Half-Life II This Summer!

[Doom_Dude]

Here is some interesting news. Gabe Newell says they're pushing for a Summer release of Half Life II. The game is reported as being finished and they are now optimising it. :)

http://www.halflifesource.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=2774

In other Half-Life news they said that both Counter Strike and the original Half-Life will be released revamped in the new Source Engine. This was revealed in a Doug Lombardi interview at E3:

http://pc.boomtown.net/en_uk/articles/art.view.php?id=5189

[The Undertaker]

Summer of what year. Certainly not this one. Don't tell me catching the guy who stole the source made them get done all of a sudden.

[Nomad]

Half-Doom Nukem Forever. It's gonna be great. :D

[Doom_Dude]

Summer of what year. Certainly not this one. Don't tell me catching the guy who stole the source made them get done all of a sudden.

I don't care as long as they finish it.

[ARMYguy]

mmmm codename gordon mmmm lol

[Nephil]

In other Half-Life news they said that both Counter Strike and the original Half-Life will be released revamped in the new Source Engine. Oh no, I won't buy another CS again. I payed 30 bucks for Condition Zero 2 months ago, I won't pay another "remake"!

[FATAL]

Oh no, I won't buy another CS again. I payed 30 bucks for Condition Zero 2 months ago, I won't pay another "remake"!
Did you get the bang for your buck? Or euros shall we say...

[Shakadi]

In other Half-Life news they said that both Counter Strike and the original Half-Life will be released revamped in the new Source Engine. Oh no, I won't buy another CS again. I payed 30 bucks for Condition Zero 2 months ago, I won't pay another "remake"!

I think whatr he meant was that if you had the original game, you could polay it kinda like a sourceport. The original Half-Life with the Half-life two engine, I'm guessing.

[Doom_Dude]

I'm not sure if they'll sell these remakes or if they'll ship with Half-Life II....

[GreatWasabi]

I don't know about Half-Life...I've never been a big fan of that franchise. The game was a bore-fest for me. A crowbar? Come on. I'll take Berserk Mode and a left hook any day. :D And re-releasing CS is pretty cheesy. I heard Condition Zero is pretty weak. What I really want is DOOM III, the rebirth of the most legendary video game of all time. (Not that anyone here doesn't know that, lol) And Halo 2. Mmm...new BFG...double weapons to kill aliens...excellent.

[Doom_Dude]

I doubt Half-Life II will be a bore-fest. :p Looks pretty damned cool to me.

[ToXiCFLUFF]

Condition Zero doesn't appeal, but I'm betting HL2 will be an awesome game.

[Ninja_of_DooM]

Well I can see the HL 2 lovers over at planet half life seem to think that DooM is just some 16 bit piece of crap. They don't really understand do they? Ah well, I can't wait for it. But IMO from what I've seen HL 2 is just another game. I've seen more of a film than a darn game from the trailers. Just my 2 cents.

[ToXiCFLUFF]

Well I can see the HL 2 lovers over at planet half life seem to think that DooM is just some 16 bit piece of crap. They don't really understand do they? Ah well, I can't wait for it. But IMO from what I've seen HL 2 is just another game. I've seen more of a film than a darn game from the trailers. Just my 2 cents. Who cares what they think of Doom. It doesn't have to affect our perceptions of Half-Life. As for trailers making the game look like a movie, trailers usually look like movies: seen the Doom3 ones?

The 25 minute long HL2 gameplay film I saw recently did not look like a movie, at least not in the way of being completely restricted.

[Nomad]

To be honest, I think they both look... overy flamboyant. I hope with their "beautiful" visuals, there's a decent game undernieth.

[Ninja_of_DooM]

Toxic, I was merely stating the facts. As for the trailers, I'd say DooM III looks more like a game.
Yeah Nomad, I don't want another Unreal II. That just sucked.:(

[ToXiCFLUFF]

Toxic, I was merely stating the facts. As for the trailers, I'd say DooM III looks more like a game.
Yeah Nomad, I don't want another Unreal II. That just sucked.:( You were stating your opinions, as you see them.

