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Tuesday 20 May 2003

Half-Life movies! [lurks]

E3 is on and Valve finally unveiled Half-Life 2. They've been showing some pre-prepared in-game action clips and Gamespot cammed the lot and put them up on this page. Although they're all locked which means you'd have to pay Gamespot five dollars or something just to leech them. During E3, that might not be an entirely bad idea given all the other content they have up.
On the other hand, I found a live bittorrent of all of the hi-res movies. Click here and the 8 (250mb total) quicktime movies shall be yours. This is essential viewing, this is the most amazing computer game I've seen in years. Finally after all the hype concerning physics, someone puts it to use in a game in a way that actually improves gameplay. I've gone beyond raving about it, you just need to see it for yourself. Suffice to say it's clear 'Oh. My. God.' situation.

23 comments:

  1. I'm getting between 1 and 2 k/sec from that Torrent... on 2Mb DSL, anyone got an alternative download location? Most everywhere I can find it is real slow, but half of EED seem to have watched it.Ah, NM, seems to have improved to 30k/s... still not great though. I expected better from BitTorrent.

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  2. Probably you don't have ports mapped. That slows BT down a lot.

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  3. Fucking unreal! This looks so cool! I want HL2 NOW!

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  4. err, what format are those movies in? I've downloaded them all on BT but Quicktime 6 and Windows Media Player 9 both refuse to recognise them. :/

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  5. Thats weird I watched them in Quicktime 6 the other night.I'm half tempted to refer you back to your comment about Unix last week!

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  6. I reckon you haven't completed the download

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  7. hmm, ok the first movie is 50,095,891 bytes in size, is that right?

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  8. 49,652 for the first movie, why don't you just run the torrent again and see if it continues ?

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  9. File size wont help you anyway. The way BT works, it creates all the files of the correct lenght. Blocks of data from these files are received randomly and sent randomly from/to many other peers. So if it isn't complete, you've got random blocks of data in the files which are filled with zeros.

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  10. Let's face it, if these movies don't give you a serious thrill, youaren't a gamer of any description whatsoever. I know I'm a bit sad likethis but everytime I see something like this I get a double 'ooh' - onefor the leetness in itself - and let's be honest this is too damn leet -but also the thought where you start going 'well my god if they can dothis, what's it going to be like in twenty year's time'. Will I evertire of vidgames? I seriously suspect not although I might end upplaying different subsets in time. I have this vision of me in the oldintellichair playing crystal clear realistic environments in retirementand probably a lot sooner. Carmack thinks we're moving in 'the goldenage of graphics programming'. If you ask me, those HL2 movies seem tome to be pretty good support. From from Monster Maze to HL2. Dear god,if it don't give you a thrill, build yourself a pine box cos you arealready dead.

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  11. nm, my mistake.

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  12. Carmack may well be right about the golden age of graphics programming. On the other hand, graphics is only one part of the equation. I'm just getting sick of the way that FPS games have moved on little since text-based adventures. You can go north, south or west. I want to go east, there's a door there. But it doesn't work and apparently I can't blow the door up even though I'm holding a man-portable mesmon cannon.
    Then there's detail. Detail takes people ages to design and that's a bugger but detail is just so important for a game. I'm sick of bland featureless coridoors, doors I can't open, bad guys that need several hits to kill but are fundamentally braindead.
    I think we're all sick of that sort of shit. Half-Life 2 has shown a glimpse at getting beyond that. Give us a more interactive environment, give us massive of detail because you've got teams of artists and designers working for years on this. Give us proper AI that doesn't need to cheat through hitpoints or whatever and ultimately tell us a story that makes us feel like we really are somewhere else.
    That's the shit that's been missing. That's the shit you can see in Half-Life 2. Now if only this time around the rest of the wankers pay attention and quit with The Sims 14.
    Unfortunately, I suspect the status quo will remain. You see Half-Life 2 will sell like nothing else and continue to sell for years. Then they'll continue to sell mods and shit like that. Meanwhile other companies are pumping out license games a dime a dozen that cost a fraction as much to develop and still sell by the truckload.
    Let's just hope the market grows sufficiently that it's worth more Valve-like enterprises in gaming appearing to cater for the games connoisseur.

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  13. Fileplanet have a huge (500MB) HL2 Movie up, since I'm signed up for this month I might as well grab it. ;)

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  14. That's probably the Gabe Newell interview. Let us know if it's any good.Ooo I was wrong. It's gameplay. 587MB zipped up Quicktime of gameplay. Still got a month of fileplanet sub myself obviously so I thought I'd grab it from their UK mirror. Of course they lie, they have no UK mirror - the file is coming down from the US. Wankers.
    Killed that. The East Coast mirror is giving me 100k/s so I recommend that one boys.

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  15. I wont be downloading that. Why? I dont want to ruin it anymore. I've seen the E3 vids. I've gone and had the wow factor. Now I'm going to sit back and wait for the game so I can truly experiance it.

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  16. I'm inclined to agree with pod. I've seen enough to know it looks fannytastic, don't want any more spoilers.

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  17. Fucking nonces the lot of you! There were loads of vids released on Half-Life, did it spoil the game? Not in the fecking slightest.

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  18. Dunno, never watched any of em :)
    HL came right out of the blue for me with the leaked thingy.

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  19. The video snippets are made by Valve. By and large they appear to demonstrate gameplay mechanics with a little bit of the scripted stuff in game. Certainly what's been seen so far there's no surprises. I'd give them a little more credit than that. Tell you what though, I'm going to watch it and tell you how leet it is OK? :)Update: The video appears to be the same demo that Gamespot shot. Only it's higher resolution and it's all in one peice. They fucked their exposure level up though so a little bit is lost in the dark bits. It's bound to show more of what's going on than Gamespot's though, the audio is better as well.If you haven't grabbed Gamespot's one or you want a better look at it (which is me!), then you can grab Gamespy's one off this torrent. If you got a fileplanet account for the Planetside beta, it might be worth going there first unless you're in no hurry and fancy helping out.

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  20. I was only just joining my first clan when half-life came out and I didn't read gaming magazines so I'd not heard of HL. First time I heard of it was when I loaded it up after leaching it off my next door neighbour in my uni dorm. It was so impressive since it was out of the blue. I would like to get the same feeling from hl2 :)

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  21. So you're preserving your forthcoming warez experience, how noble!

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  22. Well no.
    I bought Half life 1 after I downloaded it. However I'll conceed it was so I could play CS.
    I will buy HL2 without a doubt. Good games are worth buying if you play them alot. I even bought a shareware game this week :)
    I will almost certainly download Hl2 if only to play it a few days early ;)

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