Half Life 2 Demo Impressions

Half Life 2 is a breakthrough game for one main reason: its physics engine. Don’t get me wrong, the Source engine looks nice, but its graphics don’t impart the same atmosphere as Doom 3, which has much more detail and immersiveness. The graphics and sounds are good, but not revolutionary. There is a lot of attention to real-world detail and architecture, which pays off; the screen shot to the left is one of the best available, but isn’t representative of average in-game graphics.

The physics engine, on the other hand, is an order of magnitude better than anything I’ve seen in any other game. The levels and entities in them are incredibly well built to show it off. Barrels, propane tanks, circular saw blades, boxes, paint cans and other debris litter the levels. You can slice enemies in half, blow them up, set them on fire and knock them around using only the “gravity gun”; this is the kind of fun no other game has managed to deliver.

The Ravenholm level included with the demo is long and intricate, giving a potential buyer more-than-adequate play time. It’s built like a Rube Goldberg theme park, with traps and ample things to throw at hapless enemies below. Throw crates against walls until they break to get supplies hidden inside (though the box is actually marked with its contents now, so you’re not forced to break everything). Throw a cardboard box against the wall and watch it’s sides break open and flap around convincingly. Roll a barrel off of a roof at an angle and watch it tip exactly when it should, then plummet to the ground.

So, that’s the good news. Once you get into the game, it’s really cool and offers a new kind of fun for first person shooters. Note that I said once you get into the game. The in-game experience is great, the out-of-the-box experience not so much. That’s all of the time you spend from the moment you decide to play Half Life 2 until you’ve got your trusty gravity gun in your hands.

That part is far from amazing.

Getting to the game

I’m going to focus on this part because there are enough fawning reviews of Half-Life 2 that ignore the shift in content delivery. It deserves attention because this type of access to a game is heralded as the future. It’s the way content creators are going to treat their customers until we rise up and revolt (or stop buying their stuff, which is an even less likely scenario). The content delivery system is called Steam and controls which Valve content and games you have access to. It is also their multi-player platform and controls your whole Valve/online gaming experience. It’s basically a good idea, keeping gamers up-to-date and keeping out cheaters and pirates.

You download the demo through Steam (if you already have it installed) or as a massive 750MB setup. Yeah, the demo setup is almost 1GB. It gets better — the installed demo is 3.3GB. I’m honestly not sure what they were thinking or what their target market is here. The only logical reason I can think of is that they were just too damned lazy to repack their content from the Half-Life source files and just gave you the whole damned game content. I ended up installing the bloody thing twice because it took up too much space on my system drive.

So, you’re finished installing your demo and start the game. Here, you’ll have to create a Steam account (if you don’t have one already) and log in. It’s nice that the account doesn’t require much private data to be entered at all. Now comes the next problem.

Level loading speed

It’s slow.

The game itself plays really well on all types of machines (I even saw it looking and playing decently on a machine that was well below the minimum requirements). That’s not the problem. It’s the startup and level loading times that are atrociously long. I’ve got a relatively new laptop that’s far above the recommended system specs for Half-Life 2. It takes 30 seconds of thrashing on the hard drive before the screen goes black and another 40 seconds until I can select a saved game.

Loading a saved game for the first time takes anywhere from 25 to 35 seconds and reloading a quick save point takes from about 7 to 12 seconds. I know these games have a lot more content than games of old, but that’s just slow. There are also load points in the middle of levels, which some reviewers have designated as barely noticeable. They must be suffering from some sort of syndrome as they lasted anywhere from 10 seconds to about a minute for me. Then, if you encounter enemies in the newly loaded part of the map and backpedal into the save point, you’ll get to load the old part of the level and the new part of the level again, swearing the entire time (that is, if you noticed that it happened).

Steam gotchas

Actually getting into the game also isn’t always a given; Steam plays tricks sometimes.

You’re in the game and looking around and it’s awesome — you want to show a friend. So you quit out of the game, pack up the laptop and go to their house to show him (or her) the new demo. No luck. You’re not online anymore, so Steam can’t check your account, so you can’t play. You can’t play single player either; you’re just locked out of your game entirely*. I only had the demo, so I could hardly feel cheated (though I managed to somehow), but, had I bought the full game, I’d be a little pissed that I couldn’t play something I’d purchased. I’d actually be a lot pissed, but being pissed comes kind of easily for me, as you may have noticed. At any rate, get used to the screen shown on the right.

*There is, apparently, an offline toggle somewhere in the settings, bu I haven’t found it yet. Perhaps demo users aren’t allowed to play in offline mode.

So you have to be online to play, even if you’re only playing single player. That brings me to the next gotcha — Steam wants to keep all copies of the game in sync, so that when you play multi-player, everyone has the same version. Every time you start the game, it checks whether you have the latest version and, if you don’t, it starts downloading it. Without asking! I actually started this article because I had to wait while Steam dowloaded who-knows-how-much content to my hard drive (it’s not like it shows how much it’s downloading or how fast … that would be too much information). It was downloading for about 11 minutes, so, since I have broadband, it must have been quite a lot of content it needed to update.

So, here’s the point: I had to go somewhere in about 15 minutes and I figured why not kill the time by playing a game. Double-click the Half Life 2 icon and it starts updating itself — even though I only wanted to play single player and the copy I had was running just fine. It would be far better to ask if it should update and tell me that multiplayer is unavailable if I decline. Again, I’m honestly not sure what Valve is thinking here; they are obviously not afraid of alienating their customers with decisions that are only convenient for Valve.

My laptop was naturally still downloading as I left; maybe I’ll get to play a game tomorrow.