It looked okay from the trailers. Is it really that bad?

No pun intended. :p

It was terrible. I saw it with my dad. I did it because it was something he wanted to see. He even thought it sucked.

Horrible Bosses was in the previews. It looks pretty good and has an awesome cast (Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis, Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston, Colin Farrell, and Jamie Foxx).

Here's the trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awyE7tFshko

"You can't win a race without putting some bandaids on your nipples!"

I knew greatness would be iminant in that film after Spacey said that.

I just saw the new Captain America trailer....fuck ya

Definitely seeing it.

Dragon Age: Origins is awesome, even though I am a dozen hours in and just now got my talents/attacks menu properly set up

It is pretty good, but the graphics and the combat needed fixing. Dragon Age 2 has good combat but bad story and not good graphics

I got the page for Angel up. I'd apreciate it if ya'll could check my identification of the guns.

The revolver that Tina has looks like a Smith & Wesson Model 60.

Better reason to buy it: It also happens to be one of the most epic and cinematic experiences in video gaming history (and yes, I just said "epic", but if any game deserves that adjective, HL2 is it). The crowbar and gravity gun are just bonuses.

Speaking of which, I need to grab the Orange Box for my 360 pretty soon.

If you went to see a movie starring Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake, you have no right to complain. You should have known better from the start.

(Though in JT's defense, he's surprised me with some good performances in supporting roles - namely "Black Snake Moan" and "The Social Network".)

what is the orange box, a port of the whole game or a re-make?

The Orange Box is a compilation of every Valve Software game on the Source engine - HL2, TF2, HL2 episodes 1 & 2, plus Portal.

In other news, yours truly has started playing "Call of Duty: Black Ops", finally.

too bad i sold it id play against ya. Got 43 dollars on a trade at gamestop.

It's moot because I never play online. I like single-player most, split-screen only when I have company. And right now, I also have precious little time.

I beat HL2 on the original XBox, but I think I may just get Orange Box just to get Portal and the achievements for HL2. What can I say, I'm an Achievement whore.

Not even zombies? I don't like playing multi-player either, and rarely do it, but I make an exception for zombies.

I never liked zombies, it relies a lot on teamwork and people online...well arent team players.

That's true, but if you're invited to a party of friends, or are actually able to find a group that's willing to work together, it's quite enjoyable.

I saw Super 8 a few hours ago. I will definitely get a copy when it comes out on DVD

At least, I don't ever set up zombie mode whenever people come to my place. I have done it at my friends' places, on their 360s.

But right now, I'm just trying to enjoy the SP experience.

I must say HL2 left me cold. Probably because back when I got it there was no games store in our town, so I had to go to the next one over, pick it up, come back, then wait for four hours for it to install and then update Steam on my dialup (which it didn't tell me would basically take forever; I'd never have bought it if I realised it was going to take that long). Then I had to put up with it making me wait a half-hour until the actual shooting things started, and by that point if the first time I pulled the trigger I'd found myself standing at the gates of heaven I'd still have asked Saint Peter what took so long.

I just finished watching Futurama: Bender's Big Score. It was pretty good. And FYI: Zapp Brannigan is synonymous with retard and n00b.

I liked Bender's Big Score. The other movies, eh, not to much. But that's always been the problem with Futurama, for every one good to great episode they make, they also make four mediocre to bad episodes.

I once heard Zapp Brannigan described as "if William Shatner as himself was a starship captain."

My reaction when Zapp Brannigan was going to lead the assault was "NO GOD NO!!! WE'RE ALLL SERIOUSLY FUCKED!! Also, the ending with the army of Benders was epic.

Bender is the greatest.

No words have been truer, my good friend.

No offense, but those aren't good reasons. :D I agree that Steam sucked when it first came out (even on broadband; I didn't have dialup anymore by that point). But if the actual gameplay experience of HL2 left you "cold", you must have designed and coded your own FPS that was superior to anything else in 2004 (and then failed to share it with the rest of us).

