Half-Life 2 Demo Today

testing testing

Man, don't you hate people? Here's the thing, I play in a band right? This is in fact my band along with my close friend, our little project. We formed it from aquaintances and people we've played with from other bands in the past, we like it, things are developing well, and in general it's running smoothly.

Except for our drummer. She is getting on my friends nerves really badly. Now, we've known this girl for a while now, she's a very technically proficient musician who has been in a number of bands and is as such good for the band. However, her social skills are less then stellar. She's a quirky type and nobody really minded this because he was good natured, but recently she's been starting a lot of shit with my friend. Like for example just now she left his place where she generally made an ass of herself - took the graduation grades he had lying around and started making fun of them (lol I did better then you in this and this and this) which is retarded but ok not exactly the end of the world, then he's on MSN talking to a dude whose band he would like to join (he likes to play metal but we don't play that, so he's looking for a side thing in which he can stretch his more 'thrashy' muscles) besides needing a bassist, the dude also mentions that they're looking for a drummer. She sees this and jumps "OH THAT'S ME!"

Then she tells him to say to them she wants in the band while at the same time trying to discourage him from joining: "oh, you don't really want to play with them ay?". He asks why he wouldn't want to, to which she replies that she'd like to be in a GOOD (but oh, she doesn't mean that our band is bad!) band but feels that if he's in a band that he would drag it down, like he's been dragging our band down. This has nothing to do with reality, but she persists. Eventually it escalates into a real big fight in which she makes all kinds of accusations against him and is generally a bitch. It all culminates in her basically getting kicked out of his house.

I don't know what to make of this behavior. This particular incident is just the climax of the thing, and it's been like that for a month or so. She's not integral to the bands sound, and by the looks of things she's not worth the trouble. Certainly I'd rather have my friend be happy in the band, since he and I are very close and also since he's a very important part of what we do - the ideas in this band are his and mine after all. On the other hand I would feel bad for her because she's generally nice enough, and maybe she's just going through some shit right now, but she won't talk to anyone.

Somehow the responsibility has fallen to me on whether to kick her out or not. I dunno what to do really :p blah, fucking people and their fucking behavior.

I want to play the HL2 demo.
I don't want Steam.

Sorry Valve...

REQUIRING Steam is madness. It's a naked power-grab, (OR a visible demonstration on the limits of your technology, both are bad) and it reaffirms why I hate Valve.

There are several things they should have done.

1. Conveinence: Make the demo accessable through steam. For people who have Steam already, they should just go to the "Browse' section and click on 'Play HL2 Demo'

2. Advertizing: Download the demo. During the install, during the 'load times', when you shut down, after you complete, All those times are perfect opportunities to spread the word about Steam and make it seem like an excellent tool.

3. Deception: During the install you can say, "To get the full features of this demo, you need to install Steam and make an account." Then, give people the option to 'opt-out' of the install, but still play the demo. 80% of the people will install it, because they will actually think it's a good thing.


The only WRONG answer is to actually require it to play the demo. It's really not a good plan to show perspective customers that you plan to invade their system, their privacy, and disturb their system performance and integrity during your marketting and advertizing stage.

Heck, I even have Steam installed and have an account already, and I don't want to download the demo if I know it requires Steam.

Color me depressed.

I was hoping for something along the lines of Uplink , but for Half Life 2. Instead we're treated to a nice multi-level spoiler of the full game. I can understand the need to create demos from full versions of games, but I much rather prefer demos that compliment full versions of games.

Valve had it right the first time :(

leading contender for game of the year? bullshit. farcry owned hl2 in my eyes :(

i wish the made it like the hl1 demo where is actually different than anything you see in game. some extra content would be cool.

Coincidently, I just started playing HL2 for the first time today. Enjoying it so far - the last major game I played was Unreal Tournament 2003. The manhack things are annoying though.

It is available NOW http://www.shacknews.com/ja.zz?id=9235678

(sorry I missed this thread when I posted)

769MB

New record for a demo???

Steam account required? Are they worried about people warezing the demo?

Anyway, I'm glad they have a demo finally, I wanted to check out the game.

:(

Wish it didn't use Steam. I can't access Steam from work :(

Yay! Finally a demo... But requires steam? How is the steam uninstaller? Does it get rid of all the crap for ya?