Comp USA has Half-Life 2 for $19.99 after $35 instant savings. This is the cheapest you are going to find Half-Life 2 anywhere and unlike Battlefield 2, you can play it with your current videocard.*
* Unless your videocard is really crusty old.
DOH! Thought it was gonna be a long weekend of rebuilding the server but it looks like it's back up. Had a hard drive crash last night but it wasn't as serious as I thought. Maybe it was EA hacking my server because of all the smack I have been talking about Battlefield 2 lately. I think all I lost was some mail and I really think it's actually somewhere around here if I look hard enough.
Man! EA continues to amaze. They finally got around to releasing an updated dedicated server and it turns out it has problems with memory leaks. I guess at least they told the community to roll back to the original dedicated server so that's something. And now I see they are talking about how they plan to release an expansion pack but if you ask me, they probably already had all the new content that's in the expansion pack in the original Battlefield 2 but decided to pull it out and make an expansion pack so they could milk another $20 out of all us gamers. Geez! Do I sound bitter? I didn't even pick up a copy of the game so it's not like I'm out anything. The way it's going I probably won't buy it anyway. I don't have enough time to play the games I already have and the Deathcon crew hasn't been around much to game with anyway.
More EA Battlefield 2 screw ups to report. If you recall from last months news updates they had a deal with Game Spot to be the official download site for the demo and Game Spot was overloaded within five minutes of the demo being released and everybody had to wait till the next day when File Planet was allowed to host the file to get the download. Then the game doesn't work with pretty much everybody's videocards because they use a certain level of pixel shader and don't let you lower the settings to work with a majority of cards. Then the demo has all the weapons in the download but most are disabled and a 12 minute time limit. Some people were able to figure out work arounds for these and EA comes back and says 'You've hacked the game. We're black listing your server.' Hello! You dumbasses put all the weapons in the frikkin demo! If you didn't want people to hack the weapons limit don't put the frikkin models in the demo! And do you think you can find any kind of tech support on EA's site? Hell no! And now I've set up a server on Deathcon and I find out that EA's got some deal with GameSpy where they've made it so all server stats programs like qstats won't be able to show the stats so GameSpy can have the exclusive stats program and the dedicated servers that they put out are all screwed up. Word on the internet is that Dice delivered updated files but EA is sitting on them and is in no hurry to release them. Probably so anybody that wants to run a server has to pay EA to host it.
By the way, EA says Nvidia is the prefered videocard of battlefield 2. Now both ATI and Nvidia are releasing their next gen cards right around now but if you look at the last generation cards, the ATI was smokin' the Nvidia cards. And now Nvidia's got the new 7000 cards that are supposed to blow ATI's 800 series cards away. The frikkin ATI 800 was blowing Nvidia's 6000 cards away by like four times as many frames per second so Nvidia's new card can blow away ATI's last generation card and now ATI's new card is going to be double what the previous card was so Nvidia is running one generation behind. So when you go videocard shopping, pick up an ATI card. I have the ATI PCI Express 850 on my birthday wish list.