First 3 audio reviews | HL2 out in 11.5 hours

First of all I like to announce that I’ve experimented with compressed audio – and my first 3 audio reviews of PS2, Gamecube and Gameboy Advance are available. Don’t worry about download time as all 3 are less than 1 MB.



Copy and Paste these URLs in your browser's address bar:



http://iansblog.0catch.com/gamecubereview.ogg

http://iansblog.0catch.com/ps2review.ogg

http://iansblog.0catch.com/gameboyadvancereview.ogg





Official Half-life 2 Site

IGNPC's four page Preview



Half-life 2 comes out at midnight tonight at Wal-Mart and I'll be there when it is. I called ahead and know that there are copies in back-storage. I've been waiting all year for this one. HL2 the best selling PC game ever. Wasn’t the last one Diablo 2, my favorite game or was it The Sims - one of the two? It’s the highly anticipated first person shooter which is the sequel to the Half-life expansion Blue Shift. Half-life 2 is coming in DVD form with enhanced versions of Half-life and Counter Strike. IGN.com said that the game shipped today. I’m skipping out on Metriod Prime 2 for god’s sake so I could afford this ONE game. Sorry - Samus, but Gordon Freeman on my computer is much more important. I stuck a note on my monitor so I wouldn’t forget. With Half-life: Source packaged in – this package will not be short. Only problem is although the multi-play is FREE, I have a 56K modem. I mean I’ll try it out to see how well it plays over my slow connection – I doubt I will have a playable game. These games probably need a lot of bandwidth since there is a lot of action going on. I am expecting the retail version to be playable, but somewhat buggy. Valve will not be releasing patches like it was for Half-life. The full 1.0 - 1.11 patch for Half-life was a whopping 110 Megabytes – that is a lot larger than what it shall be now. Valve completed the game over 2 months ago. Valve should have a patch ready this week. I heard Valve gave select beta testers the retail version and the first patch. Back 6 months ago when Valve confirmed an Internet Link of the retail version – I looked on the pear2pear unities and shockingly, Half-life 2 was on them. The beta was leaked on Emule and Overnet.



I feel that Half-life 2 will have succeeded where ID Software failed in Doom 3. Quake 3 was great. Return to Castle Wolfenstine was great. Doom 3 wasn't so great. It was good - but not very good. Doom II is so old - like 1994 so it's 10 years older. I was 9 when Doom II came out. I was 19 when Doom 3 came out. Doom 3 has more Quake II in it than Doom II. Meanwhile - while I own Quake 3 and Doom 3 - I am not very clear on how Doom 3 could possibly be bad. I am a casual gamer - one whom plays periodically. Half-life 2 will probably play much tighter than Doom 3. Its difficulty will exceed Doom 3. Monsters hiding in the dark to feed on an un-expecting pray (me) will be twice as bad. Not to say Doom 3 on hard wasn't that way. Hard in Half-life 2 will bring Hard to a new meaning. Hardcore First person shooter fans will be stuck on normal in HL2 from what I hear on the forums.



I heard Valve favored ATI in development. That means my Radeon 9800 XT will be able to show most of the effects that Valve shown at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo). I don't think I'll be able to show it off at 1600x1200, but I can try to get 1200x968 at 4x anti-analyzing with nSync on the game. Perhaps if I let the software acceleration take over - I can get it up to 1600x1200. My point is my computer was absolutely near top of the line at the end of last year and since than I've added 1 DVD-RW and 1024 MB of SDRAM. I guess you could have spent 1000 dollars on a videocard too. Games wouldn't need that kind of gigaflop performance anyways. My guess is I can do around 20 Gigaflops. Xbox is about 10 but it's max resolution is 1200x768.



I feel bad that I am not one of those people with high-speed Internet. For those who have it – it’s part of daily life. I do have access to a T1 line though. Kazaa Lite is a big problem for WITC. The technicians have problems of the servers maxing out at 1:30 AM once in a while. I found out a few months ago that Overnet works well on it. Overnet uses the eDonkey 2000 servers. It’s mostly made up of Class C IP addresses though some are class B IP addresses. It’s possible to get some of the smaller downloads through Overnet.



Class A - 1 – 126

127 – looping address

Class B – 128 – 191

Class C – 192 – 268

Class D - 269 and above (more private use)



My ISP looks like a Class A address. It starts with 69.58.xxx.xx. That’s probably because they service DSL to 100s of subscribers around my county.



This game will never be forgotten. - Until Half-life 3 comes out.... This game will never be forgotten. - Until Half-life 3 comes out and maybe then - because Half-life 3 will have upgrade versions of Half-life 1 and 2 packaged with it....