CS Source Next Week

C-S: Source Next Week [September 29, 2004, 08:55 am EDT]

Half-Life Fallout has word from Gabe Newell on Steam packages for Half-Life 2, which will be made available for purchase next week, allowing another chance for gamers to pre-purchase the still not-gold game, in spite of recent doubts cast upon its release date (story). Each of the three game bundles does include Counter-Strike: Source, and word is the full final version of the revamped version of the military shooter mod that comprises Half-Life 2 multiplayer play will be made available on Steam at the time the bundles can be purchased. Here's the summary of the various retail and Steam editions of Half-Life 2:

Retail Boxes

• Standard Edition — includes HL2 and CS:Source. Ships on six CDs, in one of three box-art packages (Gordon, Alyx or the G-Man).
• Collector's Edition — includes Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 1: Source, a Half-Life 2 T-shirt and a Prima book sampler. Ships on a single DVD.

Steam Packages

• Bronze — HL2* and CS:Source.
• Silver — HL2*, Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 1: Source*, Day of Defeat: Source*, Valve's back catalog currently available on Steam.
• Gold — HL2*, Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 1: Source*, Day of Defeat: Source*, Valve's back catalog currently available on Steam, Complete Strategy Guide from Prima Games, 3 different Half-Life 2 posters, Half-Life 2 hat, Half-Life 2 postcard, Half-Life 2 stickers, Half-Life 2 Soundtrack CD, Chance to win a trip to Valve! (1 trip offered for every 5000 Gold packages purchased).

*To be made available upon product's release.

I saw a post from Gabe Newell in another forum stating that regardless of what vivendi wants they will make it available October 8th for download from Steam. Hopefully it is available even ealier and Vivendi's legal action doesn't prevent it. They are taking Valve to court trying to get a court order preventing them from releasing it on steam until a couple of weeks after it is available OTC. You would think they would have learned after Vivendi delayed CSCZ twice before by taking valve to court.

All of this sounds as if HL2 will be released at the same time. Am I reading this wrong are are we going to get HL2 very soon?

UPDATE - NM, I see the little asterisk now...

Vivendi Universal is just worried about money.. I guess they think that by forcing people to buy it OTC that they are somehow making more money off of it. Maybe they should have someone in marketing tell them to quit being such a-holes. I've hated Vivendi ever since they shut down Dynamix, I didn't like them much before then either.

Right now I am extremely happy I didn't buy Tribes yesterday! I logged in lastnight and it validated all the cs source files on my pc and hopefully tonight it will be time to purchase and play CS:Source read below:

Half-Life 2 Steam Offers Ready Thursday

Half-Life 2 Steam Offers Ready Thursday
October 6, 2004, 2:30 pm · valve

Tomorrow at 11 am PST, the Half-Life 2 Steam offers will be ready for purchase. Those who purchase via Steam, will receive the final version of Counter-Strike: Source immediately. Half-Life 2 and other games in the Steam offerings will be made available to purchasers upon their release.

ATI/Half-Life 2 bundle owners may redeem their product key for the Bronze offer or apply their key toward the purchase of either the Silver or Gold offers, receiving a credit equal to the price of the Bronze offer.

Also tomorrow, the Counter-Strike: Source beta will close. Valve would like to thank the thousands of gamers who participated in the beta and helped make it a success.

For more detailed information, please visit www.steampowered.com.

Half-Life 2 Steam Offers

BRONZE -- $49.95

Half-Life 2*

Counter-Strike: Source
*To be made available upon product's release.


SILVER -- $59.95

Half-Life 2*

Counter-Strike: Source

Half-Life 1: Source*

Day of Defeat: Source*

Valve's back catalog currently available on Steam
*To be made available upon products' release.


GOLD -- $89.95

Half-Life 2*

Counter-Strike: Source

Half-Life 1: Source*

Day of Defeat: Source*

Valve's back catalog currently available on Steam

Complete Half-Life 2 Strategy Guide from Prima Games

3 different Half-Life 2 posters

Half-Life Collector's box

Half-Life 2 hat

Half-Life 2 postcard

Half-Life 2 stickers

Half-Life 2 Soundtrack CD

Chance to win a trip to Valve! (1 trip offered for every 5000 Gold packages purchased).

* To be made available upon products' release.
**1 trip offered for every 5000 Gold packages purchased. For contest details, click here.

