Who’s hoping to find a paragraph dedicated to the story line and in-depth information about the gameplay mechanics, should, first of all, go see a doctor and second of all read the PC review of ages ago. I can hardly imagine anyone calling himself a gamer, who doesn’t know pretty much everything about HL2. The first question I asked myself was: “is it still looking gorgeous on the Xbox?” Well, to a degree, it still does look gorgeous. But again, to a degree since the frame rate suffers from a severe case of Parkinson during intense scenes, the textures aren’t as sharp as they should be and the resolution is anywhere near the highest PC resolution. Throw away your graphical mumbo jumbo and you’ll see the true beauty of HL2, being the source engine. I’d like to take this opportunity and thank Valve for porting the über physics engine to the Xbox without leaving out any of its fun features.

The beautiful thing of the source engine is of course the huge interactivity with the environment. Valve knows they have a lovely piece of technology so they’re exploiting it to the fullest in puzzles. This makes HL2’s gameplay fresh and hard to resist. It just never gets boring in City 17. HL2 wouldn’t be categorized as a shooter though, without a proper amount of weapons to do damage with. These range from a typical shotgun to a crossbow with zoom function and of course the gravity gun with its endless possibilities. However, developers need to bring more to the table these days. Players crave for vehicles so Valve delivers them and pours them into special, rather addictive levels. A problem of vehicles however is the possibility to rush through a level. You probably know rushing gamers that rather skip every movie in a game in order to continue rushing true the levels. Valve however, punishes those rushers by forcing the player to sometimes get out of his vehicle to get that big gate open. Just the way I like it.

It’s obvious that HL2 is a tough nut to crack for the Xbox. I’m not using the words “aged Xbox” since I believe that Microsoft’s current generation console still has enough horse power to get gamers drooling again. Yes, I do see the arrival of the Xbox 360 as being premature ejaculation. Microsoft’s managers were obviously too exited to feed the gaming audience with something new, making the Xbox 360 come too soon. But premature ejaculation isn’t the only sexual problem Microsoft is suffering from; they’re also having problems with production. Since its release on December 2nd, Microsoft failed to satisfy demands making gamers still depended on the good ol’ Xbox. However, all this wining doesn’t change a thing about the fact that the current Xbox is having a hard time running HL2. The loading times prove this fact but they’re never long enough to make a cup of coffee, take a walk with your dog or, in my case, boot your computer.

There was however a moment where the nerve on my forehead started to beat, but it was mainly my own fault. I got stuck in a game with a level design that good that it’s almost impossible to get stuck. To make things worse, I got stuck near a loading point, making the screen change in a loading screen sooner than you can say “schmutzige schwule Schwanz”. You can tell that this was my own stupid fault. The loading times are therefore no reason to complain.