As an aside, being like a movie seems to be the general aim of action games these days. I'm sure both HL2 and Doom3 are going to be aiming towards this - most modern FPS games are usually built around a sseries of scripted set-pieces.

[Ninja_of_DooM]

Toxic, that is exactly what they said ok?

[ToXiCFLUFF]

Toxic, that is exactly what they said ok? It's alright ninja, I think I was grasping the utterly wrong end of what you said when I posted that.

[Ninja_of_DooM]

ok, cool.*cool*

[HyperFlash]

I watched a lot of the trailers. I see some flaws with it. It takes a damn-load of bullets to put a guy down. And those striders take a barrage of rockets and still function?!?!??? Other than that, the game looks awesome. It's too bad that you have to spend hundreds of dollars to play a $50 game.

[Ninja_of_DooM]

Are you talking about steam? I've heard about it and how a lot of people don't really agree with it. But how do we have to pay loads just to play it? Is this related to the above or is it more of valve's crap ideas?

[HyperFlash]

I'm talking about HL2. And how you have to get a pretty good computer to be able to run it. Kind of like in Far Cry, where the power of you computer depends on some of the graphic options you can turn on.

[ToXiCFLUFF]

The HL2 beta, which looks roughly the same as the new shots, wasn't too demanding. After all, it's no Far Cry to look at.

[Doom_Dude]

I watched a lot of the trailers. I see some flaws with it. It takes a damn-load of bullets to put a guy down. And those striders take a barrage of rockets and still function?!?!??? Other than that, the game looks awesome. It's too bad that you have to spend hundreds of dollars to play a $50 game.

Im a bit tired of enemies that can't take much damage. :p

[HyperFlash]

I know, but still. A barrage of rockets?!?!??? Still walking?!?!??? AAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

[Caden]

I dont see what the big deal is. The cyber demon takes a lot of rockets to kill to :P. Half-Life 2 wont need powerful hardware, its said to be able to run on an old Rage 128 at about 700 megaherts. Still i would buy it for the physics engine. (Already have just need to send in that cupon) Welding crap together is cool :)

[Chilvence]

The game was a bore-fest for me. A crowbar? Come on.

You have obviously never had the pleasure of a real crowbar, felt its cold steel touch between your fingers, gently caressed it with your palms while whispering sweet nothings to it.

[GreatWasabi]

I've used a crowbar plenty of times, but they're more suited to breaking open boxes, not faces. And I don't talk to them. Sledge hammers are way more fun. :D And the corwbar didn't do nearly as much damage as the DOOM fist in Berserk mode.

[Caden]

Still you have to admit those snarks are cool. Look kinda like little one eyed naked hampsters.

[HyperFlash]

What the hell is a snark? Is it those flying electric balls?

[Nomad]

A snark.

http://img27.photobucket.com/albums/v82/digital_nomad/snark.jpg

They work like a living homing missile. They attack anything that moves (including yourself, if there's nothing else to attack), and blow up after a certain period of time.

I imagine the little buggers don't live very happy lives back on Xen...

[FATAL]

Oooh, I remember snarks. Aren't they cute? :)

[Ninja_of_DooM]

Nope.:p And they will attack you if you aren't moving. I threw all 15 of them at a Garg once and killed it.:D I see that's the old model there. Is that your own screeny Nomad?

[Nomad]

I see that's the old model there. Is that your own screeny Nomad?

No. I just did a quick Google search to show HyperFlash what everyone's talking about :)

[HyperFlash]

I'm gonna use the gravity gun and throw a bunch of them at a strider and see how it likes suicidal hampsters!

[Ninja_of_DooM]

Hmmm. No Snarks I think for HL 2. The gravity gun's all well and good but from the footage I saw it was just a pointless toy. The Strider just shrugged off the stuff being lobbed at it like confetti.:p Just so long as they don't do something really stupid and give it an ammo limit then that's ok. I only wish you could throw people around. Maybe youcan though.:D

[ToXiCFLUFF]

I thought the gravity gun was a very original idea for a weapon... the way you can use it for both offense and as defensive cover is good as well.

