Half Life 2

I purchased "The Orange Box" yesterday and began playing Half Life 2. I liked the original Half Life and am thinking about playing through that one again.

My first impression of Half Life 2 was a positive one. I noticed I'm playing the role of Gordon Freeman again, and that the game starts with Gordon on a train again. I wounder if Half Life 3 will begin on a train as well, I think it should; It seems to be a Half Life trade mark.

I loved the cinematic intro, the way it displayed the developers names as though I was watching a movie instead of playing a game. The graphics were great, the game was beautiful. I also like the way the guards were all jerks and would slam you if you got too close to them.

All was fine and dandy!

Half way through the first chapter I began to really get into the game. I was running for my life, being chased, when suddenly I slipped and fell off a roof-top to a quick death. (I suppose someone else would have to save the world now! ... Oh wait, respawn!) After respawning at a check-point/auto-save-point I noticed a phrase in the middle of the right hand side of my screen. It said, "A.I. Disabled..." I also noticed that one of the camera drones drifted and bounced off a wall, it was kind of neat to see. I thought one of my allies had perhaps turned off the drones and that "A.I. Disabled..." was the name of the new chapter...

Well, it turns out "A.I. Disabled..." meant the A.I. of the game had been disabled. Birds weren't flying in fear from me, NPC enemies weren't shooting at me, helicopters weren't flying after me, and when I got to a particular room where a cut-scene was supposed to take place the game came to a grinding stop for me because I could not go through any of the doors nor back (and if I could go back there was nowhere to go).

So, I did some searching on the internet and found a few websites with forum posts about this problem. Turns out lots of people have been having this problem for a while now. I fallowed the instructions that I found on two of the sites (same instructions, two different websites) and then loaded the game up with my fingers crossed.

Sure enough, the A.I. worked! Some bad-guys busted through the doors and well... I don't want to put in too many spoilers. After the fight though there's a good looking woman who starts informing Gordon about some of the stuff that's been going on. She pushes a button for an elevator and then stands there not saying a word. I walked into the elevator, but she still just stood there. She didn't move, she didn't speak, she became a statue!

I saved the game, check out the websites again, looked over my 'fixes' again, saw that everything appeared in order, and loaded the game up again. She still did not move. I checked my fixes again, loaded the game from an earlier save point, went through the whole chase scene again, and still when I got to the part with the elevator the woman wouldn't send me up or down, or where-ever I'm supposed to go.

I started the game over from scratch and got the same problem at the same place.

So, sadly for me the game is not playable. (From what I'm reading on other websites, it seems un-playable for other people as well.) Some people have reported that they've made it past that point after using the fixes; I can not get past the elevator.

Until Valve patches Half Life 2 so that it runs properly: I do not recommend buying Half Life 2, or anything that comes with Half Life 2 (like "The Orange Box"). When Valve fixes the problem, I'll play the game again and post a fallow up review.

Until next time, I'll be fooling around...