<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>
"An old man dies, a young girl lives, fair trade." - Bruce Willis from Sin City.
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