Internet Archive's 25th Anniversary Logo. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest.
Sign up Log in. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book.
The extras included: Counter-Strike: Source - The next generation of the 1 online action game Half-Life: Source - Digitally remastered version of the original acclaimed PC game Following the period of instability caused by the events described in Half-Life , an interdimensional organization known as the Combine invades the Earth, defeating the human forces in the Seven Hour War.
Wallace Breen, a human scientist, rules the city on behalf of his new masters. An energy field prevents humans from procreating, and no new children are born. Earth is turning into a grim, oppressive police state. Meanwhile, Gordon Freeman, the man who was at the center of the events that took place shortly before the rise of the Combine, awakens from his stasis and is inserted into a train to City 17 by the mysterious G-man.
Gordon is soon brought into a resistance group, and makes a seemingly futile attempt to bring down the Combine and liberate the Earth. Half-Life 2 is a linear first-person shooter with light puzzle-solving elements and many setpieces, similar to its predecessor in concept. The player guides Gordon Freeman through the City 17 and the wilderness that surrounds it.
On his way, he'll encounter a few friendly characters, but also fight dangerous foes. The game features a realistic physics system: Gordon can pick up objects and toss them freely, and many of the puzzles are physics-based - for example, at one point the player has to weigh down a seesaw with bricks at one end to turn it into a ramp.
Gordon's enemies, apart from alien wildlife which found its way to Earth, are mainly Combine forces, which utilize a variety of firearms, gadgets and vehicles.
Policemen and foot soldiers work along with helicopters, gunships and gigantic walking machines to hunt him down. Free Download to Xbox Meet the Demoman, one of nine playable character classes in Team Fortress 2. A fierce temper, a fascination with all things explosive, and a terrible plan to kill the Loch Ness Monster cost the six year old Demoman his original set of adoptive parents. His disposition and total number of intact eyeballs, however, did not.
Meet the Heavy, one of nine playable character classes in Team Fortress 2. Like a hibernating bear, the Heavy appears to be a gentle giant. Also like a bear, confusing his deliberate, sleepy demeanor with gentleness will get you ripped limb from limb. Gabe picks up the thread. You can learn from the Al though, so you may see them doing something you didn't know you could do and then use that later on to your advantage.
Now if you see a dumpster, you can pick it up and throw it at the enemy if you want to. But will we see the same kind of individuality and autonomy as we did from the bots in Valve's other recent project, Condition Zero, who, depending on their psychological makeup, would follow your orders to varying degrees? Sure, chimes Gabe. They'll argue with you too. So if you tell someone to go and defend a certain area, they can turn around to you and say that they don't want to, as there could be a lot of risk associated with that action.
They'll wait till you're not looking and then go off and do their own thing. And so we move on to the final level of the day, one that may have a ring of familiarity if you've seen all of the Half-Life 2 movies we've run on our discs over the past year.
In this third level, we're actually using the new technology to drive new types of gameplay," explains Doug as I dive in. There's a buggy right next to me with a mounted machine gun, and the nearest thing of interest - a dry dock - is a long way off. Smoothly, I slide into the vehicle and accelerate across the bumpy terrain, the frail car bucking like a wild bull beneath me.
I fight for control, barely avoiding a spin as I round a corner only to embarrassingly wade straight into a lake. The engine cuts out. I've lost the buggy for sure and a long trek lies ahead of me. Why don't you try getting out and giving it a little push with your Manipulator? He's not wrong. Using the Manipulator's alternate fire button, I start shunting the car out of the water, get back on board and resume my uncomfortable journey.
At the dock, I use a crane with an enormous magnet attached to suck up the increasingly abused vehicle and plop it onto the pier, only to alert several very pissed off guards with the commotion. They waste no time trying to mince me with their machine guns. I return the compliment, ducking behind crates as they pin me down with a hail of lead. Diving out, I bear down on two of them. They disperse and flock for shelter with startling realism, firing wildly as they run, but one falls as a volley from my MP5 connects with his back and bows his spine.
The other one soon follows suit, crumpling to the floor with a thud. Jumping back into the car, I accelerate through a storage shelter towards a ramp leading to a huge window. Images of a heroic escape fill my mind, a majestic exit of splintered glass and a flight through the air to safety. Instead, I lose control again, decelerating pathetically and coming to a halt with half of the car teetering on the outside of the building, while the back wobbles awkwardly within.
Back and forth it goes, each dip forward more precarious than the next, until at last the nose begins its slow motion-like plummet to the earth. I'm upside down. Now where did I put that Manipulator? I get going again. In the foreground, circular metallic objects begin rolling towards me. Roller bowling ball and Mines," exclaims Doug gleefully.
