Well, I have HL2 and Steam, so I got Lost Coast free. I have a nice new video card that can handle HDR so I thought I would give it a try.

I wait through a download that is as long as the full game and anxiously start up the level. 15 min later I was thinking, "Is that it"?
The "expansion level" takes literally 15 min to complete (10 on the second runthrough which I did to see if I missed something). Freedom of movement to explore is worse than the full game with a path that is literally 2 feet across until you get to the last room.

There are three types of enemies and all the weapons in the full game are at your disposal from the start.

This is an emasculated demo level at best. Maybe I was misinformed as to the scope of this add on and so was expecting more, but I was disappointed.

well, technically it was a "tech demo." the add-on that you might be thinking of is hl2: aftermath. however, i wouldnt exactly know how cool lost coast is because my game freezes at the same point every time (in the cathedral) i hate valve with a passion, ive had nothing but problems with hl2 products since their 9/23 update and nothing has been done about it (i get the The Instruction at 0x####### referenced memory at 0x#######. The memory could not be 'read' error)

my only complaint is that nothing ever went wrong. technically i wasn't able to activate my HL2 last year from within the university network, but Valve somehow got it working. Sure it was a ta slow, but, meh.

quote:

Originally posted by mrmetal_53:
i hate valve with a passion

why do you say that?

Probably because their product is ingenious, and everybody is jealous they scored big with the idea.

V-v-v a-a l v-v e-e, to me, seems like the Apple computer of video games. They dumb down their software (no fancy shadows or lighting in Source, lower precision HDR than FC in the lost coast, linear level design), and then everybody applauds them. Plus, it took me 6 hours or so to install HL2 on the day of launch (HL2 wouldnt install from CD unless I also installed CSS).

A shooter, to me, is all about level design, AI, and atmosphere. I dont care about watching people talk to me. Valve did their characters very very well, but that type of thing is not so engaging to me. I want to shoot and be challenged by the AI.

Their physics implementation in Source was superb. I did not care, however, for the physics and jumping 'puzzles'. Painkiller hit the nail on the head, as far as physics are concerned. All the destroyed objects, gibs, and dropped weapons flying around made the fighting very intense.

Steam is . . . i dunno. It has its merits, and Valve has done a good job with it, I believe.

I loved HL1, because you were fighting for your life, and werent really associated with any organization. In HL2, you are associated with this ambiguous rebellion movement, and your fighting the combine, well, for the cause. And zombies.

I also thought HL2's level design was a bit plain, after playing Far Cry and Painkiller.

However, Source runs well on older hardware. Honestly though, I have a FX5200go. FC and HL2 both run about the same, except HL2 stutters. However, the environments in FC are just more impressive, even indoors. FC apparently handles high poly counts better than Source.

...

I have not played the Lost Coast. I have seen FC played with HDR level two, on maxed settings and a rediculous resolution. I have read, that FC uses a more precise HDR method than the lost coast, and that AA with HDR on in FC will be possible with some new graphics cards. Is it me, or is it ironic that Valve takes the HDR cake, when FC is older and has a higher-quality implementation of HDR?

HL@ is simply a half-life game. comparing it to games like farcry (i never plyed painkiller) is not something that really works well. HL is meant to be uber linear, like it was back in the day. heck, it was built off the quake 1 engine (with some quake 2 tweaks). so, well, yeah. if they would've made the game play better, it wouldn't have been half-life anymore. my only comlaint is that they cut the game into two parts, and if we want to know the true ending, we have to get aftermath.

Perhaps I should not have compared it to FC from a gameplay standpoint.

Compared to HL1, HL2's story feels weak.
Compared to FC and other recent games, Source seems underwhelming (even with HDR). Read stuff on the internet, and it seems the other way around. Pisses me off.

i honestly dont care about games vs games. i like the games i like, and thats it. however, what i dont like is a company (valve) who doesnt fix problems that their software is causing. i can let it slide that i havent been able to finish lost coast (even though i really wanted to play the "tech demo"), however, i cannot let it slide that my cs:s crashes at least once a day with an error message saying something about memory not being able to be accessed at a certain point, when this never happened before the 9/23 update and the fact that they have no definite fix for it. i have two gigs of memory, there shouldnt be any problems! lol. jesus, anyway. i still loved hl2 and cs, but i dont like valve.

quote:

Originally posted by mrmetal_53:
i honestly dont care about games vs games. i like the games i like, and thats it.

Exactly. Now that the gaming industry is surpassing the video industry, there are signs of the same weknesses shown in movies. Everything now is basically sequels, or washed up games covering the same old ideas (how many firking WW2 shooters are there now? MoHAA and COD are all I care about).

There is no wonder my top 5 games are all older ones. Even sequels to my favourite games (namely Deus Ex 2) were utter **** because of being imtroduced to the console market.