When Expectations Are Exceeded: Valve

Last week, EA held their big summer press event. When I saw the coverage start pouring in I turned a blind eye. EA, along with Microsoft are in my shit books and I really didn’t care to hear about their list of sequels that are coming out this holiday season. That is, until I saw Valve mentioned in one of the headlines. I had forgotten that Half-Life 2 is now published by EA and with Episode 2 on the horizon, I had to check in to see if there was any exciting news. What followed can only be described as a bombardment of awesomeness.

Half-Life 2 Hates IconPackager

Had the strangest thing happen last night. As I was checking my feeds to see what’s new, I noticed a new ‘mod’ for Half-Life 2 had been uploaded to GameSpot DLX. The mod adds high resolution textures to a handful of the main characters in the game and the result is simply amazing…

I downloaded it right away and fired up Half-Life 2… nothing. Steam signed in, I got the ‘preparing to play Half-Life 2′, then nothing. It just sat there. I checked my running processes and hl2.exe was running at 18 MB but …