Half-Life 2: Collector's Edition
 | Average Customer Rating: Recommend Half-Life 2 Collector's Edition delivers a new level of realistic action and excitement. Players return to the world of Gordon Freeman, as he returns to the Black Mesa research facility. The aliens are pouring into our world, and Freeman becomes part of a resistance group to stop them. New weapons, new enemies and new characters are waiting -- along with major enhancements in animation, artificial intelligence and graphics. Product details and pricing info |
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71 Customer Reviews Posted
- Know What You're Getting
- I bought this collector's edition because I didn't see any information on how to get Half-Life: Source...I didn't realize that they'd offer you both it and Counter-Strike: Source for free when you register any version of the Half-Life 2 game. So...if you're buying it for that, don't bother. If you think you're getting a strategy guide, that's not entirely the truth, either. I was hoping to see the Prima trade paperback inside, but what you get instead is a pocket-sized book of excerpts from the guide and what looks like bits from the book "Raising the Bar", a hardcover about the making of Half-Life 2.
The free T-shirt is just the logo, and it's only available in a men's XL.
That said, here's the rest of the story: Half-Life 2 is an absolutely wonderful game. I cannot begin to describe how awesome it is: fun, scary, and real. Where the original game was frightening because the story was fast-paced and intense, and a lot of moments startled you, HL2 is more suspenseful and nerve-wracking because you feel more immersed in it. In any other game, running from the police in a city in broad daylight wouldn't do much for me, but here I feel frantic.
Despite the disappointments in the packaging, I'm still kind of glad I bought the collector's edition, for the "just because" factor. Call it a "special occasion" purchase. Half-Life: Source is a huge improvement over the original game, but if you have the "High-Definition Pack" that came free with Blue Shift, it's not much different from that: don't expect it to look at all like HL2.
One last thing: don't worry about Steam. It's not malware, it doesn't appear to be very intrusive, and I'm actually enjoying all the free goodies they offer me. Think of it less like having to activate Windows XP, and more like having a direct pipeline to the development team. - 2004-12-31, 3 of 3 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Half Life 2 Collector's Edition
- This game is has the best graphic out of all games. and the stort line is great!
- 2004-12-28, 0 of 4 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Dissapointed
- I had high hopes for this game. Really high hopes...I woke up early the dy it was released in order to play it first out of everyone I knew. I beat the game in 16 hours over two days. That was over a month ago, and I haven't played since. It was fun while it lasted, but there are problems I have. There is limited replayability, and CS Source is really the same as CS 1.6. A great game, but until the mods start coming out, I won't be playing it.
So,
Pros:
Amazing Graphics
Superb Physics Engine
Lots of Fun to play
Cons:
No replay value
CS source laggy and almost same as original CS
Steam is annoying, sometimes I can't play offline - 2004-12-20, 0 of 0 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- The replay value is in the T-Shirt.
- After being blown away by Far Cry and having spent heaps of time playing Rainbow 6 I guess I was expecting more from this. The original Half-Life was spectacular in its time. Sadly Half-Life 2 was a dissappointment. It's good don't get me wrong and while it rises over the mediocre it doesn't go much further than that. I was so antcipating this game that I forked out the extra bucks for the Collectors edition. Forgiving the fact that it took 3 days to figure out how to install it, the game is just uninspired. It is massively linear, massively easy, and massively predictable, basically it's boring. As for the story, I am not sure what happened, it just lost it's magic from the first one. The little elements with the soldiers conversations, the intriguing level design, the weapons, the variety of story telling methods, it is all gone in part 2. They still haven't got endings right. This is better than the jumping levels of the first one but its not great.
From a technical standpoint, it is a masterpiece. The physics, graphics and sound are all extremely well done. However the level design, the story telling and the weapons are just mediocre. The level design is extremely linear and becomes very predictable after awhile. A lot of the level design is clearly done to show off the impressive physics engine that sits underneath the levels. This is used to good effect later in the piece when you pick up the gravity gun. With the gravity gun you can manipulate objects to great effect including killing enemies with objects. However once you get the gravity gun you are basically invincible and once I got it I never died again in the game (on the hardest difficulty) except once when I accidently fell off a ledge. The weapons are not balanced at all in this game. The pistol is effective to 800 yards. Once i was shooting this guy who was maybe 12 pixels tall with the pistol because he was so far away and he wasn't dying though I had shot him with 3 full magazines. When i got closer I realised he wouldn't die because he was required to deliver a scripted speech so that I knew what to do next. Anyways, I moved on, killing folk at 800 yards with my pistol. Maybe they'll eventually fix this with a patch but it doesn't say much for the physics engine.
