loonyblog.

Definitely worth the wait.

My review of Half-Life 2 has gone up over at ShackReviews. While I think it's a great, even brilliant game, I don't hesitate to point out its various flaws. Here's an excerpt, dealing with the headache that is Steam:

I would be remiss if I didn’t take a few minutes to talk about Steam, Valve’s highly touted e-delivery platform. I like Steam on paper, and my version of the game was purely delivered by Steam, but the technology needs some time to get the kinks worked out. On my machine at the office it worked great, and I was playing Counter-Strike: Source in no time. But at home, where I wanted to play the single player game, I had quite a few problems. I quickly discovered that leaving Steam running in the background was a surefire way to make my entire machine come to a screeching halt. If it was updating a game while I was trying to do anything, it would crash my machine. Repeatedly. Also, I found the game would periodically hang on those “Loading…” screens. Once the game loaded it ran great on my X800 pro, staying at a solid minimum of 60 FPS, and dropping only occasionally (it’s worth pointing out that this is far better performance than I saw in Doom 3), but getting there was a bit of a headache. I’m sure these problems will all be worked out eventually, but as of right now, it’s a work-in-progress.

Read the whole thing over at Shacknews.

Posted by jason at December 5, 2004 06:19 PM | TrackBack | Read more: Games , Reviews