I dunno, it just seemed obsessed with its own gimmickry, none of which had anything to do with shooting things. The ammo counts were tiny because they wanted you to use the junk-hurling machine, there were stupid, out-of-place physics puzzles that made you feel like you were playing the physics system rather than playing with it (stop the helicopter chase! Time to push a washing machine into a hole!), endless scenes of nothing but unskippable on-the-nose exposition delivered by people standing still and staring at you disconcertingly (and sometimes even walking backwards just so you could see their facial animation) while you stood in a locked room full of nothing-to-do, the incredibly empty buggy and airboat levels, the stupid, tedious section where you had to use bits of hard-to-land-on junk to cross sand, the jumping puzzles, the strange sense the entire game was about everyone in it except you...

Hate to say it, but it did absolutely nothing for me; the only part I really enjoyed was Ravenholm. I liked the original Half-Life and Opposing Force, even if they haven't aged well, but of all the games I have played through (often multiple times for recording) I've only bothered to beat HL2 once and haven't ever stuck through either Episode or felt any compulsion to do so.

Well, OK, at least here, you are making some arguments about the actual gameplay.

But I disagree with you that the physics was treated as a "gimmick". In Doom 3 (which came out earlier that year), the physics were a gimmick. In HL2, I thought that the physics really made the gameplay a lot more exciting. And so what if they kept ammo availability low so that players would be encouraged to use the Gravity Gun more often? Once I realized how much more fun it was to hurl saw blades at zombies with the Gravity than to just shoot them, I stopped caring that I couldn't find enough MP7 ammo.

A lot of your other complaints, while valid, seem fairly minor relative to the big picture. I don't see how you could have been so unmoved by some of the wonderful levels in the game, like the shootout on the suspension bridge, the various battles with the Striders, leading the Antlions, and the infiltration of the Combine tower. It all felt like an epic sci-fi movie, and for moments like that, I can forgive a few places where the game lags or gets buggy.

Also, not sure I'd say that the original Half-Life aged poorly. Obviously, it's dated compared to most contemporary shooters, but for the better part of 5 years, it was by far the best SP and online FPS experience available. Despite the various new FPS games that came out on PC between HL and HL2 (Quake 3, Unreal Tournament and Unreal 2, Deus Ex, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Far Cry, etc.), my copy of HL stayed on my hard drive even while my computer and OS got upgraded three times. Even now, I still have HL: Source on my current laptop, and I'm really looking forward to playing Black Mesa: Source (if it ever gets released).

Watching some missed deadliest warrior episodes on netflix, and reminds me how
A. Some weapons are poorly chosen.
B. Weapons, not tactics, are the deciding factor.
C. How corny it is overall

But it is still pretty fun to watch.

Deadliest Warrior has not been known for it's wise chose in weapons

I guess I like having choices; I preferred it in Crysis where you could throw stuff around if you wanted to, but there was always enough ammo that you didn't have to do it. And a lot of the game's "physics puzzles" were so unnatural they just yanked me right out of the game: why am I suddenly balancing cinderblocks on one end of a seesaw or looking for barrels that float to put into a weird underwater cage under a big beam that's hinged at one end? For that matter, what is the latter thing even for?

It was kinda the same with the Combine: the game was so eager to show off the ragdoll body physics that you're told the Combine is this big threat to the world but then you see a bunch of pratfalling clowns who stand on ridiculously rickety wooden structures or hump exploding barrels. It made it hard for me to believe the same evil, powerful enemy that destroyed Ravenholm and built Nova Prospekt were hiring the idiots I was fighting.

Well, the big battle under the bridge was a helicopter / rocket launcher / infinite ammo crate boss, which I've never been able to summon up the slightest fondness for in any game that does it. The problem I had with the Strider / Gunship battles was they were all basically the same and came down to finding the infinite rocket crate in the current area. Antlions, gah. By the time I'd done the crossing the sand section I was sick of the sight of the damn things, one of the things that really prickled me about Episode 2 was the idea I'd ever want to see the little bastards again.

I'd actually say I prefer Half-Life to it's own sequel, but it is in some ways a victim of the passage of time. The original game is structured like a disaster movie and was one of the games that established the "ghost train" school of level design where a level is a series of tightly scripted and meticulously designed battles and setpieces rather than a maze where the primary goal is to figure out where the exit is and how to open it (Max Payne 2 had an excellent joke about this where one level was a funhouse which was structured exactly like any of the other levels, and later they just stick enemy encounters in the main rooms). Fine back in the day when it wasn't all that common, but these days it's hard to find an FPS with levels that aren't designed that way, and HL's flashy setpieces aren't quite as flashy as they used to be after almost thirteen years of bigger and more impressive whiz-bang shooters. Plus, of course, there's the extensive use of jumping puzzles and that classic old-FPS issue where using a ladder is almost as likely to kill you as anything combat-related.

