Well, I got to see the Half-Life 2 press demonstration today, finally seeing some of those 'screenshots' in action. I'm not gonna say that much about HL 2, since every major site already has, and every interested gamer already read up about it, a lot of them even saw the demonstration (or at least part of it) in a leaked movie online.

However, I had seen the screenshots, I had already seen big screen trailers of the action here at E3, but there's still a world of difference with what it looks like on a regular (well, 30" plasma is maybe not THAT regular, but still) computer screen. It looks GREAT!

The graphics are just incredibly impressive. The facial animation makes you drewl all over, we all got wet feet in that small booth. The eyes follow you around, the character can smile, look sad, actually show feelings in a more or less decent way. Very realistic !

Then there's the new physics in the Source engine: weeeh. This is what we've been waiting for, great action and reaction of objects. Smacking a guy against the wall becomes an unprecedented gameplay experience. I hope a lot of the environment will be this interacting in the full game, it will be a whole new immersion!

Not that much to say about the game itself, apparently there'll be more character-character interaction, adding to the complete gameplay immersion. We're all just really looking forward to this game, and other games that'll take the full advantage of the new Source engine.

The press demo was done on ATI Radeon 9800 Pro graphics cards, but I don't know the specific specs of the system behind it. I think (unsure) the resolution of the demonstration was 1600x1200, but in any case, the demo wasn't that smooth at all times. In fact I distinctly got the feeling I would not play a game at that framerate (framerate was not shown), it just wasn't smooth enough. At some points when many objects came into view, things actually became quite shaky for a moment. So let's just hope they manage to keep the system specs as low as possible so we'll all be able to enjoy this new smasher !

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