Yes, thanks for clarifying! I hadn't realized HL2 and Portal are DRM-free - good to know.

Oh I see where this is going, into pure propaganda land.

But let's keep reading, I already clicked it... lol
This nonsense.

Scrolling down, HL2 seems to have went through at least 6 preloading phases.
The fuck? People dealt with this nonsense for an overhyped shooter with a massive identity crisis back in 2004. I can't believe it.

And the staff pick comments are those that are positive of steam.
Yeah, right, you've made your bed, now lie in it.

----

Look at the end of the day, no matter how many times you shout "ACHIEVEMENTS!!" or give a feature list a mile wide (which would rightly be called bloatware in any other scenario), steam was DRM, is DRM and will be DRM. So yeah, most people did give away their right to own a game just for a below average game that doesn't deserve all this news coverage, today or 20 years back.

The masses pushed back then, now they won't even download a freeware game because it's not on Steam. :D

What's worse - most everybody now says Steam instead of PC. Coming to Steam, releasing on Steam etc. It has overtaken the minds of the normies entirely and anything not on Steam is boycott material.

I am one of the many who took the bait, i have a retail copy of HL2 and an active steam account nearing fast its 20th anniversary as a direct result of it.

What boggles the mind is that steam managed to pull it off with an (back then) unbelievable pos client and one of the most overrated games of all times.

Also, holly hell, 20 years.

And you still can't get over it!

I'm well over what from a certain perspective can be regarded as having been "tricked" because i could have walked away right then and there and i didn't so everything after steam's disingenuous inception it's on me, can't resent steam for my own choices.

The masses pushed back? The masses folded like a house of cards almost immediately.

I am no less offended by the concept of 'online activation for a single player game' today than I was when this was launched. I hate how everyone was up in arms for about a week, but then "Want shiny thing now" ended up being way more important than protesting the loss of control over the product you're paying for. Valve was banking on this kind of reaction, Gaben's crap was a trojan horse, and everyone fell for it.

And there you have it... Complaining about things online counts for diddly-squat if you still give them your money. That's precisely the reason why gamer "boycotts" have always been and will always be a joke. Remember that Modern Warfare 2 meme about the dedicated servers?

Check out the comments underneath the article for extra giggles! HL2 is not entirely awful (like Bioshock), but it's quite mediocre and vastly overrated. It's basically a glorified tech showcase that railroads you from Cool thing our engine can do #A to Cool thing our engine can do #B.

And I'll come right out and say it: The gravity gun is just about the most boring weapon in any FPS ever (except for maybe the default laser pistol in Quake 2).

Convenience is king and will always prevail. The sad thing is that there are people who grew up with Steam and honestly have no idea how a game installs or even function without the Steam client and just assume all PC game stores just sell steam keys.

I really wish people would finally realise that. But it's like waiting for Netflix to make a good tv series.

Hmmm okay I might as well write it here since everyone seems to believe it's unthinkable why anyone would not like the game.

A quick recap of the game's prequel, the original Half-Life, has the protagonist do the funny event where aliens are invited into the world, then he goes around the super secret science facility taking down aliens and the military who wants to take down everything, the game advances slowly until we show up in the Nether- sorry the End- sorry another dimension to finally take down the alien boss and it ends there. All the while we have this weird creepy business suit guy non-chalantly showing up in different places because fuck it. The super secret facility was based in North America I think.

But you can see above that the game is kind of focused. Brief introduction, then shoot your way outta this whole mess, and here's some plot. Now let's get into the stupid game in question, the half meme 2.

The creepy business suit guy gives us an introduction before the protagonist is suddenly tossed into The Eastern European Dystopia(TM), brought forth because of that alien invasion from earlier. Before long we're introduced into a cast of characters that always overstay their welcome when the previous game has a different guy show up to help you every now and then. But now the stakes are kind of bigger and so we're no longer confined to a facility in the desert, so to close the distance between important locations we run into the first problem: VEHICLES.

Not only do the vehicles all handle like crap, it is also one of the things that make the game really weak as a shooter, since for some reason the game has this weird idea that it should change its formula every section into something else. Right after you're done with the driving, here's a section where you're just walking for a long while, because you know, it would still be a few years before Dear Esther actually fleshes out this kind of section into a gameplay genre worth its salt. Here's a section where you're introduced to the gravity gun and asked to kill super frightening monsters at night - to be fair, if there's any part of the game that's really powerful, it's Ravenholm, and the rest of the game is just dreadfully mediocre when compared to it. After spending the night at Ravenholm it's back to duking it out with the forces of the dystopia, and then it's a prison break sequence, and then more driving, and then suddenly I'm asked to command minions in a big fight to the death-

It's a shooter game that thinks it needs to change its gameplay style every second into something else, when its predecessor already pulled it off as a pure shooter just fine. It's a game that has a severe identity crisis and honestly it just feels like a bunch of different setpieces cobbled together.

I stopped playing it during the minions part. I've just about had it at that point - and this was a second playthrough too, so I gave the game enough chances to shine - it insisted not to. I'm not gonna mince words, so allow me to say that it felt like a mass appeal corporate product.

Sorry to be "that guy" but the original is not a prequel. A prequel is an installment released later, but covering previous events. The original is never a prequel, or a sequel, or anything-quel. The original Star Wars (later dubbed Episode IV) is not a prequel to Empire Strikes Back, nor is it a sequel to Revenge of the Sith.

Checks the dictionary...
Akshuaaaally..... you're right.
Just pretend you see "predecessor" or "original" instead of "prequel."