My HL2 Rant

I love The Orange Box. I do. Truly. I love Portal. I love Team Fortress 2. I think its great that Half Life 2 and its two expansions are available to me for the first time since i never had a PC that was capeable of playing games... and now I don't have a PC at all. So to have the opertunity to get to play (from what i'm told) one of the best shooters ever really excited me.

But here's why i'm pissed off. Loading. Not that i'm pissed of at loading screens, or loading levels or even at the word loading, but it's where said loading takes place. In the middle of the freaken level! And I'm not talking just a slight jump as it loads and pops in the next stuff in a room. That I can deal with, heck, that I can even understand. No. Every few minutes I see an actual loading bar on the bottom of my screen. It's completely unnecessary with the power of the Xbox 360. The thing that makes consoles great, is their standardising of system requirements, unlike PC's where everything is different. Console games know what a system is capeable of the games should respond accordingly. It's as if Valve just dropped HL2 onto their disc without doing anything to it. And, I mean, thats great and all, but to load several times in the middle of the level when i KNOW my system has the ram to load the whole thing, hell, it could probably load two levels at once, the game is in no way graphicly spectaculr because its 3 years old.

Ugh, it just frustrates me that they went out of their way to re-release their game, I'm sure they had to re-tool things for HD, and clean it up, why NOT go back and fix teh damn loading thing too. On an otherwise near perfect box of orange. Oh, also the driving of the air boat sucks ass too... but not as much as the loading.