Lately, my father has been mentioning that he has nothing new to play since I've switched to gaming on my Xbox from a PC, and he can't stand to use the Controller. Seeing as how my father really enjoyed Half-Life and its expansions, and how he expressed interest in Half-Life 2, I picked up Half-Life 2: Game of the Year Edition (PC) for him as an early Father's Day gift.
Though I'm running a four-year-old computer system, I knew it'd run Half-Life 2 seeing as how it ran the Half-Life 2: Demo on most Medium graphic settings without too much difficulty. While my father is enjoying the title (and putting up with some minor framerate issues and the stuttering bug), I'm going to share with you some general differences I noted about the PC version compared to my Xbox version:
The PC version comes on 5 CD's, as opposed to the 1 DVD of the Xbox version. While this isn't anything bad unto itself (and Half-Life 2: Game of the Year Edition, published by EA, comes in a nice DVD case unlike the original Sierra-based retail version), the install time took forever! Simply installing the game off the CDs took a good 45 minutes! After that, of course, I needed to register the product on Steam, Valve's content distribution system, and it forced me to update Half-Life 2. Seeing as how I was forced to wait on this, I decided to download the free bonus level, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, since I've never played it before.
After a few more hours that was finally done, and I was able to set up Half-Life 2 for my father. Graphically, even on my aged PC, the game seems to look better than on the Xbox; though this may be because I'm running it at 1024x768, while the Xbox version is running at 480i (I dropped the game down to 800x600, and this had a very noticable impact on the game's image quality, bringing it down a lot closer to the Xbox version). From what I've seen though, the Xbox version has a smoother frame rate and thankfully, less bugs. There is something to be said about being able to optimize for a specific platform.
Half-Life 2: Game of the Year Edition also came with Half-Life: Source, a "special edition"
of the original Half-Life. Basically, it seems Half-Life: Source is nothing more than the original Half-Life enhanced with various effects from the Source Engine: Enhanced physics, effects (including water), and Half-Life 2 styled menus. The game's character models and environments look mostly the same, the High Def. graphic models weren't even used (though many of Gordon's weapons are shinier).Anyway, Half-Life: Source might be fun to go through, but I'm not expecting any ground-breaking re-inventions with it.
At present, my father is enjoying the PC version of Half-Life 2, however it seems to me the Xbox version is a lot more hassle free (and it's Steam-less), so for myself, I'll stick with it at the moment. I have played through Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, however, so I'll post my review of it soon.
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