head around. Their mouths move and you can see their teeth. The detail is astonishing. In the opening video sequence we see a mysterious, gaunt man (known as the "G-Man") - we see him closeup, and you can see the pores in his skin, his mouth movements as he talks, his teeth, his reflective eyes... one thing I remember reading about in HL2 is that there is a speech system in the game so that if you were to put in any phrase, such as "Hello, how are you today?" -- the character you are working with will say what you type in this particular file. This allows for very, very dynamic character speech - it's an amazing technology, tho relatively simple if you think about it - take all the nuances and letters of a voice and assign them into certain letters and groupings. When the G-Man talked, it was believable, save for some slight noticeable pauses or just a bit off-tone in some words. Still, very, very nice. Also, characters faces adjust according to their particular emotion, instead of remaining with a static look.

Back to the game... the lighting is very impressive - light beams through windows, dust particles can be seen. This is the first game I've seen where the light is actually BRIGHT. YOu can look straight up at a light source and you might even literally be squinting, at least if you've been walking around in a dim or dark area for some time. There is also some nicereflections upon certain floor surfaces of the surrounding area. All I can say is the visual detail is just awesome. Later into the game I got into some combat. There is a particular weapon called the gravity gun, which allows you to pull and pickup objects from chairs to barrels to big dressers, and launch them very, very far and very fast. You could hurl an armoire at an enemy and he'll be knocked back! Or you can launch oxygen tanks and they'll explode. The fire effects are quite nice too, some of the best I've seen yet in a game, actually realistic this time. One thing I didn't seem to find in the demo is dynamic lighting coming from the firing weapons - meaning, the area around you would light up. It could just be a feature missing from the demo, or maybe I REALLY didn't look at all the options, but I'm sure I had most settings on high.

Another really well implemented feature in the physics engine is ragdoll physics. This is basically a system where monsters and characters and certain objects have joints or a flexibility, allowing their parts to hang or their entirety to roll along certain surfaces. For instance, you could shoot a monster down a set of stairs, and it's body will conform to the angle of the steps. I shot a head crab and noticed he was clinging off a table just by it's one arm! A very memorable portion of the game, a couple actually... one is when I see a spinning butstationary blade device. Ahead of me, the headcrab zombies were coming towards me, but they walked into this spinning blade and were chopped in half! I had to duck below the blade to turn off the device, then I could proceed. I could always turn it back on and use it against the monsters. Related, I came to a point where there are 2 cars hoisted by cables. Pulling a switch, I was able to drop a car onto a group of zombies and crush
them to death! I then jumped onto the car, I was pulled back up with the pulley and was able to access another area. Earlier I remember placing a doll on one end of a see-saw, and I dropped a cement brick on the other end. The doll flew up a bit but mostly rolled down and off the seesaw.. too cool!

How about water? THis is the best water I've seen yet, better than the game "Far Cry". It's just HL2's water looks much more realistic, other's is typically blue. I dropped some objects into some water and watched the splash come up. I am anxious for the day that true water physics will be implemented in games - surging waterfalls, channels, streams that can move through any pathway it so "chooses". What else is there... related to the lighting, there was one particular part where I launched a circular saw blade into a corner wall area. The light in that region of the wall created a shadow of the blade - you could see each individual blade tooth in the shadow - this is realtime lighting and shading, and it's damn nice to see. Toss an object and see it's shadow play around as it falls.

This is just the demo and I've already written a good amount. All I can say is HL2 is very impressive, and I'd much rather get this than Doom 3. It runs so much better than Doom 3 on my system as well, and it looks great. There is the occasional pause but it is really quite playable - enjoyably. I am definitely going to buy HL2, and I'm anxious to see what mod-makers will do with all these damn possibilities!

My system:

2 Ghz Intel Celeron
512 MB RAM
256 MB GeForce 5600XT

Half Life 2:

800 x 600
high textures
no Anti-aliasing

[ctmsound]

Fuck the demo, the actual game kicks ass!!!!!!!!!!!!

[hammertime]

I got the game for Christmas, but I don't have enough juice in my non-music computers to play it. I'm going to wait till I have some free time, so I can load it up on my laptop, or maybe even upgrade one of these computers. I played all of the previous versions of the Half-life series -- opposing force, blue-shift, etc -- and had a pretty interesting time. You might like Doom 3 if you like Half-Life 2.

[horacesqueeze]

I can't believe I took time away form the game to post here.



BEWARE.THE.CRACK.THAT.IS.HALFLIFE2!!!!!