Who bought Episode 1?

ME!

Goes live in 30 minutes.

What?

Half Life I believe.

It cost me £10. Can't wait to play. :)

i thought you guys were talkin' about Star Wars or something...

--Mike

It's live now. Decrypting!

Losers! :)

It's still decrypting! Augh! Couldn't they have just encrypted the EXE or something? JEEZ!

How long will it take to get on a 56K modem?

Hahahahahaha!

Does that answer yuor question? :-)

It's 595 megabytes. If I remember correctly it took 6 hours to download a 30 megabyte file when I had a modem.

So, 5 days. :-)

It's in stores, you can get it there.

Done decrypting! Took 10 minutes.

I wish you had said Yestday that you were getting it. I had to take the kid to see XMEN 3 today, and I could have gone game shopping whilst there. But didnt think there was anything I wanted

And I thought I had slow dial-up, was only 10mb per hour for mine.

Speakin of which, should really get Half-Life2 beaten before I get tempted to buy the trilogy-episode expansion.

[EDIT] Any word on whether or not there'll be a boxed-release? I prefer not to have to blow my bandwidth on something I'll be installing on two systems without means of using CD-Rs.

I'm very tempted - I loved HL2. I wonder how big the "Episode 1" single player campaign is though...

Should be able to download 595 MB in ~33 hours if you have a moderately fast dialup connection, aren't doing anything else, and don't get disconnected.

(My old modem had a fun 'feature' that the driver would generate a general failure after being connected for 12 hours, and then refuse to reconnect again until after the computer was physically powered off. Yay for DSL.)

Just played it for a while. I don't know how long it is, but it's lots of fun. Just got out of the citadel.

Genexi, from what I understand the reason it was released today and not a few weeks ago when it was done, was because it is going to be in stores and on shelves. So it should be available right now.

I might get this - steam was previously asking me to pre-load it, but I was playing hard-to-get.

Not heard much hype about it - which is the reason I am stalling.

I was tempted to download it, but Steam is very very slow today (Wonder Why?) Took 30 mins to update just steam.

'aight, good to hear, now to just finish HL2 which I finished updating an hour or so ago...currently on the Strider section, cant find me that bloody rocket-ammunition box they said was in the area though. ;/

[EDIT] Dammit, just beat the game, and now left wanting more.....guess I'll be taking me a trip to town tomorrow then for Episode1.

In case anyone is wondering, going by the new game list of the chapters, the addon has about 6-7 hours of gameplay. I'm nearly to the end now with only two chapters to go.

Arg, I want it.

Supposedly a main character dies :o (I hope they dont mean Breen)

Actually, does "Alyx" wear anything a bit less frumpy in this one?

I distinctly remember that it was planned for some kind of romance between her and "Gordon".

What is she wearing this time?

Surly Breen is already dead. You cannot tell me that blowing up that intergalactic teleport thing with him in it didnt kill him

Shut up about dead people!!!!!
If you ruin it for me, I'll... I'll...

hmm...


H&K:
Yes, the cat name came AFTER this one.
(Curse that fat idiot... curse him!!)

They could in episode one officially announce his death :P that could count

Time to start saving up!

lol @Mr PicKlesworth (Which sounds like a cats name)

Mmmm... looks pretty much the same:



...Unless there is different set of clothing for "romancing"... stockings, garter belts, whips... mmm...

@sswift
I think those who have it will answer after they've finished it... ;O) *getting it today*

Will never buy this.

I hate EA and for their Booster Packs (and other things) and I dislike Valve for this method of getting money easier and faster.

I would have bought a real add-on or full game.
But not this map pack.

Then wait till all 3 episodes are out and on sale for the usual expansion-pack price?



From what I've been reading in reviews, it's like a freaking thrill-ride of the best gameplay moments of HL2, with some good storyline to boot, that and it still holds the high standards HL2 brough to us, is as polished as the actual thing apparently.

Grisu:
The addon is only $20, seems to be about a third of the length of the full game, and the full game was around $60. You do the math. They're not screwing you out of much if anything, especially given the 10% discount when you preorder.

Nah, you have to figure out what this Episodic thing is all about!
This addon actually has load of content -- the first half hour is, as always, very story and little action and I feel they managed to do it as well as the intro to HL2. The HDR looks beautiful, and the voice acting is, of course, spot-on.

