Marek

Well, you know...

Ah okay. I never had trouble with that, though I was thinking you were talking about disabling the little jumping mines. Confusion!

If you're trying to disarm something, just move your squad to a save position with the C key.

Are you the jaf, who used to hang out on AG?

Oh man, GI-Joe. I had so many of the toys. I also created papier-mache landscapes for them to be in. It was awesome. I was really proud of having the giant green vehicle where a smaller vehicle came out of, as well as gun turrets and two big missiles. It was so big! I couldn't find a picture of it on one of the many GI-Joe fan sites though.

Hey, welcome to the forum! I just started re-playing HL2 on hard, and I'm enjoying some of the details I missed the first time around. In the train station you can see that City 17 and City 15 (which is mentioned in dialog) are not the only ones. The sign with all the arrivals show up to C 27 if I remember correctly. Nice.

I guess I'm not looking for pure theories (e.g. "I think XYZ happened and have nothing to back it up"), but I sure want to know if I missed any crucial details, and if any dots can be easily connected. In other news: what the fuck is this?!

No, no. Idle Thumbs is like the secret town, which you'll find if you fly all the way up on a CS server with no clipping. There's always that a minitiature town, which is in fact magnified by the engine, surrounding the whole level. That is Idle Thumbs.

Ermmmm you did it all wrong, and if you can't go back to the big room you should reload a savegame. You should inspect the room with all the pipes a little more carefully. Don't just use the ladder; jump onto the pipes and check them out. The solution can't be seen from the ladder or from the bottom of that room, but it can be seem if you look better.

I don't remember this part of the game, so you'd have to be more specific. For some reason everyone thinks that stacking things is the answer to everything in HL2, but it's not. If you find yourself trying to stack things for more than 5 or 10 minutes, you're probably on the wrong track, as the designers would never force you to fuck around with barrels or boxes for an hour.

jp-30: you can play HL2 as a standalone game. Apart from the return of some old friends which won't mean much to you, you can still enjoy and understand the rest of the game. So playing HL1 is definitely not required. But like Jake and Trep I do recommend playing them in the right order, as it's more fun.

DINO-RIDERS!! Thank you so much for digging that up. Ah yes, Krulos, the Rulon ruler. What a guy!

Yeah, I'm almost certain it's Dog.

I think we're going to see major updates to CS soon. I suspect they weren't allowed to use many HL2 assets until that game had shipped. This is why there's no chickens in cs_italy. They couldn't yet use HL2's bird AI.

Chris wrote Doc in a recent news item, which I corrected, which apparently turned out to be wrong. I'm still not convinced though. Characters call Gordon Doc (as in: Dr. Freeman), but it seems the robot should be called Dog as he lives in a dog house and behaves like some kind of dog slash gorilla.

Compared to Half-Life 1, or every other shooter, the different chapters of HL2 are actually super varied. I think it's because the character moments are so damn good it feels like everything in between is too elaborate, but really it isn't. I have one criticism on the game (namely on the larger story going on), but I will withhold it until I've finished it, as my impressions could still change a lot. So far I'm still completely overwhelmed by the game's awesomeness. Just wait till Doc gets his piece of the action!

Haha those are pretty extreme. By the way

Ah yeah I was stuck there for a few minutes too. I'll give you a hint. Let me know if that helps.

Maybe you can take a screenshot so I know what you're talking about. (Press F5 in the game, then look in in Program Files\Valve\Steam\SteamApps\{username}\half-life2\hl2\screenshots )

I did pause 5 minutes for food, yes.

I (mildly) agree with that. I never actually got bored though. I mean holy shit, the game is jam-packed with stuff to do. Fortunately there's slightly more variety after you have completed the hovercraft thing. I've been playing the game for 10 hours now, and I'm still shocked and awed.

I went to GAMEXPO 2004, a gaming consumer event in Holland. It's the third time a GAMEXPO is held, and although I never went to GAMEXPO before, this year's show sounded pretty exciting. It was the first time they had a list of speakers as well as an elaborate award show with some international guests. There were also pro-gamers and a bunch of tournaments. And what a vortex of pleasure it was. The Xbox booth was promoting a shooter known as Halo 2. Exciting things were happening on stage. Host: "This question is going to be very tough. Are you sure you want to do this? Here it goes. What weapon in Halo 2 is replacing the shotgun? I repeat: what weapon in Halo 2 is replacing the shotgun?" "The SMG?" "Can you say that a little louder?" "The SMG!" "No, no, no. All wrong. But because you participated you get this Halo 2 GoODiE bAg woot!!!! Anyone else want a goodie bag?!" Greedy hands launched into the air. Someone handed me a free copy of an official Xbox magazine. I went to have a snack. But that wasn't the only highlight. There was also Jeroen Post and some girl I don't know from TMF (a Dutch music channel owned by MTV) mucking about on stage and taking pictures with people and even hosting an improvised rap battle for what were probably amazing prizes. Celebrity action!! I didn't play much games, because all the pods were occupied, and the featured games were out anyway so you could just as well play them at home. I suspect it was super fun for at least half of the people in attendance, but to me this part of the show was shit and boring. A friend gets interviewed by an unknown camera crew. The questions included, apparently, "what are you playing right now?" and "are you excited to be here?". On to the multi-game tournament. It had spectator seats and two nice big screens showing each of the two competing players. Good. Finally. But as I sat down to watch a pro-gaming C&C: Generals session, the big screens crashed. Screw that. Maybe this place wasn't meant for me. Perhaps, possibly, I didn't really belong and it was turning against me. Fortunately, there was also a lecture by Ernest Adams. This, to me, was a big reason for coming. You can't really go wrong with Ernest Adams. What a great lecturer. Sadly, his session was canceled, in fact all of the sessions were cancelled, because the lecture room was placed -- get this -- in the middle of the show floor. Guess why they canceled it? Yep: the noise. Man, what an astronomical fuck-up. Sadly, no one informed anyone that it was canceled, so I sat there for half an hour waiting for it to start. You see, the poster outside the lecture room said it would start at 4:00, while I was told in advance that it'd start at 4:30. I asked the guy at the information desk, but he was completely clueless on everything. The people at the press room were friendly, if ignorant. There was, indeed, no one with any significant ties to the GAMEXPO organization to tell me what the hell was going on. To top it off, GAMEXPO messed up my press registration. Also due to lack of proper advance communication and/or people present at the show who actually had a clue, I was denied access to the game award show because all seats were taken and apparently I was not to be found on any list. Everything that was press-related or excitedly pre-announced that I was anticipating did in fact not occur due to GAMEXPO being insultingly disorganized. Fuck you. The verdict: It was butt. There were girls. Some of them were cute.

My wildest dreams do not involve a geek saving the world, but if they did: yes. Yes.

This camping tactic is becoming increasingly popular. For a CT it takes two or three jumps to cross the barrier of chairs - enough to take them out. You can also block the narrow connection between the two hostage areas by tipping over the filing cabinets there. I really hope future levels will allow more creative strategies like this. Also high on my wishlist is a level that actually makes use the flashlights and night vision useful. With Source's improved lightning I wonder what a night-time level would look like, and how it would play.

Gitaroo Man is hardcore to the bone.