A burst of machine-gun fire sends one pinging backwards like a V bowling ball and bouncing against A the road barrier; the others I seem to avoid. However, one's attached itself to the car and is now draining it of energy. Again, I come to a halt and shoot the mine off, only for it to resume its incessant charge over and over again.
Then, an idea. Switching to the Manipulator, I suck the mine up and cast it over the ravine at the edge of the road, watching as it drops into the sea below. I race over hills and obstacles, slowly mastering the amazingly lifelike vehicle physics which prove even more authentic than those featured in Far Cry. Just as I think I'm safe, a storm of bullets kicks up a maelstrom of dust and a hovercraft fills my view.
I stamp on the turbo and accelerate off. With that, the level ends, an exhilarating ride -although I'm left somewhat disappointed that only two of the weapons available to me, the Manipulator and a hugely powerful alien machine gun, seem to have been added to the Half-Life arsenal. Apart from these, the hardware at your disposal seems much the same as before.
So what's the deal with the machine specs I ask, now the gaming fun has finished? Is the minimum spec still going to be a Pill as promised 12 months ago? Once you get over a 1. It's been almost seven months since we were assured Half-Life 2 would hit the shelves, a date which was compromised not only by the theft of an early version of the game, but also unforeseen programming complications. So when can we finally expect to get our anxious, clammy mitts on a finished copy?
We're targeting this summer for completion. We're hopeful we'll be able to declare a date at E3 in May," says Doug. With Half-Life 2 so close to completion, and with the likes of Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 3 to look forward to see Looking Forward', above , the future is surely bright for a company that's constantly striving to roll back the barriers in an attempt to take the FPS genre to all-new heights. On the evidence we've experienced first hand, Valve seems well on course to achieving its goals of providing an unparalleled cinematic shooting experience, one that's threatening to not only knock A-List top dog shooter Far Cry off its perch, but potentially blow it away.
And in just a few short months time, you'll be able to find out for yourself if Valve has pulled it off. Valve is working furiously to meet its deadlines, but Gabe is already planning ahead. We're still working on Team Fortress 2" he reveals, talking about the sequel to the much-loved class-based online shooter.
When we first showed it, it was on the Half-Life tech, and the Half-Life team was already halfway down the road to building the HL2 technology. So when the TF team saw what the new engine was capable of, they decided they wanted to use it too.
The problem then was, how do we talk about TF2 without talking about HL2? We kind of screwed ourselves there, so we decided to say nothing more on it till we announced HL2. And what are the chances of us seeing a Half-Life 3? We've got a lot of thoughts about the universe and things that we can do. We love the design challenges too. We'd like to do other stuff as well, but we'll definitely be doing a third Half-Life game.
There are a lot of cool things left to do in this style of game and this universe. What's more, from the sound of things we won't have to wait another five or six years for it either. Part of what we're doing is trying to build things which haven't existed before. But now that they're there, we can continue the process with smaller steps. We've got a lot of things that we can do with the new technology that we haven't done yet, as opposed to the technology for HL.
When that game shipped, we decided that there were all of these new things that needed to be built. Now all of these things have been built, we really need to use them. I think what we'll do next is go off with these new tools and try to set ourselves a whole lot of new challenges. It was a little bit hard to know how to react," begins Gabe melancholically. The idea of having something that you're not entirely done with thrown out to the world is pretty traumatic and the morale of the team was terrible after it happened.
We'd invested so much time and ten times the budget of Half-Life to build this game, only to have a load of people have their first experience of it through this unfinished random release. Some parts of the game had to be re-written as a result. We had to go back and look at our network protocols for multiplayer games and mods, and make sure we didn't leave any holes that people could exploit.
But was the leak the main reason behind the game's delay? No, the fundamental reason was because we underestimated the amount of work left to do and how long it was going to take, especially when the team were so demoralised after the leak.
Tuning, tuning and more tuning," comes Gabe's reply. If that's truly the case, then summer's looking like a fairly realistic target. During our visit, I got to spend some time with HL2's facial animator Bill Van Buren, who explained how Valve is tackling the problem of making its game as cinematic as a film.
It's really easy when you do a predefined cinematic to have very high production values, because you know where the camera and characters are going to be.
In HL2 though, because you can roam around each room and the Al is designed to react dynamically to your actions, you never know where the player is going to be during a key scene.
So we have to have something good ready, no matter what the player does. We've managed to find a balance between something that's really intentional from the level designers and the animators - such as a line of dialogue from a key character - but which continues to look good," says Bill. Aptly demonstrating this was a scene where Alyx, Dr Kleiner and an unnamed character in full body armour discuss the dangers of having Gordon in their lab.
