| 
 enlarge
| From: Electronic Arts
Category: Video Games
List Price: $19.99
Buy New: $9.29
You Save: $10.70 (54%)
New (7) Used (11) from $6.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  115 reviews
Sales Rank: 6102
Platform: Windows
ESRB: Mature
Media: DVD-ROM
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Age: 17 - 20 years
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.4 x 1.1
MPN: 9845
Model: 71608
UPC: 014633098457
EAN: 0014633098457
ASIN: B000CQIDTC
Release Date: June 1, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: NOTE - software is shrinkwrapped, but box is damaged. Software is in good shape, however packing/case shows some wear. CD is in unused or lightly used shape.
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Great new content, but Steam platform is a nightmare February 22, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The game is visually stunning and quite fun to play (although I agree with others who have said that your 'companion' in the game tends to like to get in the way of your bullets...). The big problem here is the same as for HL2: the Steam engine. Steam is a hugely problematic game platform that constantly crashes. I've never, NEVER gotten Steam to start on its own w/o crashing. I can launch the game through the HL2 shortcut but Steam still tends to crash 80% of the time, taking the game with it. The game itself is a pain in the a** to set up also. I have a 1 yr old, top of the line Dell XPS. Half Life 2 and HL2-E1 both required literally over an hour of fiddling with the settings to get it to perform w/o crashing. My recommendation: even if you think your machine can handle settings higher than the 'recommended', keep them at the recommended levels or you will crash. Even bumping the screen resolution to match my desktop or bumping the ansiotropic filtering by one level causes the game to go haywire and crashing with endless looping sound effects that require a hard reboot of the computer. Once you've got the setting set up, you're good to go and there shouldn't be any more problems (other than with Steam crashing).
 Steam me up, Alyx! February 13, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a fine continuation of the Half-Life series. The effects are nice and the puzzles keep the monotony at bay. About the time you've figured out a certain enemy type, they'll throw in something new and different. The AI is much more advanced in this game although the enemies still get stuck in one geographic location. Although in some levels, enemies can spawn ahead of you as well as in an area you've cleared behind you. Keep your eyes and ears peeled!
The graphics are sharp and the dialog is smart enough for me. They even throw in a humorous quip here and there. There was one or two "boss battles" that were more annoying than thrilling. (Thank goodness the reload time is pretty short in those instances.)
While the game is shorter than average, it is not nearly as short as some here have claimed. If you play this in 1 to 4 hours then you're still learning to tell time, cheating, or just kidding yourself. It's just not that short. (Running time for me was probably in the 8 hour range. Playing at medium difficulty and not using a walk-through or any cheats. On the good side, I wasn't completely sick of it by the time it was over. That is not always the case.
Steam gave me no problems at all and it played fine right out of the box. I'm running a GeForce 7800 and it worked swell.
Have fun!
 A Real Winner of an FPS! February 6, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Oh wow. This game is one of the best games of '06, maybe one of the best games ever made. I'll admit it, I actually didn't play Half Life 2, a fact which I wish to remedy before too long, but you really don't need to have played that game, to love this one! I did play the original Half Life, and enjoyed it quite a bit, mostly for it's intense game play, and downright frightening scenarios. This game is better. The puzzles are great, the action high, the characters wonderful, the graphics stunning, and the tension VERY thick.
PS
Steam is not too bad with a high speed connection. It took me one night of dowloading for gameplay the next morning. Also make sure your computer has a lot of disk space and a good processor.
 Still better than Doom3 January 26, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Here's how I see it:
Pros:
--With a little tweaking, this game will play on older computers like my vintage '01 AMD 1600+ with 768 meg and some outdated crappy AGP video card (I think its a Geforce 6xxx somthing). CAVEATS: see "Cons" below.
--If you liked HL2, you'll like this game. Nothing much new but one character AI'd from a NPC in HL2. Why mess with a good thing. Right?
Cons:
--Nothing much new! All the environments/backgrounds are all just cut and pasted from HL2. The huge Combine building/ freedom tower like thingy is on the verge of blowing up and the world is about to come to an end, AND NOTHING HAS CHANGED! Come on, use a little imagination, like in the church environment in the HL2: Lost Coast Demo. Change the lighting, change the color pallette, do something different. In real life when the sky is filled with smoke (as with the cut scenes of Combine's skyscraper HQ) there is a yellowish color shift to everything. If this was DOOM3 I wouldn't have been surprised, but I expect more creativity and realism from Half-Life.
--The friendly AI chic gets in the way more than she helps. I was fragged many times by her blocking my progress or escape route.
--The game should have longer play time for $20. I don't play FPS multiplayer games (as I still have a modem) and don't play many FPS single player games. I finished HL2: Espisode 1 in 4 hours and half of that time was waiting for the game levels to load.
--STEAM needs to go. I still have a 56ghey modem because I live in fly-over land and high-speed is non-existent or prohibitively expensive (satellite) unlike for those who live in suburbia. As mentioned in previous reviews, you no longer own these games. STEAM allows you to use them. I bought the CD/DVD. I still had to download the entire game. It took 7 days. . . 7 WHOLE DAYS! I had no phone for 7 days. It's a good thing nobody died in my family. I would have never known about the funeral. I will not buy another HL game unless the complete game is on the CD/DVD.
--Tech support is non-existent. Note: after you log onto STEAM support, you have to go to one of the pre-existing problems/answers before the "ask a question" tab will appear and you are allowed to e-mail the ALMIGHTY STEAM with your question. I still have yet to receive a reply. It's been a week. For those of you with older video cards, if the game loads to the menu screen but crashes right after you "start a new game," try forcing a lower directx with the "-directx81" start-up command. I had to figure that out on my own. Of course, at directx 8.1, you lose all the cool light effects demo'd in Lost Coast.
The Game itself is good, but you MUST deal with Steam January 25, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
If you played Half Life 2, you already know everything you will need to know about the gameplay, and the graphics, which are fun and entertaining. In this extension, you and Alyx go poking around through the city ruins, fighting the baddies in much the same way that First-Person Shooters usually do. A lot of folks have commented that the game is a lot like Doom III, and I'd agree -- dark, creepy, with enemies jumping up and attacking you, etc. There are complaints about the game being too short, but for less than twenty bucks, I wasn't expecting a game that would last for weeks on end.
My problem was the *mandatory* online interaction with the "Steam" platform. On the game's box the buyer is told that no other software is needed to play Half-Life 2, Episode 1, except for what is in the box, but you cannot activate and play the game unless you submit and download validation and other content to and from Steam, and unless I'm quite wrong, this is done by software over the internet, not by telepathy or smoke signals.
Because of this, I had numerous problems, including frequent "crashes" during gameplay, especially between levels. Others have challenged my contention that Steam caused any of this, but why are Half-Life 2, and more particularly, Half-Life 2 Episode 1 the only games I've ever had these many problems with? Is it only a coincidence that that both of these games require the use of the Steam interface platform? Ultimately, the only way I could get HL2- Episode 1 to run satisfactorily was by disabling my firewall completely, and that is totally unacceptable. The criticism to that comment was that "all you have to do is run the game in the off-line mode", but something kept disabling my ability to do that, over and over.
In the end, the game is good, but it's simply not good enough to make me deal with Steam any more. No game would be.
|
|
|