So far, games have only generally been using physics for the same things - things you can knock over, and corpses. They have these great physics engines, and this is all they can think of to use them for?

So yeah, I like the idea of the physics being used differently for once. It's like that sequence of Doom3 pictures not so long back, showing a large bridge falling apart and dropping into the bottom of the cavern - why isn't anyone else doing this kind of stuff?

[Ninja_of_DooM]

Necasue it can be done through scripting much more easily. Anyone rememebr the V2 base mission from RTCW? That's a litttle but of scripting there. But I'd much rather see someone do it through the use of physics. Much more realistic and nicer to look at.:)
I aslo heard a similar DooM III story where they're hiding just under a window when a zombie comes down the corridor. It goes past the window when they made DOoM Guy leap up and blast the thing through and opposite window with a shotgun and casued it to tumble down a staircase using real physics.

[ToXiCFLUFF]

Necasue it can be done through scripting much more easily. Anyone rememebr the V2 base mission from RTCW? That's a litttle but of scripting there. But I'd much rather see someone do it through the use of physics. Much more realistic and nicer to look at.:)
I aslo heard a similar DooM III story where they're hiding just under a window when a zombie comes down the corridor. It goes past the window when they made DOoM Guy leap up and blast the thing through and opposite window with a shotgun and casued it to tumble down a staircase using real physics. Don't get me wrong, it's a decent sounding thing to happen, but I've seen similar stuff in Max Payne 2, Postal 2 et al - it's just ragdoll physics, which are pretty standard now, and this kind of thing is what you expect from them.

I don't think it's the difficulty of using these physics engines for less typical things, but simply lack of imagination... look at Gish for instance - it may be 2D, but it uses a proper physics engine for gameplay more than any game has so far, and in original ways.

[Ninja_of_DooM]

And It's been ages since I've seen barrels that affect things around them when they blow up. In Half Life if you blew up a barrel any nearby barrels would either blow up or not. They wouldn't even budge an inch. But it seems to work in DooM. Anyone who plays Barrels of Fun will know this. Enemies were moved by explosions and stuff liek teh BFG up close got them moving really far if it was an Imp or something. But nothing liek it in Half Life. The enmies just either blew up or fell to the ground oin the same spot. Now how weird does that sound?*confused*

[ToXiCFLUFF]

Heh, damn right.

Seriously, I think the way stuff gets pushed around is one of the key things in why shooting a monster in Doom is so much more satisfying than in any other game.... I love it when you get a perfect shot on an imp, and push it over the edge of something.

Enemies seem glued to the ground until they are dead, in modern games.

[Nephil]

So far, games have only generally been using physics for the same things - things you can knock over, and corpses. They have these great physics engines, and this is all they can think of to use them for?That's one thing I liked about Painkiller. It was plain fun trying out how the enemies fly if you hit different body parts with the stakes gun or the stotgun. They really used the physics engine quite well in this game!

[Ninja_of_DooM]

From what I saw in the demo I played it was pretty well done.

[ToXiCFLUFF]

So far, games have only generally been using physics for the same things - things you can knock over, and corpses. They have these great physics engines, and this is all they can think of to use them for?That's one thing I liked about Painkiller. It was plain fun trying out how the enemies fly if you hit different body parts with the stakes gun or the stotgun. They really used the physics engine quite well in this game! This stuff is called, wait for it.... RAGDOLL. Painkillers enemies are pretty much glued to the ground, right until you kill them - just like I was talking about before. Sure, the weapons toss them around like feather pillows but it's the same thing as shooting a guy in UT2K3 - just with more force applied to the corpse.

The stakegun is something different, but it's still basically just a corpse manipulator.

[DooMRockeR]

DAmn, they finished it? If they finished it then give is the F(_)CKING DEMO!

[Ninja_of_DooM]

A Painkiller demo? Those have been around for ages.
Read my last post here.