Half-Life 2

Half-Life 2 (bestgamesatpc.blogspot.com)

If you are a normal pc gamer you should probably know about the Half  life 2. Most of Critics and fans consider Half Life 2 as the greatest pc game ever made.The game won 39 "Game of the Year" awards  and the title of "Game Of The Decade" at the 2012 Spike Video Game Awards. . Critics who applauded the game cited the advanced graphics and physics. If you still did’nt play Half life 2 play it, you will never regret for playing this. These are the minimum and recommended system  requirements for play half lif 2.

 Half-Life 2 Minimum Requirements

CPU	Pentium 4
CPU Speed	1.7 GHz
RAM	512 MB
Os	Windows 98/ME/2000/XP (95 & NT not supported)
Video Card	DirectX 8.1 level Graphics Card
Free Disk Space	4.5 GB
DirectX version	7.0

Half-Life 2 Recommended Requirements

CPU	Pentium 4 or Athlon XP
CPU Speed	3.0 GHz
RAM	1 GB
Os	Windows 2000/Xp
Video Card	DirectX 9 level Graphics Card
Free Disk Space	4.5 GB
DirectX version	9.0

Well done mate.!!!  I am sure You can run it. Half-Life 2 is a first-person shooter video game Developed by Valve Corporation for Windows, Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, OS X, Linux, Shield Portable platforms. It was released on November 16, 2004, following a protracted five-year  $40 million development and considered as one of the best game ever made. The game was developed alongside Valve's Steam software. It introduced the Source game engine and, because of Steam, was the first single-player video game to require online product activation. 

Like its predecessor, Half-Life 2 received critical acclaim. It was praised for its advanced physics, animation, sound, AI, graphics, and narrative. The game won 39 "Game of the Year" awards  and the title of "Game Of The Decade" at the 2012 Spike Video Game Awards. As of February 9, 2011, Half-Life 2 had sold over 12 million copies and game became the fifth title to receive Edge magazine's ten-out-of-ten score. Guinness World Records awarded Half-Life 2 the world record for "Highest Rated Shooter by PC Gamer Magazine" in the Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008.Half Life 2 developed and published by Valve Corporation, Distributed by Sierra, composed by Kelly Bailey.Here is Half life 2 game trailer.

Plot

Gordon Freeman is brought out of stasis by the G-Man, who inserts him into a train arriving at City 17. After arriving at the station and eluding Combine forces, Gordon joins Lambda resistance members including Barney Calhoun, a former Black Mesa security guard now working undercover as a Combine CP officer, and Alyx Vance, the daughter of one of Gordon's former colleagues, Dr. Eli Vance. After a failed attempt to teleport to Eli's resistance base known as Black Mesa East from Dr. Kleiner's makeshift laboratory in City 17, Gordon, re-equipped with the HEV suit and a crowbar, is forced to progress on foot through the city's old canal system. After obtaining an airboat, he battles his way to Black Mesa East, several miles from the city.

Gordon is reintroduced to Eli and meets another resistance scientist, Dr. Judith Mossman. Alyx introduces Gordon to her pet robot D0g and gives him a "gravity gun", an instrument which allows Gordon to easily pick up and move large objects. Black Mesa East comes under Combine attack, and Eli and Mossman are taken to a Combine prison, Nova Prospekt. Separated from Alyx, Gordon takes a detour through the zombie-infested town of Ravenholm with help from its last survivor, Father Grigori. After making his way through the town and a mine, Gordon arrives at a Resistance outpost. He uses a customized dune buggy to travel a crumbling coastal road to Nova Prospekt, encountering Combine patrols and assisting the Resistance in fending off raids.Gordon lays siege to Nova Prospekt by using alien "pheropods" to command the hordes of antlions that infest the coast. He reunites with Alyx in the prison and they locate Eli, but discover that Mossman is a Combine informant. Before they can stop her, she teleports herself and Eli back to City 17's Citadel. The Combine teleporter explodes as Gordon and Alyx use it to escape Nova Prospekt.

