I can unashamedly say that I have never been happier to uninstall a game then when I uninstalled Half-Life 2 (and it's partner in crime, Steam). After enduring yet more crashes in the same place during the mechanical pod ride, I upgraded my video drivers. It helped. By all of 3 seconds. Instead of crashing (freezing) before I went past the helicopter manufacturing bit, it crashed right afterwards as the train went by.
Thankfully a tweak in the video settings with everything changed from high to low got passed that problem. Only to encounter... The "I cannot jump" bug. This bug is unusual and lives up to its name in that you simply cannot jump. I had the gravity gun. I was wasting more soldiers and thinking about how gimmicky it was (lack of actually strategy, no choice in weapons, no reason to conserve ammo etc...) only to encounter a small barrier which I had to jump over. The lack of my ability to jump made this small barrier an impedible obstacle.
Re-loading any of my save games didn't fix it (my practie of relying on the auto-saves with one additional manual save had finally proved fruitless) so I had to start a new game at that chapter. Thankfully, HL2 has chapters you can start again. Thankfully, I was not far into that chapter. Thankfully, I wasn't too pissed at having to endure the pod ride again. After getting past said pod ride for what I hoped would be one final time, I got the gravity gun and... I could jump this time. Yay!
I progressed onwards. Only to encounter yet another pod ride later on which... caused another crash. Reloading got me past that one though. So far, in the past 3 hours of playing HL2, I had reset my computer some 6 times. Numbers 7, 8, 9 and 10 were not far off as HL2 then proceded to freeze:
- When loading a save game
- Upon entering a new area.
- For no apparent reason
I perserved however and managed to struggle on. Freeman endured all obstacles laid before him and finished the game.
I then decided it was time to check out that Lost Coast level. As I played it I thought "Now this is the kind of levels that HL2 should've been more full of, instead of that gimmicky crud" only to have it... freeze. That was enough Lost Coast and I found that I couldn't uninstall the sorry piece of shit fast enough.
Overall though, crashes aside (which I'll put down to my old graphics card, even though it seemed quite capable of running 99% of the game), I have to say Half-Life 2 was one of the more boring FPS I've played. Story? Sure, if you don't mind it not making any sense. Fun? Yeah, if you don't mind ignoring the fact that you should be playing a FPS and instead get caught up in the gimmicks used to:
- Take away any sense of strategy.
- Remove the need to conserve ammo as you encounter crates of unlimited ammo.
- Find out how useless rockets are as it takes about 10 of them to take down anything, yet you can only carry 3.
- Are thankful that whenever you actually need to use rockets, there is ALWAYS an unlimited supply of rockets nearby. In fact, whenever you needed to use any weapon, there just happened to be an unlimite crate full of ammo for them nearby.
- Don't mind using whatever weapon just happens to have a crate of ammo nearby. Forget about using that more powerful gun and just use the one you have ammo for. This means you can ignore the good ol' 6 shooter (which has no ammo for it anywhere in the game).
- Encounter vast legions of the same enemy again and again and again. In Half-Life 2 you go up against such a diverse range of opponents as headcrabs, headcrabs on bodies and overwatch soldiers. And no, tnat's it. That's all you ever encounter.
- Forget about engaging in combat yourself for vast periods of time as you enocunter unlimited supplies of bugs, soldiers or my personal favourite, invincible hero characters who all do the fighting for you.
- ... not to forget the long periods you spend in a buggy or hovercraft not shooting anything and just running and gunning it.
- Encounter reams of health all throughout every single level. Forget about ducking behind that wall to avoid enemy fire, then strategically running across the field as you lob grenades. Nope. Just run from health box to health box. Better yet, there's plenty of crates to smash open for goodies around every single fucking corner.
- Don't mind not having anything make any sense what-so-ever. Who are these aliens? Why am I fighting them? Why are the aliens I thought I saved the world from in HL1 now helping me in HL2? Enjoy as all these questions and many more go unanswered.
- Don't mind having this extra program thingy called "Steam" running in the background just so you can play a single-player game you paid for. Nor mind it automatically upgrading HL2 the minute it's installed making you wonder how long it's going to take to finish downloading so you can play the damn game.
- Create an incredibly short game that's not worthy of its predecessor.
Unless I hear HL3 finally has story that explains EVERYTHING that happened since HL1, I ain't gonna buy it. I know there's story out there on the web. That's nice. I want it in the game. You know, that thing I paid for.