It still does it for me, though. Partly because Gordon never feels useless like I found he did in Half-Life 2; I got the feeling there that you might as well be playing as Alyx for all the difference Gordon's entire existence made to the story. Partly because the ongoing disaster at Black Mesa serves as a driving force; you're always moving forward in game due to the constantly worsening situation and out of game due to the "how much worse can it get?" curiousity that's behind any big-budget event movie. In Half-Life 2, there were a lot of segments where there was no real sense of urgency; indeed, in the driving levels there were such large expanses of nothingness between contact with the plot that at least once I had to think fairly hard to recall where I was actually trying to go or what getting there was supposed to achieve. The plot even acknowledges this lack of pace by having to skip into the future after Nova Prospekt to get to a point where something is actually happening.

The pacing of Half-Life also means you never wonder why Gordon doesn't just sit down and ask someone to explain what's happening: apart from anything else, he was in the best position to know (being right in the test chamber) and still doesn't, so it's unsurprising everyone else is as confused as you and trying to find a way out. In Half-Life 2 there were several points where the only reason the "mystery" of what's going on in the world even exists is because Gordon refuses to interrogate people about what's happening, even when he'd clearly want to know as with the Vortigaunts. I'm pretty sure if you dropped a GI from 1944 into the middle of the cold war he'd want to know why we were suddenly friends with the Germans the first time there was a chance to ask, yet Gordon just sits there passively while people yammer about a teleporter instead of providing him with any useful amout of information about what happened while he was gone.

Maybe I'm a minority of one, but HL2 never grabbed me like the first one did and always managed to make me feel like it was preening itself and demanding I notice how bloody amazing it was rather than trying to entertain me; I don't like, for example, being made to stack boxes just to show me that in Havok / Source I can stack boxes without them sliding off each other. And I don't think I've ever been angrier at a game than when I saw that garden gnome in Episode 2's long, unskippable Alyx / Eli conversation, as if to say "oh, well if you must play a game while we're making art I suppose we can give you a toy to play with."

Such as the episode when they pit a hand axe up against a siege ballista...

Or when a Viking buries an axe in a Samurai's spine, yet somehow loses :rolleyes:

Is that show seriously still around?

Or al capone losing to jesse james because the "long range weapon choice" was winchesters vs grenades? They expect a 100 yard grenade throw?

plus eye protection seems optional....

HDNet Movies had "The Perfect Host" tonight. It was pretty good. You guys should check it out when I comes out.

Looks like I should have known better than to challenge Tim. Oh, well. :D

Anyway, Tim, I think you are still diving a little too much into fairly trivial details about HL2. But a couple quick points...

You didn't enjoy manipulating them into walking into robot sentries, then?

Yeah, you are. :D Also, maybe you should review games for a living (if you don't already).

Anyway, because I am too busy and too lazy to respond point-by-point to your Ayn Rand novel-length post, I'm going to leave with you with this: You seem to dwell a lot on the various places in which Valve seems to have designed levels or particular sequences specifically to show off the capabilities of the Source engine, as opposed to furthering the story. My response is, so what? Sometimes, that kind of stuff can be entertaining in its own way. Especially back in 2004, when game technology was still improving by leaps and bounds and tech demos used to wow gamers.

Speaking of which, your essay sounds a lot like what you don't like about HL2: Just as you think Valve was trying too hard to show off rather than tell a story, I felt like your rebuttal was intended to demonstrate your ability to pick out details and write extensively about them. I'm not being overly critical; I understand the temptation to be argumentative, and I respect your ability to craft arguments this way. But there is a point where you can over-analyze things too much, and I think that's what you're doing now. And while I have never been one to argue for the innate wisdom of the masses, I think you have to acknowledge that if HL2 reasonated with most gamers in the way that it did, then Valve must have done something right.

i ordered orange box but gamefly kinda sucks at sending things, should be here today. they say they are "the netlix of games" but netflix=Fast, Gamefly=slow as hell.

I'm just surprised he remembered all of them. I haven't played the game in four years.