Now, we can buy 3 of these episodes for a little over the price of a full game.
Each episode has about 10 hours of gameplay...
Considering that a full FPS these days has 20 hours of gameplay, that's a great deal!
Especially when you consider that the episodes have lots of story and are forced to do something fresh every time.

Sounds good, right?
Also, we get these episodes in 6 months instead of 6 years.


EA's booster packs are very different; the original product was ALREADY garbage, and every booster pack breaks it for everyone else (god knows how they managed that).
Not only that, but the booster packs really have very little content (compared to quality custom maps churned out routinely for other games for FREE), and I bet they'd have to try a lot harder if they opened up a custom maps system.

I read that each episode is to be around 4-6 hours of gameplay actually....

I've finished it now, and I figure on average it'll take people around 7 hours to complete. I was playing on normal difficulty. I doubt the other episodes will have less gameplay. This felt just about right for length.

I suspect it would take you 10 hours if you were playing on the hardest difficulty level though.

I might go through it again on easy sometime to hear the commentary.

Just got me it for $19.99, first thing I do, put the DVD in, hit install, type in activation key, hit ok, poof, PC hard-shuts off...

Boot it up again, click Steam, poof, happens again....

Boot it up one more time, oh goody, Firefox forgets my personal settings *loads up backup settings*, and amazingly, Steam didn't shutoff my PC yet again.....

Starting to suspect my recently new HD may be on the kaputz already...

It did tick me off that I had to wait 5min for my activation key to actually register though...you cant even install the game during the time you have to wait on it!

Hey, that happened to me! I got a progress bar, and I sat diligently waiting for it to fill up for an entire 2 minutes.
After that time, it finally decided to tell me to try back in a while because their servers couldn't handle my request.
Come on! It's STEAM! Has anybody looked at how much bandwidth they have?
How in the blazes can it not handle a tiny little string like that :(

Anyway, pretty good.
The audio commentaries are great, and I hope more games do them in future.
They work far better than in movies, because:
-I don't end up with huge chunks where noone says anything but I am unable to hear the film because of the sound editing they've done to fit it in.
-I can shut them up at any time
-They are REALLY interesting and informative at points, because the people commentating aren't doing it on the fly.

With closer examination, the game has many subtle improvements over HL2's.
-Striders have smarter AI, and they will actually shoot at physics objects in order to crush or otherwise injure you. It works beautifully.
-More detailed facial animations than before.
-Their old hand to hand combat stuff which they left in after some proof of concept is more prominent, and is now more a part of the game. Alyx often stomps on headcrabs, and she does (in an unscripted seeming fashion) all those other neat sequences that we saw in trailers.
-NPCs will occasionally say things based on situations, and dialogue has been undoubtedly improved (in fact, they say that the story team now has more to do with it, which is pretty cool). A neat sequence which happens slightly differently each time occurs once and only once after a large zombie onslaught. Alyx is behind the player making growling noises as a joke. (Actually kind of funny, and really helps immersion -- especially with surround sound!). This happens sort of differently each time, and won't occur in the middle of combat.
-Sound complexity kills my sound card. (I consider this a good thing).
-HDR has definietly been optimized since Lost Coast. I can run it reasonably (max 20 FPS, which isn't bad, considering I'm on a Radeon 9600 and can barely handle Oblivion...) with all settings at high except for Disabled colour correction, 1280x1024 screen resolution, and Full HDR. Lowering to 1024x769 or even 1280x960 gives me a pretty stable frame rate.

The HDR works better in here than I expected, and it isn't at all distracting.
Looking at The Core in real time was breathtaking, to say the least.

Also learned one disappointing thing when listening to the commentary.
When Barney picks up a crowbar, there are actually 3 objects. One is invisible and in his hand. This one appears when he brings his hand to the crowbar on the ground. The 3rd crowbar is the crowbar being thrown to Gordon.
Learning that limitation was like learning the truth about Santa Clause :(

The trailer for HL2 Ep 2 is excellent, and I can once again trust Valve to be showing me nothing but actual in-game content.
Very different from everything else, and a bit Star Wars-ish. The trailer shows some giant two legged robots charging around in a forested area (excellently done, too) and some more of those nearly incomprehensible Vortigaunts.
Very cool.

Bahhh the introsound from valve is so brilliant...i'll start it again just for the theme... :O)

heh, Riddick started the whole commentary thing and that was awesome too. I am pleased with the performance too. Runs very well on my 6600GT at 1600x1200 with HDR and all the graphics turned up minus AA, which you don't need at that res anyway :)