Bill moved Gordon around the room, and all three of the supporting characters adapt perfectly, turning to Gordon at the right times and making the scene look as convincing as any pre-defined cinematic could. Each character's animations are blended into their postures so they can deliver lines and actions convincingly and logically wherever the player is, continues Bill.
You could be about to see a shooter that genuinely feels like a movie. September I'm sure, like me, you've cleared your diaries, booked time off work, arranged to pack your partner off to a downmarket hotel and are looking forward to spending the entire week playing the most-anticipated game in the world.
Because the game is going to come out on September 30, right? And, although I'd been specifically warned off the subject by a friendly PR person "Mention anything about the release date and your interview will be terminated immediately. Damn, this man's good. And in fear of getting the bum's rush I decided to believe that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the game will indeed be on the shelves on the specified date. And move on. So, if the game's going to be on the shelves in a couple of weeks, I presume that it's finished, that you're just tweaking and balancing?
Once we've got it to a point that we think is pretty good we'll find out what other people think about it. We did the same with Half-Life 1 as well. We try to get as wide a range of opinions as possible - for the original Half-Life we brought Valve founder Gabe Newell's dad in to play the game, a retired air force guy who was in his fifties, early sixties, and had never even looked at a PC, let alone a PC game.
Gabe said, 'If my dad can't pick it up and run with it then we're not done. And women? One of the things with this game and the new characters was to widen it up to more than just white males aged We really wanted to see if they could help us get into a female audience. And if they've got any sense, they will. Half-Life 2 is still on course to be the game that moves the goalposts. You've probably seen the game running by now - if not check out the footage on this month's DVD - and the brief stint I enjoyed at ECTS, albeit with the same code that we looked at last time, has done nothing to shake my faith.
But what about Valve? The game's been in development since work on the original Half-Life ended and five years is a long time to keep a project to yourself without any feedback from outside. So we could pick up bottles and chuck them around - stuff like that gives you a shot in the arm.
The same happened when Ken Birdwell another senior software development engineer at Valve started chucking the facial animations in and it was like, 'Hey these characters are cool, they can smile and stuff. And for me, it's these two aspects of the game that threaten to lift Half-Life 2 so far away from the chasing pack that it's unlikely anything will topple it until Half-Life 3, of course.
Because, while you've seen the movies, what you might not realise is that none of the cinematic events that you're watching are scripted. Doug talks instead about contextual Al, where the non-playing characters are given basic knowledge about the environments they're in and a set of choices based on this. And the player decided to duck into this room and slam the door. Now, that wasn't a critical path for the player. There were multiple ways for you, as the player, to get out of that scene. And if you made that choice, then the Meeh decided to put the camera in, trap you and bang the door down.
In the old way we would have forced you to go into that room, and the Meeh would have knocked the door down every single time. So we're now able to open things up a bit and say, 'If the player does this, then you can do that,' and it becomes more Al than just a canned scripted sequence. Think of it as exactly how you'll play through the game. With the advanced ptysics model you'll be able to get through the game by shooting or by using the environment. Doug starts talking about the choices you'll have in Half-Life 2, making reference to the Traptown demo which you can find on this month's DVD.
You know, you could sit on the ledge with your shotgun and take them out one by one, or you could do it the way we intentionally did in the demo to prove you can get through just using physics. What we're hoping is that you play it one way, someone else does it differently. We're hoping to create more discovery and freedom. We're not trying to say to people, 'You're going to play this game three times.
Actual specifics about the game - in terms of weapons, story and even characters -are still being held completely under wraps - a deliberate policy on Valve's part in order to retain the mystery and ensure the game has maximum impact when it's released. Doug did divulge a little about vehicles, confirming that they would all be land-based and would include jeeps and APCs, but he was quick to check himself, reminding us that Valve doesn't want to ruin the game by giving too much away see Saturation Point boxout.
Even so. I did get him to reveal a little more about the places you're likely to see as you're playing the game, as well as the ones you won't. So we knew where not to go, and that helps you define where you should go.
When you play the game, I think you'll understand more about how you moved from New Mexico to Eastern Europe, and you'll be able to put those pieces together as you play and as Gordon finds out what's been happening between that. And with that I was yanked away from the screen and dumped outside the hotel, where a large group of teenage girls was loitering expectantly. It was immediately obvious that they weren't there for me one of the mums threatened to call the police when I started waving and smiling , but the real tragedy is that they weren't there for Half-Life 2 either - apparently Westlife were staying in the same hotel.
If only they knew. We gamers have become steeped in Half-Life - its engine, its Counter-Strike bedfellow, its sci-fi lore, its physics, its characters spreadeagled in humorous Carry's Mod poses, and the unexpected desktop disturbance that was Steam.
0コメント