First of all, just started Half-Life 2 last night and wow i'm loving it. I really felt like I was in a city from Airstrip 1 in the first bit, after being pushed away then zapped by the guard I pestered on the train platform, then talking to all the 'Proles' in the station I made sure I kept my distance from the guards and did what they told me (well almost, I did throw an old doll at one a bit later, and then started throwing stuff out of the 1st floor windows when I got upstairs). The only thing I don't get (though maybe it will become clear later) is how the inhabitants from Xen became integrated into society.
I have a question about game performance though. My laptop is certainly not meant for gaming (no dedicated graphics card) and as such I do recieve the occasional frame rate problem when things get busy in Half-Life 2, and sometimes bits of sound will get choppy or cut off, for example someone's sentence will start a second late so I miss part of the first word. Most of the time though (at least so far, i've just got on the airboat/fanboat) it has been running well with models and textures on high settings. This was not true however of Half-Life, despite it being 6 years older, and 10 years older than my laptop.
I played through Half-Life with similar issues to the above, but wheras in HL2 they have only occurred 2-3 times so far in about 3 hours, there was quite a lot of the sound issue, and more frame rate strangling, especially in areas where multiple "special effects" were taking place like electricity sparks, flames and pools of liquid (though calling them special effects is quite an overstatement nowadays) In fact in 3 or 4 areas the frame rate dropped to make it almost unplayable (at a guess maybe 5 or 6 per second) and wouldn't be back to normal until I had exited the area or killed off the enemies.
Can anyone explain why my machine has more issues with a game 10 years older that doesn't look much better than Goldeneye N64, than a game only 4 years older that technically surpasses most of the 6th gen games I have seen playing?
Something else I noticed was when I first launched Half-Life 2 is it questioned me about an unrecognised graphics driver, which I had forgotten about but it also did that when I first installed Portal (which I had to run on low settings but otherwise didn't have many performance issues). It didn't ask me that for the 3 Half-Life games though.
-----
After I finished Half-Life I went on to play Opposing Force and Blue Shift, in which the issues were even worse (I understand they were not developed by Valve, but looking so identical I assume they used the same engine) I actually can't complete Opposing Force because it always crashes in the middle of the fight against what I assume is the final boss (huge beetle thing that comes out of a purple portal)
