Well after several boring months of waiting I'm finally playing HL2, it's pretty good so far but I'm not really impressed with how it runs on my pc. The only way I can get it to run without much of a hitch is by turning the textures quality to medium, which causes things to look pretty crappy. Still the gameplay holds, the physics rock (I love just going in a building and throwing everything out the window, expecially the TV), and the facial animations are amazing. The only prob is I don't understand why I have to connect to play, I thought after I'm signed in under a registered profile I can just boot up the game off-line? But when I double-click on the icon it opens up steam, opens the account, and prepairs to run the game. Which is annoying for everyone in the house who wants to make calls, at least it doesn't need the cd in at the same time.
How does it run on the rest of your systems? I've only got it @ 800x600, trilinear filtering, high shadows, high char. detail, no AA or AF, reflect world, and texture quality: medium. And that runs pretty well but that's about all I can get away with, I just can't allow myself to lower the character detail, it's a psycological thing I guess.