Woooooooooooohhhhhhhhooooooooooooo
Another game completed rite on time, I just completed Half life 2, I have to leave for Delhi tomorrow at night, so I wanted to complete the game today, I played it for 6 hrs today, although with packets of 2 hrs, after that 1 hr rest, then again, play
I was in Highway 17 yesterday, at the bridge, today when I started I played the Nova prospect level, the Citadel, & dam, Havoc Engine rocks, dam useful in the game or maybe the game was made in a way to make use of it.
Still no idea what the story was, how many years have passed after HL1, & what happened in the end, after that portal blasted in the end & the G-Man came, what happened after that, are Alyx & Humans safe, does this means combine forces are over or not, still a lot of stories untold
I took screenshots on the way of my game play, but I was slow in taking them, dam the story is wisely scripted as a game by the storyline is completely bonkers, u have no idea of what is going on, how everything started & why u r doing all this, maybe for the freedom of mankind
& somebody tell me if the teleport combine made gives u ability to time travel then how in the end Dr. Breen was going to use it to teleport himself in another universe, hmm, Stefan Hawking anyone
Now about the game engine, graphics are beautifully crafted, even at DX8.1 it is really close to DX 9, I was able to use tweaks & played game at the settings of 1024X768 with 2XQ AA & 2X Anis, 85 Hz refresh rate, forced FP16, & DX9 mode, (the FX card tweaks apply here). There were no Outdoor scenes in D3 so I can’t directly compete, but the outdoors of HL2 are much better then even Far Cry, however, I found D3 to have a smooth finish on the indoors then HL2, the indoor scenes of D3 were a lot better. Also I have to admit, until now the best Fire I have seen in a game is UT2004
One bad thing, the sound engine is really horrible, When compared to Doom3 a game which this game was made to compete in the game engine market, it beats HL2 by every possible way, first there was the stuttering problem, that was solved but came again, then there were white lines in the game, well, ok, this can be a driver bug, also the sound in D3 used to sound like actually coming from somewhere close or whispering, like I used to go or follow the path or detect the monsters by their sound in D3, but nothing like that here, when hearing by Headphones. Valve really needs to polish that EAX engine even on my Audigy it doesn’t sounds any better then D3, but worse
Now come to the system wrecking thing, well, ok, just like D3, HL2 requires a lot of PC power, it played fine on my P4 3.06 GHz system with 512 MB RAM, however, I guess that even 512 MB was a bit low for it, as it used to slowdown my PC a lot when exiting, but this was solved when I added 2X128 MB of more RAM to my system, my Page file was at default of what I use, 512 MB, in Dual Channel DDR mode. I bought the RAM from a friend, so no investment as 512 is still enough for me
I have given a link to download a zip of all the screen shots I took, they are recompressed at the resolution of 800X600 with high compression to minimize the file size, just download the zip, I edited them to add my subtitles
*www.geocities.com/gx_saurav/gfiles/HL2.zip 944 KB
So most people have finished playing the game at least thrice, so that's why Sourabh said "Better late than never" 
