lolz at the comment about Nico being fresh from battling the Combine over in HL2...

I can wax nostalgic about video games for hours every day. My personal best years in gaming:

1983 - We got Intellivion for Xmas 82.. Played a lot of Lock & Chase, Astrosmash, Night Stalker, Sea Battle, etc.
1989 - The year I bought myself a NES.. Played Bionic Commando, Contra, Castlevania.. First job mowing lawns gave me income in addition to my allowance which went up to $10/wk. to blow on gaming magazines and the occasional game, as well as a decent budget for arcade games which were in their heyday... Golden Axe, Robocop, Narc, Hard Drivin, Stider, that was 1989 for me. Probably the single best year.
1992 - Now working one full-time and one part-time job for the summer, as soon as I wrote my final exams I I bought myself Genesis, then SNES the next day. Played a lot of Super Contra, Street Fighter 2, Castlevania 4, Super Battletank (first game with photo-real graphics on home systems imho), Populous, Strider, etc.
1994 - The year I bought my first PC.. played a lot of Doom 2, Alone in the Dark 2, Ecstatica, Tie Fighter, and countless demos from PC Gamer and other magazine pack-in discs
1998 - The year I got into multiplayer... played insane amounts of Quake 2
2000 - The year I bought my first true custom-built gaming PC.. played Quake 3, Deus Ex, Aliens Vs Predator, and in 2001 played tons of Tribes 2
2002 - At end of 2001 I bought another even better gaming box... played tons of RTCW, Medal of Honor, and ended the year playing BF1942 about four hours per day
2006 - The year I bought my first bleeding-edge custom-built gaming PC (dual GPUs, 30 inch 4 megapixel monitor, $150 mouse, etc.)... played BF2, Quake 4, Call of Duty 2, Prey, HL2: Ep1

2007 was a decent year, might look like a stand-out once I get some distance and perspective.

I used to love rts/strategy type games (C&C, Dune II, Civilisation, Railway Tycoon, Syndicate etc. etc.)

However now that I have a job, and a family etc. time is seriously limited for game playing, so I've turned to games that give instant fun and can be picked up and put down quickly... so FPS is where it's at for me. Bioshock and the Half Life 2 games are my current lot.

The Crysis demo was pretty awesome too, but seeing as I've owned the orange box for months now and haven't even started HL2 ep2, I can't justify buying that... or Gears of war for the PC for that matter.

So I still do love an RTS and other such games (in my youth I LOVED adventure games, not so much now)... but time somewhat dictates what I can play.

That's true, Oatmeal. More of a good thing is still a good thing.

Didn't realise they were calling it HL3. For like HL2.5 if you ask me. Still good but not worthy in overall length as to a finished project; plus these mountainous gaps between episode releases really broke up the feeling of still caring about that universe and those characters. My vested interest was gone by that point.

It will be interesting to see what they do with HL4. Rather than follow the existing storyline, I say start fresh with a new idea, and throw all there energy into creating the next level of interactive gameplay. Remember when you first played Half-Life how real it was? As compared to games that came before it. It was evolutionary. I want THAT, but to the next generation. Than throw me in an action-adventure meets Die-Hard scenario. And of course it's just a few more steps to Holodecks. I'd pay for some of that shit. I envy our youth.

Yeah this is a real tease alright, I read about this in a magazine when HL2 came out and we've had two episodes since. That said they are doing it for nothing (well apart from jobs in Valve maybe ) and its also going to support co-op mode right through and extra areas that werent in the original.

It will also support the extra graphical features of Episode 2. Its a pity the team revamping Opposing Forces broke up.

On retro gaming the 3D graphics upgrade for Duke Nukem3D is good fun, its like a 300mb download. Like Half Life that game had some brilliantly designed levels.

Arsenault, you owe it to yourself to get the Orange Box. It's worth it if only for TF2 and Portal, but since you'll be hopping into HL2 and Ep1 and Ep2, um... just go buy it.

We've got a TF2 community going on at http://steamcommunity.com/groups/videosift

Tags for this video have been changed from 'john, freeman, gordon, fanfic, garys mod' to 'halflife 2, hl2, john, freeman, gordon, fanfic, garys mod' - edited by calvados

Tags for this video have been changed from 'hl2, half life, halflife, gman, valve, gordon freeman' to 'hl2, half life 2, half life, halflife, gman, valve, gordon freeman' - edited by calvados

Thats gotta be the worst ad for any videogame, ever. Who's retarded idea is this? 5 seconds pf TF2 footage could sell this game to anyone. or Portal, or HL2. TV ads are supposed to get the wider audience interested, no? After seeing this nonsense, most wont even know its a freaking game, much less any of the contents. What a waste of money.

The reason you sound like a noob is you can have so MANY different problems and still try and blame it all on the game. I don't have any of the problems you describe. My only problem is my video driver occcasionally resets itself, which interrupts play for about 30 seconds, and my computer has locked up a few times. Like most PC gamers with a clue, I accept that it's only been released for 72 hours, it's the most demanding game ever created, and there has not been a patch and no targeted video drivers yet. There are going to be some bugs, and spending an entire day making multiple calls to tech support expecting them to wave some magic wand to fix your clearly fucked up hardware just paints you as a clueless NOOB.

