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Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

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Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

#171
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there perhaps some kind of legal thing where they turn off the red blood for the "teen" version?

That's Germany I think? I seem to remember playing Carmageddon with green blood and that was some kind of German mode?

Korea definitely has non-red blood in plenty of games. PUBG has blue blood in Korea for example.

https://img.gurugamer.com//resize/640x-//2021/03/29/the-red-...

https://www.reddit.com/r/PUBATTLEGROUNDS/comments/7z0aot/how...

Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Steam wouldn't have happened if Windows had a proper package manager (and if Valve hadn't been screwed over by Sierra). I'm wondering about what cleanliness you are talking about, after all Steam (thankfully) never got a 100% market share (Games For Windows Live, Stardock's Impulse, GamersGate, Matrix/Slitherine, Blizzard games, Good Old Games, Ubisoft's horrible launchers, various boxes-only games, indies...) - if a…

> it has killed indie gaming

That's quite the take. I'd say Valve did more good for indie gaming than anyone else with the introduction of early access. Almost all the indie gaming being done in my social circles is through Steam's early access program. Before that people just didn't play indie games.

Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

#173
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there perhaps some kind of legal thing where they turn off the red blood for the "teen" version?

That's Germany I think? I seem to remember playing Carmageddon with green blood and that was some kind of German mode?

Carmageddon 64 in Germany also replaced the zombies (which were already replacements for pedestrians) with dinosaurs. Truly bizarre.

Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

#174
I'm incredible surprised how "mean" my 2004 computer were. P4 at 2.66GHz, 512MB RAM, a 128MB GeForce4 MX 440, and a CRT display that runs 1024x768 at 85Hz. The amount of hours of CS 1.6 and CS:S were really big on that machine :-)

Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

#175
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Fun fact but for years updating GPUs led to a decrease rather than an increase in framerate. Sounds more like a specific technical issue with an specific engine and drivers that lacked optimization rather than an axiom that can generalize games and GPUs for several years. If you have a source for this please share it. Also, IIRC, back then the game physics were tied to the framerate, so having too high framerate mad…

specifically, it sounds to me like ATI/AMD's rather-notoriously-poor OpenGL performance in action... another way to rephrase OP to take the emphasis off hardware generation (which makes no sense) would be "when I switched from NVIDIA to ATI I lost 40% of my performance"... which is still an experience many people have today with OpenGL on the AMD cards.

I could be wrong (I never really got into gaming as GMA950+Linux was an exceptionally bad combo for it) but I thought source was exclusively DirectX back then.

Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

> except for titles where the launcher you bought it on launches another launcher That's just comedy. I know this happens for a lot of Ubisoft games in my Steam library. I guess they want to keep the cake and eat it to. Exposure on Steam, walled garden in Connect. I'll definitely check out Playnite. Thanks for the tip!

It's even worse with Rockstar games on Epic

Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes WoW is exactly the primary example of "arcadeization" as I call it and why companies should not listen to their vocal playerbase sometimes. WoW went from a game where player interaction was the norm (both negative and positive), going to a dungeon was a massive adventure just for getting there, you would have meaningful interactions with other players, coordinating to get to a place, giving directions, traversing…

And yet at the time, we thought those systems were dumb. 'why do I have to run around looking for a group? Cant you just match me with one?'

I think more generally, what we want at the time and what we remember years later are often different and sometimes even opposed.

Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

#179
post #38

Take 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 think LGR did a pretty good video on this; it boiled down to what hardware you had and if there were good drivers available for it. Most hardware configurations did not and contributed to the well deserved reputation.

Re: Steam: Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey (2004)

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loaded up the Ubisoft app recently. Pure trash, apps / syncing wouldn’t work till I accepted all cookies, things wouldn’t download in the background while playing single player, etc.

I tried playing an old Ubisoft title recently, Farcry Blood Dragon. But it wants to connect to a long dead ubisoft server EVERY time I his Esc to go to the menu and takes 30 seconds to time out. Every time! I decided I just won't buy anymore Ubisoft games after that.

Fwiw I played that for a few hours, I got it via their monthly subscription. I did not have the issue you describe.
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