I have been playing a lot Valve’s games like Half Life 2 and then I also got the chance to play Portal. I thought I would talk about this because of how Steam is giving it away for free until May 24. I had my chance this weekend to play around with the game and I was most impressed with how Valve has incorporated logic into most of their games.

What do I like about Valve’s Games?

I will say I like how they make most of their games use logic but that isn’t all.   I also like how they make it a First Person Shooter but that is just me.   I am sure others like these types of games for their own reasons.   I do know that the development teams work hard at these games and I like how they add commentary to Portal.  I don’t know if they planned that during development or afterwards.  Jusst Like Portal, Half Life 2 has a commentary but the game developers did do it a little differently because of how long the game is to complete.   They put their own level in to talk about the challenges and other such video or audio rendering problems.  I do like to hear how they had troubles with levels in the games and how they got around some of them.   If you want to be a game developer this would be on game to look at and listen to the commentaries to find out if you want to be one.

Who can play Portal or Half Life 2?

Since both of these games are using the Half Life engine, you can play these are almost any system as long as you use my cheat to change the Direct X requirements.   If you use those instructions that I have provided on my previous post you can play both games easily with less requirements than expected.  Although to be truthful, you should have the minimum requirements which you can find out if you can play this game successfully by going to Can you run it website. I do know with my new laptop that I bought this year, that I had no problems running Portal or Half Life 2 at the highest settings possible. So I am really happy with this laptop.

What else can you do with Portal?

What I did was go to Portalgamemaps.com and downloaded even more maps to play with portal.   You can add more complex or more easier maps to get even more achievements for your steam account.  You can search the web for more Portal Maps if you want to but I figure I could have hours of fun trying new maps and probably never really get board with this game.    I will recommend this game to anyone who might want to challenge there minds to a new puzzle or a way to just to relax.   This is really a good game just to sit back and relax to!!

Have a Good Monday, See you Wednesday!!

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So I’ve been Playing Half-Life 2 and Enjoying it so much. I’ve had a problem with Vista popping up and saying “The igfx video driver has stopped responding and has recovered!”. Which means this, that the game goes black and stops being played. It’s an annoying Vista flaw, I am thinking that if it wasn’t Vista it wouldn’t of happened. I’ve got the Minimum system specs for the game. DirectX 7.0 Compatible, 512 Megabytes of Ram, 128 megabytes Video Ram Card(some supported cards here but I don’t have one of those cards!), and Windows NT/XP/2000/98.

I did a little research and found out that the game was only using 256 megabytes of ram. How do I know? I went into the Taskmanager Manager and looked at hl2.exe (it was around 254 megs of memory!). So that got me thinking, I have 1024 megabytes(1 gigabyte memory) and I was using 256 megabytes of that for video. Well I still had over 700 megabytes of memory to use.

I did some digging and found this great article about Steam and Commands that I could put in to force Half-Life 2 to co-operate. The article is from the Linux Community and using the WINE engine to help people to play Half-Life 2 with Linux. This little option is available to most of the Steam community. To use these commands, one must do some stuff check farther down for details. These commands are:

Command Line Commands

-heapsize [Kilobytes]: This command tells Half Life 2 to allocate more RAM to the game system heap, where it can be accessed by the game to improve performance by storing more game information in RAM and hence reducing loading pauses. The default heapsize is 64MB, however you can safely allocate around 128MB (i.e. -heapsize 128000) for most systems. You can use higher values if you have more RAM, but I don’t recommend exceeding half your physical RAM (e.g. for 1GB RAM, set heapsize of 512000).

-console: Speeds up the loading of Half Life 2 at startup by not loading up the background 3D graphics on the main menu and instead loading up a blurry background picture and the Half Life 2 console open. Note you can close this console using the ‘~’ key.

-width [pixels] -height [pixels]: Using these two commands you can set a custom resolution in Pixel Width x Pixel Height (e.g. -width 640 height 480 starts HL2 with 640×480 resolution). Make sure you choose a resolution supported by your monitor and with the correct ratio of width to height (usually 4:3).

-dxlevel [version]: Using this command allows you to force Half Life into only using the specified DirectX version for shaders. For example, use -dxlevel 70 to force Hardware DirectX7.0 level support for shaders. This means a reduction in image quality but an increase in performance. Other values include -dxlevel 80 -dxlevel 81 and -dxlevel90. Note that this only works if you choose a DirectX version which is lower than the current one supported by your graphics card. See the Hardware DirectX Version option under the In-Game settings for more details.

-refresh [Hz]: Specifies the refresh rate the game will use upon loading. This is normally not required as your system should already use the optimal refresh rate at your chosen resolution. However if this is not the case you can force it to a specific refresh rate (e.g. -rate 85). Make absolutely certain that the rate you are trying to apply does not exceed your monitor’s capabilities otherwise you may damage your monitor – especially if you change resolutions and forget to change this option.

-novid: Disables the intro video so that Half-Life 2 loads a bit faster.

[Via Linux and Open Source Blog]

Now what I used to make Half-Life 2 a more enjoyable game was to go into steam program and Right click Half-Life 2 and select properties Then select : “Select launch options” and I added this:

“-console -heapsize 512000 -dxlevel 70”

Now let’s clarify some of this:

the heapsize I set that to add more memory for Half-Life 2 to make it around 512 megabytes. I then told it to Use only DirectX 7.0. Now when Direct X 7.0 was out you could only have 128 megabytes of Video so that was fine. I’ve got 256 megabytes of shared video memory, I Just told it to use only 128 so it actually helped out the game performance. I Got a more stable game to where I could play for hours without any annoying glitches and got to see the story line. I will say you shouldn’t use this particular setting unless you have enough memory. I think Vista is having trouble with Direct X 10.0 because the change of the game was surprisingly smoother. I am not sure why it works I just know it does. I hope this helps other gamers out with this little problem, I’ve had with Vista and all.

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