I think my Steam account is my oldest account that I still actively use as it has a registration date in 2003. Gmail probably the runner-up but that debuted in 2004. To that effect, my Steam username is an email address where the domain long expired and is no accessible by me.
Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
131–140 of 190 posts
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#132HL2, Portal, CS:S. Valve really hit it out of the park in those days. I wonder how much of Steams success can be traced back to it. Just the Valve catalog alone carried it for me and my friends.
Probably more due to Half-Life, TFC, and CS. The enormous player bases were forced to adopt Steam. And then Valve continued to put a few more good games. Honestly CS:S was a bit of a miss—largely considered a failure by the 1.6 community—but it didn’t matter because TF2 came out and was a smash hit.
Also L4D seems largely forgotten compared to TF2 but was definitely a hit in its own right.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#133Fun fact but for years updating GPUs led to a decrease rather than an increase in framerate. Basically with a solid GeForce 4 series card you could already cap the 100 fps framerate on Half-Life, but update to a much more powerful 9600 pro and framerate would start getting much more lower. The Quake 1 engine would be so old that getting better GPUs would make it run worse. Also, another fun fact about HL is that scal…
Your last few sentences really hit. This is what occurred to World of Warcraft. I've been playing the re-release of Classic WoW, Season of Mastery, and I find the experience much more compelling than any common day mass multi-player online experience.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#134[deleted]
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#135Take a moment for the 32k people using Windows Me. We will remember them.
What's funny, that I had friends who were running Windows Me very successfully, without any issues whatsoever and they liked Windows Me. I guess, they were lucky in that regard. Mine experiences was totally different.
I knew of one reliable Windows Me machine that needed a driver update (perhaps printer?) it became the most unstable operating system I'd ever seen. It would suddenly blue screen halfway through a Quake 2 session.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#136I have nostalgia for the games of that era far more than the hardware. While the hardware has come leaps and bounds, the gameplay has gone backwards. Take battlefield as an example; back then it was a tactical team-based shooter, today it's a gallery shooter. Same thing with the Crysis series; every entry got dumbed down.
I guess some individual series have gotten worse. Debatably the monetization models have gotten worse too. But I think game design has generally improved. I loved Half life, but is the gameplay really better than games like Doom Eternal and Titanfall 2?
Yeah I think a lot of commenters here are seeing popular gameplay diverge from the gameplay they prefer. I like the gunplay of Half-Life, Quake, etc, and still fire up openarena with some friends every once in a while, but I spend most of my time playing games with different gun models. Right now I'm busy with Hell Let Loose for example, which is about as far as you can get from the arena shooter gunplay model. People looking for gunplay more like 2004 gaming might want to look into boomer shooters instead
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#137I have nostalgia for the games of that era far more than the hardware. While the hardware has come leaps and bounds, the gameplay has gone backwards. Take battlefield as an example; back then it was a tactical team-based shooter, today it's a gallery shooter. Same thing with the Crysis series; every entry got dumbed down.
I guess some individual series have gotten worse. Debatably the monetization models have gotten worse too. But I think game design has generally improved. I loved Half life, but is the gameplay really better than games like Doom Eternal and Titanfall 2?
Doom Eternal, sure, the original Doom did not have the sort of forced pace that the newer Doom games do
Everyone says its better, but I don't like it as it forces me to play the game their way, not my way
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#138Very cool, what a time machine! I wonder what the single person with a 9-pixel wide game screen was doing, and how they enjoyed their gaming experience. :)
Probably a misidentified or misreported uncommon resolution.
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
When HL2 came out we were forced to install Steam whether we liked it or not. I hated it at the time because I bought the game on DVD (as was usual at the time) and just wanted to play it. I was on 56k dial-up and didn't want to be forced to download updates. I remember thinking they must have been completely crazy to do this. It was about a year before always-on broadband became widespread for everyone. Then it all…
Regarding the first part, I'm pretty sure that Steam had an offline mode from the start. Perhaps it required an initial connection to set up an account, though. I was lucky to be in an area that had very early access to DSL, so it wasn't a problem for me. The "always on" features was actually pretty awesome and novel if you had a permanent connection. In general I've been impressed by Steam from the start. On the oth…
> If anything it's now more confusing than ever to keep track of which launcher has which game and which friends had been added where.
I've been using Playnite to consolidate my games list across launchers. It works pretty well once it's set up, except for titles where the launcher you bought it on launches another launcher
Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)
#140Fun fact but for years updating GPUs led to a decrease rather than an increase in framerate. Basically with a solid GeForce 4 series card you could already cap the 100 fps framerate on Half-Life, but update to a much more powerful 9600 pro and framerate would start getting much more lower. The Quake 1 engine would be so old that getting better GPUs would make it run worse. Also, another fun fact about HL is that scal…
When reading through your comment I had a blast from the past and remembered how I was browsing the "All-Seeing Eye" [1] to look for Quake 3 servers and then share them with friends via IRC. Looking back at those times I remember the Internet as a much more social place (but that might be just be). I think it's because people had to get active to use services for social interaction as opposed to getting hit by a noti…
ASE was great, I think it was possible to filter servers by country, and I think I used to find new servers and players from my country to play with.