Half-Life 2 has gone GOLD

[Lady Vader]

And the week before Thanksgiving no less (Thanksgiving weekend being the biggest buying weekend of the year). Predictable? You decide.

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/half-life-2/557970p1.html

[Master Yoghurt]

I look forward to this one :)

[Morgan Evanar]

Finally.

[Charley]

Right on ti...


o wait

[Gurney Devries]

If they still plan to make you validate your game via Steam to play Single Player, then I'm not buying it. :\ I haven't heard any word on this for a while now, so maybe they changed their minds about that. The last thing I want is to spend $50 on a new game and not be able to play it whenever my net connection is down.

Edit to say that I'm really glad it's done so Troika can finally release Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. I think I'm going to enjoy that much more than HL2.

[Master Yoghurt]

Official release date is 16 of november

PC Gamer gives it 96%
http://aaltonen.us/archive/2004/10/03/news-half-life-2-review/

[AmazonBabe]

If they still plan to make you validate your game via Steam to play Single Player, then I'm not buying it.

Is that for real??? Boy, would that be dumb. Besides the fact that for some reason, Steam does strange things to my comp sometimes... like make the program I'm running on it lock up. Very annoying. In essence, I don't like Steam much. :\

[Gurney Devries]

Last I heard, here's how it works:

You buy the game, you can play the Single Player till your heart's content. But the first time you connect to the internet with the game, whether to play Multiplayer or to update the game, from then on, you need to connect to Steam to play the Single Player campaign.

This was announced months ago, so I'm not sure if it's changed or not. But considering the amount of people who seemed upset by this, I'd think they make an announcement if they nixed it.

\\ EDIT \\

Funny timing. Just yesterday, Gamepsy did an interview with Doug Lombardi that clears this up. They have, indeed, changed how Steam authentication works.

Now, you will need to connect to the internet once during installation of the game, and then will not need to connect to the net to play Single Player or LAN games. This isn't too bad, and may sway my decision on whether or not to buy the game, but I guess that makes it pretty much impossible for someone without an internet connection to play the game.