The things that were fun in the original most notable it's great story that was revealed as you went along are missing here. It has little replay value so play it once and then uninstall. I'll get extra value out of the T-shirt. To remove the bitter taste from my mouth I think I'll go and play FarCry.
On Reflection: The above review was done a month after the games release when I was working in the gaming industry. I remember it clearly, it was hyped beyond all belief, the magazine raved about it, everyone thought it was wonderful. About 50 of us at work bought it all in the space of 2 days. A week later none of us talked about it anymore, it just simply wasn't that good. A year on and it is long forgotten. - 2004-12-11, 4 of 7 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- A cool game that is flawed beyond belief
- Half Life 2 could have been an all around excellent game. Unfortunately its flaws bring it down into the levels of mediocrity for many players.
First off, let's start with the bugs in this game. No matter what brand processor, motherboard, videocard, or soundcard you have, no matter how fast your system is, there is a very good chance you will suffer from crashes, sound stuttering, and frequent 5-10 second freezes in this game. There are many things Valve will tell you is wrong with your system that is causing the problem, but in the end it is a problem with their programming of the source engine - which has some unforseen compatibility problems with a wide spectrum of hardware. Valve has still not delivered a satisfactory patch addressing the bugs in the game.
Next up is inefficient shader programming. Though the game runs beautifully on modern Nvidia GeForce 6600/6800 videocards, at max detail, buyers with older cards are not so lucky. If you have a GeForce FX 5200/5600/5900 card, you will be forced into using a lower quality DirectX 8.1 mode even though the GeForce FX supports DirectX 9.0. This is because Valve coded the shaders inefficiently, and failed to use partial precision (FP16) in their game unlike all the other DirectX9 games available. By using a mixed precision path, which Valve stated would be in the game and benchmarked over a year ago, they could have made DirectX9 available to owners of older GeForce FX cards. However, much like the rest of the game, the graphic implementation here appears rushed, and again we have less than desirable results for a large amount of people. So don't expect anything approaching the best quality unless you have the latest $300 videocard.
But the disappointment does not end there. Most games you type in your CDKEY, hit install, wait a 10 minutes, and you are done. Not Half Life 2. After doing the initial standard 10 minute cdkey/install, you then have to install a program called steam on your hard drive and setup an online account. This takes another 10 minutes. After you have setup the steam account, you then have to wait for the files to be decrypted on your hard drive. This takes about 30-45 minutes for the games on the CE. So now you are talking an hour+ just to install the game. You think, boy, after all that, it must be real easy to play, right? No way. You have to keep the CD in the drive like any other game, and on top of that you have to launch the steam program, wait for it to connect to the internet, then you can play Half Life 2 - every time you play the game. There is a hassle you can go through to play HL2 offline, but you still have to install, activate, and decrypt the files on steam at least once. Major, major, major intrusive pain in the rear that no buyer of a retail CD should have to endure. This is a case where anti-piracy measures have hurt the consumer more than the pirates.
If you are not fed up with the game after the long and intrusive install, the missed opportunity in terms of graphic performance, and the bugs that may bring your game to a grinding halt on a frequent basis, then you may actually enjoy this game. But that's a *big* if.
Proceed with caution with this title. What could have been a great gaming experience has been marred by sloppy general programming & bugs, inefficient graphics programming for older graphics cards, and a horribly intrusive and painful install procedure that persists past the install and into your gameplaying experience. If you think you can deal with these issues, this is definitely a cool game. On the other hand, you just might want to skip it and go for Doom3, which is just as fun and doesn't have all the technical issues this game does. - 2004-12-07, 11 of 16 people found this review helpful, Rated:
