I take back everything I said before. After completing HL2 I can say it was better than Halo 2 and quite possibly the best game I' ve played. After about half way through the game it becomes absolutely incredible.

No offense but IMO Half Life 2 looks like total ***, and it' s not my PC either, I have a AMD Athlon 64 3800+ 1GB of Ram in Dual Channel, and an ATI Radeon X800XT Platinum Edition

I was expecting something more on par with Doom 3, maybe that spoiled me, BTW If Quake IV uses the Doom 3 engine that will be awesome, outdoor enviromnets on doom 3' s engine = drool. The problem with HL2' s graphics is that its almost like it has no bump mapping, and it almost looks cartoonish, I' ve enabled every setting, everything is on max and it still looks like there is no bump mapping

Anyhow, I played it for a few hours and quit, the story is total ass, multiplayer is fun as hell (picking up stuff and throwing it at people is awesome) but why can I only choose 2 maps?? And I' m talking about HL2 Deathmatch, not CS Source, I hate counter strike.

So you' re saying something has to be bump mapped in order to look good? Pssh... that' s a most craptacullar statement. You' re entitled to you' re opinion, but it' s seems very narrow minded. You do realize from a technical stand point Doom 3' s visuals aren' t as impressive as HL2. Bump Mapping is a way to get around polygon usage. It' s an optical illusion to make you think there are polygons when infact there aren' t as many as it portrays.

HL2 is made of raw polygons. I think there were a few instances where I noticed bumpmapping but it could have been another visual effect. That' s what makes this game so graphically top notch. They also rely heavily on textures. This game has some of the best textures I' ve ever seen in a game. The only thing that comes close is Splinter Cell. Finally the animations, especially on the faces, are some of the best ever in a game. It makes the characters seem much more human. It give off immense personality.

I will agree that I liked Doom3' s graphics a little better, but basing it off of bumpmapping completely is just ignorant. Doom3' s textures and animations are crap compared to HL2. These differences are mainly impart due to which which graphics card each were designed for. Doom3 is nVidia based while HL2 is best on ATI. ATI is better with raw polygons while nVidia goes more towards effects.

Btw, I played both games at top levels on a Alienware laptop with an Alienware custom ATI Mobility graphics card, a gig of Ram, and a 3.2 gig Pentium 4.

Well I beat HL2 today. After a good run with it, its over. this is the first time in a while that i was sad to see a game end. this was a treat to play.

It doesn' t matter if its an " illusion" , they obviously needed to use it because the game looks like crap without it, and I' ve noticed some bump mapping too, but not much of it, you can just tell when stuff isn' t bump mapped and it looks bad.

And the fastest ATI mobility card you can actually buy is a 9800 Pro, and no you can' t max out doom 3 with a 9800 pro. You can probably max it out with Nvidia' s 6800 mobility cards but not with any of ATI' s, they havent released their new laptop GPUs yet.

I put it on the max setting and it let me. You can tell me all you want that it won' t run but it did. I also think it' s bullsh*t that a game looks like crap without bumpmapping. I' ve seen numerous cases in which bump mapping makes things look terribel. Take Captain Keys daughter for example. In Halo 2 they bump mapped the hell out of her face and it looks like crap for it.

I like bump mapping, don' t get me wrong. But the statements you' re making are stupid. It' s your opinion though so I' ll leave it at that.

Btw, bump mapping is crap compared to normal mapping. Check out the new unreal engine.

I completely agree with what Rampage is saying here. Your talking absolute crap Evil Man. Half-life 2 is widely acknowledged by both gamers and the gaming press as an absolutely gorgeous game. One of the best.

I agree that Doom 3 looks better. No doubt about it in fact, although the textures in Doom 3 on maximum are still far worse than Half-life 2' s and the polygon is too low. In Doom 3 characters are quite blocky up close, especially the Imps. However, because Doom 3 uses " Normal Mapping" (not bump mapping) and makes extensive use of the lighting and shadow options available as a result of the " normal mapping" , it does look more realistic.

Half-life 2 on the other hand only uses bump-mapping and therefore does not have that same look as a result. However, Half-life 2 has vast, open landscapes, fully implimented physics, still great lighting, excellent particle effects etc. The vast outdoor landscapes (which are graphics intensive) and physics are not seen in Doom 3 which means it must concede some points to Half-life 2 there.

For the record, Normal mapping is basically a combination of bump mapping and advanced shader effects giving more depth and accuracy to lighting than is provided by by bump mapping alone.

Anyway, whilst I agree Doom 3 looks better, how can you say Half-life 2 looks like crap? Crap compared to what? Other than Doom 3 what games look better? Maybe one or two depending on people' s opinions but thats about it.

I don' t really like the story in Half-Life 2. The overall story of the game is good, but while you are playing almost everything you do is just plain unrealistic and ruined the mood for me. Gordan may be a genius, but the stuff he has to go through is just outragous. There is no way a guy like him could fight through that many things and live. And other things in the story like when him and alyx are teleporting were just stupid. It just happens to break while he tries to teleport and he ends up right outside...

I still love the game, I think they could have done far better with the story.

I agree with that at least. As someone who only brielfy played the first quarter of half-life 1 and didn' t like it, I have no idea what the story is about?

I assume completing Half-life 1 explains it, but how the hell did some of the alien things join the resistance side? Why is the world now a crazy policed state? Why are their headcrabs and stuff all over the place now as opposed to just being in the Black Mesa labs? What has Gordon being doing since HL1 to HL2? How did he end up on the train at the start of HL2? Who is the " G-man" . I never met the G-man in what I played of HL1 so I had never even heard of him before? Anyone got the answers for these questions?

i' m right at the very very very end of half-life 2.......minutes away from beating it, and i never will. i have no desire to finish the game.

ORIGINAL: Pierre2k

However, because Doom 3 uses " Normal Mapping" (not bump mapping) and makes extensive use of the lighting and shadow options available as a result of the " normal mapping" , it does look more realistic.

Actually it' s a mix of normal mapping and bump mapping. This game was the first to really test normal mapping and to be honest it barely touched on what normal mapping is capable of. Watch the Unreal 3 engine and you' ll see what true normal mapping is.

That was a big complaint I heard at my school from professors and students alike, they didn' t enough normal mapping was used in Doom 3. The normal mapping wasn' t really pushed. It still looked damn good though. Like you said, characters still seemed a bit blocky up close, that was still due to the use of regular bumpmapping.

My PC is rubbish and won' t be able to play HL2. It' s a Pentium 3-1.6 Gig, Voodoo 3 with 40 gig hard drive space and 256 bits of ram. What should I do with it... upgrade it (and to what?) or just buy a new PC?

Wow, it let you run it? What' s your PC supposed to do pop up a screen and say " I' m too weak to run this at max settings please reconsider!" ? Of course it' s going to let you run it, I can make my 5 year old 1ghz PC run doom 3 at max settings and it' ll let me run it, do I just ignore the fact that it runs at 3-5FPS? Clearly you know nothing. 9800 Pro' s can barely pull off doom 3 at 40FPS on medium/high settings and dont even think about enabling antialisasing or anistropic filtering, and at max it would just drag everything down to *** I know because I had one, and I upgraded to x800xt, so shut your mouth.

As for Half Life 2, its a crappy looking game, if you can' t see that your blind, end of story.

lol u guys. Almost all of the new games use bump mapping and shader 2.0. The reason you can' t tell is because it looks the same as if you just used more polygons. And HL2 does look really good, especially the characters faces, but I do agree doom 3 pwns it in terms of graphics. While I agree that I didn' t enjoy the story in HL2 that much it was still pretty good overall story wise. I really enjoyed the last level (u know why if u got there) physics stuff.
HL2 pwns doom 3 in multiplayer, both hl2 multiplayer and cs are damn good multiplayer games, although I wouldn' t say they are the best multiplayer games. For me I enjoyed HL2 single player, but I liked Halo 2' s a little better, although they have simmiliar style endings (bastards). For multiplayer cs source is good, and so is hl2 mp, but halo 2 mp is quite a bit better, up there with UT2k4, not quite that good though.
For single and mp overall game i would pick Halo 2 as best and HL2 as second, although it is very close I could see why people think hl2 is better, but thats mostly people who don' t even own an xbox, and will lie and say they do because they are such extreme fanboys.

And Unreal Engine 3.0 just pwns the shit out of all of the best engines today combined. Better physics, better lighting, more polygons, shader 3.0, they have like 2 million source polygons in every seen versus like 200,000 in games now. Just watch the movie its unfreaking believable.
And oh yeah, xbox 2, most likely PS3, and possibly nintendo revolution, will all be able to run unreal engine 3.0 because they' ll have shader 3.0 supported graphics cards. Only thing that can run it now is the newest nVidia cards, but the next ATI cards will be able to too.
Prepare to be pwnd!

its a very good game.its also very fun

I agree....this was DEF better than Halo 2. I loved it! In fact, I' ve been so bold as to say its the best game I' ve ever played....and I stick by that.