The Shrine

<div style='font: 10pt Tahoma; text-align: left; '>Appearently, Half-Life 2 is available for pre-order on Valve's Steam thing and if you buy it via Steam you get the CS:Source download free and immediately. I have tried to get to the webpage to DL Steam (steampowered.com) but it must be mega clogged because i keep getting the "page cannot be dislayed" error.

Dammit, i wanna play CS:S now. I hear it is much the same, but just better graphics and sounds and skins and stuff.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>I'd do it...except I have a 1.5gig weekly bandwidth limit, so there's no way in hell I can get it all</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Tahoma; text-align: left; '>I'm doing it now, says it will take 30 min to DL... lalalaaa</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Tahoma; text-align: left; '>Its good, same gameplay... same guns... same most everything... but the graphics are prestine, now. I guess they figured, if it aint broke, dont fix it.</div>

<div style='font: 11pt Dominion; text-align: left; '>which package did you buy and how big was it? I might actually be able to do this...</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Tahoma; text-align: left; '>i got the silver, i figured the extra games were worth 10 bucks, but all the stupid stuff like a hat and stickers and postyers were not worth the extra 30... Steam didnt say how big it was, sorry.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Arial; text-align: left; '>I purchased HL2 over Steam this weekend. It took me 26 1/2 hours to preload the entire thing in one sitting, then I purchased it, downloaded CS:S (another 500MB so about 2 hours) and I came home from work and played around a bit. Now I don't know if it's just my wireless internet connection, but my ping would spike from 50 to 120 constantly with choke and on occassion packet loss. I've since opened the ports for CS:S and the problem has been slightly minimalized. When I go home this weekend I'll probably end up making a good length of cable and running it to my friends router in his room since we don't want to pay $25 a month each for access to a T1 that is shared throughout the entire building. Hopefully that and a few console commands and settings I used in CS will solve that problem.

The source engine looks amazing and my stress test video results were in the upper 80s in FPS with AA and AF on. All other settings were set to medium, which makes me think my processor (2.4GHz Intel C) is a bit underpowered either that or I need to pick up some PC 3200 Ram to bump the bus speed up (running 2700 right now). CS:S is better in some ways than I had anticipated and worse in others. First off, the netcode still has some gliches. For example, if you run into someone your ping can sky rocket. Collision detection within the engine itself has some issues (I got stuck on a couple of walls in office and I couldn't figure out why). CS:S is using a dumbed down version of the physics engine Half-Life 2 will be running, but it suits it's purpose. CS:S though, is essentially not finished. There are only two player models and a lot of the popular maps did not make it into the final release (inferno, dust2002, fy_iceworld and as_oilrig). I believe all of the maps have a 16 player limit on both sides so 32 people can be in game at the same time on a server. I think this is limited due to spawn points and will be corrected with other map releases once HL2 is released.

Half-Life's back catalogue I already own most of. I got CS:CZ and Opp Forces but where oh where is Blue Shift? Hopefully that will be released later. They should have released Half-Life 1 source as well as releasing CS:S, but there must be a method behind Valve and Vivendi's madness.

All in all, the game isn't done, like any game released, it will be patched because there will always be problems. Hopefully nothing too major will stop this game from hitting shelves and the net soon. I guess on the bright side, as soon as it goes gold, I'll be able to play it.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Tahoma; text-align: left; '>I only use a 9600 pro and i can find games where my ping stays at 30-50, i use cable internet. This is with AA off and high/meduim settings for everything else.

The two models look similar in CS:S, which kind of bothers me. There were a lot more team kills then you usually see in CS 1.16. They also changed the names of some of the guns, but didnt change the guns?

All in all, i like the Steam thing. I've been so out of the loop that i have never seen it before. I'm glad i bought my HL2 through Steam, why worry about CD's when you can just go to one place to play all your Valve games? I did notice Blue Shift was missing from the list, too, and found that curious.

I dont know why it took you so long to get going, the pre-loading took me like 10 minutes, and CS:S updated itself and started for the first time in 30 minutes and in 30 seconds each time after... maybe cable is that good? I look forward to the future updates, but am glad i have something to mess around with while waiting. It may not be finished, but it is highly playable.</div>

<div style='font: 10pt Arial; text-align: left; '>We've only seen the beginnings of this engine and I cannot wait until it finally is released and what other great mods will come out for it. I'm pretty sure my ping issues are because of the wireless network and how the internet is setup here at the apartment. I checked it and I'm set at 6x AA and 4x AF so I think that's pretty good since it runs smooth as a baby's ass on 1024x768. As for the TKing, well, there is a big blue name that comes up right before you pull the trigger and I don't pull the trigger until I know it turns red or the guy is not in front of me in my radar. I've been able to learn that radar and somehow people who have played for awhile still have no idea what the hell it is for. Use it, it is your best friend, especially if you know the maps. You can tell almost exactly where your pal just got nailed by an awper. And that's why people think I cheat.</div>