Who's up for CS: Source on my server this weekend?

I definitely am! Can you please create a ventrilo channel for CS Source.

(twist's own arm) I'm in also.

Less than an hour to go and I will be playing CS source all night :)

I'm away from my computer until Monday, but I'll definitely be up for some CS action when I get back!

Which package have you guys purchased?

Bronze here, I never did care for DOD so I didn't bother spending the extra 10 bucks.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by [AK]Palooka

Who's up for CS: Source on my server this weekend?

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Is the server up yet?

I got Silver...I'm ready to go.

It's taken so long for HL2 to get out see what it's done to poor Gordon Freeman!

http://www.planetquake.com/berneyboy...on_waiting.jpg

PC Gamer has a great (long) review in this months issue.

They give it a 98 and call it possibly the best game evah.

Why do I feel that they are going to miss the 11/01 date........... How often is a game released on a monday???
INCO!

http://www.ebgames.com/ebx/product/243836.asp

Yes, the server is up.

August Knights CS: Source
63.172.129.152

http://skdr.dodfi.net/hl2/

The review scanned...nice!

Edit- that appears to be a different version that the one I read. Possibly from the UK. My edition has different pictures and review and rating.

Anyone up for some CS source goodness tonight? I have been playing everynight and I am having a blast, need a new vid card but other than that the game is great I love the changes they have made to the maps.

9 Pm Edt?

I am hopping on now see you then.

Grouchy,,,, urr, I mean Squidly. I hear that you figured out how to do hi-res sprays in the game. Could you share the formula please??

tks.

Sure pansy...er...I mean Stitch. Go to http://squidly.com and read todays post. :)

;) thank you sir, I mean dude.

Half-Life 2 Gold

Vivendi Universal Games sends along the eagerly anticipated press release that Half-Life 2 has gone gold, and is scheduled to ship world-wide on November 16, 2004. Here's an excerpt:

LOS ANGELES (October 18, 2004) – Vivendi Universal Games (VU Games) today announced that Half-Life® 2, the sequel to one of the most critically acclaimed PC titles in gaming history, will ship to retail outlets around the world in November. The Company confirmed that Half-Life 2, developed by Valve Software, has gone gold with a planned retail street date of November 16, 2004. The countdown to the highly anticipated retail street date has begun around the world, as VU Games completes plans to ship localized versions of Half-Life 2 simultaneously in English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Korean, Thai and Japanese.

“Half-Life 2 has surpassed our expectations in every sense – its high-quality graphics, ground-breaking physics and immersive first-person shooter gameplay set a new standard for PC action games,” said Bruce Hack, CEO of VU Games. “Half-Life 2 will go down as one of the best-selling PC titles, and we are thrilled to deliver this ground-breaking title to the worldwide gaming community this fall.”

Question is - when will steam downloads be unlocked? They've already charged my charge card.

Steam just popped up with a message that I can download it, but it still shows under coming soon at 25% right now so I guess we'll see. I went under games and it is available under individual games to download and install.

Even though it came up with a steam update that redownloaded the HL2 files and had a message that HL2 went gold, it was still unavailable after download. :(

I think Steam will leave HL2 locked until the actually release day. That would make sense, but I feel those who got the coupons, and paid for it early shoudl have at least a few day head start above everyone else.

Looks like my INCO is going to be false on this. I'll have to shift my attention to Duke Nukem Forever and Team Fortress 2 as the INCO titles now :)

I think they should give the Steam folks a slight head start... like 12:01am on 11/16 you can start unlocking your games. That'd be cool.

I'm guessing someone's going to figure out how to crack the pre-load if they stay on course for not releasing it early on steam..

The core files to enable use of the software still hasn't been released. And on top of that. Once you have the files on your machine, everytime you open the game, it's announced on the internet. So Piarating the game is gonna be a challenge. It will be cool to see how the hackers get around this :)

Also I noticed periodically that steam has a pop up message "verifying Source files" which lasts about 20 minutes.

Today they released a couple of patches for CS:S and something for DoD:S which prompted that message. Dunno about the other times you've seen it.

It happened twice prior to CS:Source being released. I don't think many AK guys play CS so they probably wouldn't have seen it.

I just logged into steam and it went through some un-locking files mode for HL2 and CS source... I wonder what that means????

Yeah I got that lastnight but HL2 is still locked :(