I have to get this out before the beauty of the game makes me completely forget about it.
I recently celebrated my 26th birthday and got Half-Life 2 as a gift (thanks Mom). I was pretty jazzed about the game because it got so many great reviews and I was pretty disappointed with Doom 3; so disappointed that I traded it in before I finished it. So I install the game: it’s 5 CDs worth of content, but that’s normal these days, so no big deal; it still takes about 5 – 10 minutes to install, but that’s big-budget games for you. The thing that really made me fume is this Steam bullshit. The installer installs the files encrypted and you have to go out on the internet; register with Steam and then it’ll spend 5 minutes authenticating and another 10 minutes decrypting the files on your own computer (actually from what I hear, that’s a decent time; some people I’ve spoken to since had to wait hours), after you bought the fucking thing from the store! Sure, games are big budget and you have to protect your investment, blah, blah, blah. But this is ridiculous: you’re punishing paying customers! Assholes. Is piracy really that rampant, Valve? The first game is still on the shelves in stores! And then that Steam shit sits on your machine running in the background (with a ~70MB working set, that ain’t tiny). Do you want Steam to start when Windows starts? Um, no.
But like I said at the beginning, the game is making me forget this inconvenience. The graphics are the most beautiful I’ve seen in a video game (the characters lips move with the words they’re saying!). The sound is also second-to-none. I have no idea about the story, because I don’t think I’m very far into it, but the environment they create: very realistic, very detailed. Valve has done great work here. Too bad they wreck it at the start.