The guy probably "lied" to you because you were being self-righteous. Demanding his personal e-mail is like demanding his cell phone #. That address doesn't exist to serve you and he is not obliged to share it with you. Stepping outside of procedure like that creates huge inefficiencies when you're dealing with large call volumes. A lot of people who have to deal with the public learn to tell little white lies so as to avoid wasting time, and hearing undue sanctimony from the bleating morons who call up to dish some abuse. I'd love to do a quick poll of people who have worked in customer support and see who'd be willing to give a complainant their personal contact information, even if it's work-based.

You assume the most demanding game ever released is not causing heat problems just because your fans are on max at all times... well maybe you are wearing the damn fans out, maybe the stock cooler on your video card is not up to the task, etc. Like I said before, this is the only game that causes my video fans to spin up to maximum, so obviously it causes more heat due to rendering load than other games. I can play TF2, HL2, etc.. all day at 2560x1600 and the fans never spin up... play Crysis for 20 seconds at 1680X1050 and both cards have spun up to maximum...

Try a different video card. If you're broke, just buy a fast card on credit and return it after you've diagnosed the problem. I've experienced the problem in your screenshot, and some of the problems in your list before, and it was due to the video card hardware being basically borked. In one case the cooling fan stopped spinning, which caused heat damage due to overclocking, and in another there was a bad capacitor on the card. At any rate, there is just something about the tone of your post that really rubs me the wrong way.

Ah, I'd forgotten about the Vortiguants. Yeah they're all throughout HL2 talking about the 'Free-Man'. Still doesn't explain the age gap. The only reference to it I can remember is Dr Vance saying a throwaway line 'you haven't changed a bit'.
Are you sure it's decades between games? I thought it was only about 4 years?
Maybe I'm going to much into it. I'm sure it'll all be explained in HL3.

I'm loving the HL2 Episodes more than the first HL2 game. Yea, they're far between, but they're so cinematic and diverse to the point where it warrants the short play time. I've never heard more powerful voice acting. The fast paced and linear style of Ep 1 is nicely contrasted with the open environment and few, huge encounters of Ep 2.

I'm loving Crysis demo. Definitely buying this game, and thinking about a mobo\CPU\RAM upgrade to get the best performance. I already get nice performance at 1920 X 1200 with most visual settings on high. I'm running two video cards in Crossfire mode: X1950XTX CF Master Edition with the X1900XTX. This is slightly faster than a single 8800GTX in most benchmarks.

HL2: E2 was a worthy chapter in the HL saga, but Bioshock started to bore me about halfway through. Despite the finely designed and rendered setting, Bioshock is one of the most repetitive games I've played in the past year. I don't really understand all the hype that started when it came out. Also, I think the story is complete bullshit, and just as thin and meaningless as the majority of video game stories have been. It truly baffles me when I hear video game podcasts go on about "the best story ever in a first person shooter". What frigging story? You crashed, don't know who you are, and there is a bunch of bullshit about Big Daddies and Little Sisters that makes no fucking sense at all.

Half Life 2 was an epic sci-fi masterpiece. Episode 1 was excellent. Episode 2 is the simplest and most contrived of the three. It lacks the atmosphere and re-playability of HL2 and HL2 EP1. The 'scenes' are way too simple. There aren't enough engagements with the combine. The hunters are just plain annoying. The big battle at the end is a terrible mess.

And Bioshock, seriously, where is the gameplay? All you need to play it is one brain cell and one finger to click the mouse. It has the most horrible railroading of any FPS I've ever played. It's essentially a rolling graphics engine.

System Shock 2 didn't impress me much either, mainly because it was one of the first PC games I had ever played, and I'd just completed 3 player co-op Hired Guns on the Amiga which is one of THE most atmospheric, challenging and fun games I've ever played. SS2 tasks consisted mainly of 'go here, hit switch, open door, go here, get key, open door...' which gets extraordinarily dull after a few hours.

Deus Ex and HL2 are still the best FPS PC games if you ask me. The storyline of Bioshock that everyone raves on about isn't a patch on the storyline of either of these games.

(ducks)

Bioshock was simply System Shock 2 with all the complexity cut out for it for dumbed down gamers who got used to playing Halo 2 on the Xbox 360s.

Half Life Episode 2 besides Portal was again a disappointment, the HL2 set pieces are the same as before, the game length is even shorter then Episode 1, even though they promised more content. The plot? Well what plot? All running around again with mysterious allusions that never get revealed (alot like Lost actually).

Yes they were good games, but they alluded to being so much more then they turned out to be. I would rather have had a full direct upgrade of System Shock 2 then Bioshock and Half Life 3 instead of these piece meal expansion packs that are supposed to be released sooner then a year apart... I mean wasn't that the whole point of episodic content?