HalfLife 2 Info

Scarthy © ® ™ · April 23, 2003

Hi all ;) ,

I have found some information on the release of this game, later on this year...

looks like good stuff!
"Half-Life 2 will be shown at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo.
So all these wacky rumors should be cleared up by May 14th.
Gamer.nl has publicly leaked two bits of information: the first is that the magazine embargo ends on April 28th, so magazines can publish their Half-Life 2 articles after this date. It's already been shown to certain members of the press.
They also leaked the big news we hinted at before: Half-Life 2 will be released this year.
It should also be noted that this is pretty much the first official mention of Half-Life 2's existence from Valve."

Here's a piccy I found from HERE. (if anyone can translate dutch, it could be useful?? :) ).

Also some news HERE.

;)

L3@©H¥ ²°°³ · April 24, 2003

looks kewl Scarthy :D

Scarthy © ® ™ · May 19, 2003

Some first impressions on the game...

It’s almost always a little difficult to gauge what a final game will be like based on a controlled condition demo. In the case of the E3 2003 Valve-ATI Half-Life 2 demo, however, it seems pretty clear that the sequel to one of the best games of all time has little chance of disappointing its many fans.
Valve Software’s Erik Johnson was in charge of the lengthy 28 minute demo presentation, which began with a few minutes of Source engine demo features. Valve’s proprietary 3D graphics engine has already scored one third party license and its easy to see why. From the accurate facial expressions on Half-Life 2’s version of the G-Man to the ragdoll physics of the game’s objects to the game’s use of texture properties (we even saw how a character could be made out of water), the engine is more than able to keep up with the rest of the increasingly crowed game graphics crowd. One final Source demo showed the impressive internal camera system that can be used for security cameras in the game.
The rest of the demo showed off parts of the game itself. As you made have read, parts of Half-Life 2 take place in a fictional Eastern European city called City 17 (why a city would be referred to by such an odd name is never explained in the demo). We get to meet a familiar person in the scientist from the original game and a new character, his daughter, as they talk to your character, Gordon Freeman, and each other which again showed off the sequels facial animation system. From there it was pretty much all action for the rest of the demo as Freeman encounters aliens left and right. Some are familiar like the headcrabs and their human hosts (in a neat twists, headcrabs can leave their hosts after they die this time) and new creatures like a small flying bug with a razor sharp propeller.
Some people might have worried that Half-Life 2 might not look as good as Doom III or the latest Unreal engine based on comments in articles that Valve wanted a relatively low system requirement for running the game. For those folks, don’t worry. Half-Life 2 is easily one of the best looking first person shooters yet developed with high scale textures, solid character animation and incredible level design. One level takes place in a drained sea (complete with huge ships stranded in the sand) as you drive a jeep all over the sea and on land trying to avoid a huge propeller driven alien threat. It’s clear that Half-Life 2 should be able to handle large outdoor areas with ease.
Another sequence shows City 17 being slowly taken over, physically, by a massive alien citadel via huge metal pillars that are moving and destroying the city. We encountered some human soldiers who move about the city only to encounter the big alien set piece of Half-Life 2; the 30 foot high War of the Worlds like Strider tripod. Its presence should spook even die hard gamers as they move through the ruined city streets and fires its main weapon that distorts the air around it.
Of course, you have some new weapons that you can use to fight the enemies you encounter, like the bug bait grenade that when you throw it makes the Starship Troopers aliens follow you around without attacking you and most impressively the anti-gravity weapon that pushes up objects when then can be thrown to targets with great force.
AI was one of Half-Life’s strongest features and the sequel will apparently be no exception either. We saw a sequence where Gordon and his AI teammates take on some human enemies. Our team slowly moved up to the enemy’s position, using cover all the way, until we found a way to come up around the enemy’s position.
By the way, we noticed in the Half-Life 2 E3 demo room some mock-ups of the game's retail boxes. We asked Johnson about this and he confirmed that Half-Life 2 will have several collectible game boxes when it comes out, with images of Freeman, the G-Man, the new character Alyx and a special silver box that will apparently be a limited edition with some as yet unrevealed special items.
So, the big question following the Half-Life 2 demo is still, “ Can Valve make its announced September 30 release date?” Johnson is still sticking by that date following our demo so unless something goes wrong we should experience a one-of-a-kind game. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Thanx to John [JCal] Callaham.