I feel a two day virus coming on. *sniffle*

I got the time, I got the new graphics card…

I GOT NO GAME!

My copy is still in the mail. But then I *had* to get a UK version because I wanted the ‘original one’ instead of the German version.

So here I’m waiting for 1-2 more days, while dozens of copies lie around (just LIE around) in the local mall…

I actually stayed up late last night to play it.  It took about 30 minutes for it to “validate” with the Steam servers (kept dropping on me due to the heavy volume of requests) and finally got to play around 1 AM this morning.  By that time, I was so assed-out, I only played for 20-30 minutes.  The graphics are really amazing and it’s so much less dark than Doom3.  I’m going to give it a few good hours tonight to see what I really like about it.

A tip I got from an “insider” at Valve is to make sure you’ve got at least a Gig of RAM and defrag your Hard Drive before playing for the first time.  I’m running 512 MB of RAM with an ATI Radeon 8600 and am running at 800x600 resolution just fine.  1024x768 was causing some choppiness.

It’s so amazing it brought a tear to my mind as I exclaimed to my roomate who was going through the same “Now this is how a fucking video game is supposed to be...” ... “Pssst, don’t talk for me for 2 hours” “Okay you do the same” *headphones on, lock and load*

Interesting to see also that in some places already, people have found a workaround to validating the retail copy of HL2 through Steam to play single-player. I won’t go into details, but it’s a pretty neat trick that I’ve read about that seems to work. I myself don’t like Half-Life, although I did pick up the new Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines game which uses the HL2 Source engine. Awesome graphics. It just stutters a bit during cutscenes because I only have 256mb RAM currently…