Reaching Kleiner's lab, Gordon and Alyx learn that they were caught in a "slow teleport", during which a week has passed. In their absence, the Resistance has mobilized against the Combine, turning City 17 into a battleground.[30] During the fighting, Alyx is captured by the Combine and taken to the Citadel, as Gordon fights through the city with the aid of D0g and Barney to reach it. Inside the Citadel, he is caught in a Combine "confiscation chamber" that destroys all of his weapons except for the gravity gun, the energy enhancing its capabilities and turning it into a superior weapon.Eventually, Gordon is captured riding in a Combine transport pod and is taken to Dr. Breen's office, where he and Dr. Mossman are waiting with Eli and Alyx in captivity.

 Dr. Breen begins to explain his plans for further conquest of the humans by the Combine, contrary to what he had told Dr. Mossman.[32] Angered, Mossman frees Gordon, Alyx, and Eli before Breen can teleport them off-world. Dr. Breen tries to escape through a portal, but Gordon pursues him and destroys the portal reactor with the super-charged Gravity Gun. Breen appears to be annihilated in the resulting explosion. Just before Gordon and Alyx can meet a similar fate, time is frozen. The G-Man reappears, praising Gordon for his actions in City 17 and the Citadel. Making vague mention of "offers for [Gordon's] services", the G-Man places him back into stasis.Here is the ending of Half life 2.

Gameplay

Half-Life 2 is a single player first person shooter broken into several chapters, permanently casting the player as the protagonist Gordon Freeman. The player also starts without items, slowly building up an arsenal over the course of the game. A diverse set of enemies is present, which usually require being approached with different tactics. Gordon can kill most enemies with his weapons, or make use of indirect means, exploiting environmental hazards such as explosive pressurized canisters, gas fires or improvised traps. At one point in the game, Gordon can be joined by up to four armed Resistance soldiers however, they can still die easily due to lack of damage protection.

Many of the game's new features utilize its detailed physics simulation. Two sections of the game involve driving vehicles. Instead of button-based puzzles from Half-Life, environmental puzzles are also introduced with makeshift mechanical systems, revolving around the player's new ability to pick up, move, and place objects. Solutions involve objects' physical properties, such as shape, weight, and buoyancy. Part-way through the game, Gordon acquires the Gravity Gun, which allows him to draw distant objects towards himself or forcefully push them away, as well as to manipulate larger and heavier objects than he is able to alone. These abilities are required to solve puzzles later in the game, and can also be used to great effect in combat, as any non-static object within proximity to the player has the potential to be used as a makeshift defense by throwing a gasoline can or a buzzsaw blade etc.

Half-Life 2 presents a dystopian alternate history of Earth, where the resources of the planet, including the human race itself, are being harvested by an oppressive multidimensional empire, known as the Combine. The game is set around the fictitious City 17, roughly 20 years after the events of its predecessor Half-Life. During Half-Life, the scientists, including Gordon Freeman, at the Black Mesa Research Facility, an experiment on an alien crystal sample went wrong and Alien creatures flooded into the facility. Gordon fought his way through them and  he Lambda scientists helped Gordon teleport to Xen, where Gordon destroyed a large alien entity keeping the rift open. Gordon was then suddenly extracted by the mysterious G-Man, and Impressed with his ability to survive against all odds, the G-Man offered him a job before placing him into stasis, which Gordon had no option but to accept. After a seven hour war humanity surrendered and city 17 became the home of the gigantic Combine Citadel. Meanwhile, an underground "Lambda Resistance" of humans and Vortigaunts, now working together, was formed. This saw Freeman as a saviour who would lead them to freedom.

Development

For Half-Life 2, Valve Corporation developed a new game engine called Source, which handles the game's visual, audio, and artificial intelligence elements. Integral to Half-Life 2 on the Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms and( it also updated to bit 64) is the Steam content delivery system developed by Valve Corporation. All Half-Life 2 players on PC are required to have Steam installed and a valid account in order to play. The book Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar, revealed many of the game's original settings and action that were cut down or removed from the game. Half-Life 2 was originally intended to be a darker game with grittier artwork, where the Combine were more obviously draining the oceans for minerals and replacing the atmosphere with noxious, murky gases. In June 2004, Valve Software announced in a press release that the FBI had arrested several people suspected of involvement in the source code leak. Valve claimed the game had been leaked by a German black-hat hacker named Axel "Ago" Gembe.

Sales And Critical Response

Over 6.5 million copies of Half-Life 2 were sold at retail by December 3, 2008. As of February 9, 2011, Half-Life 2 had sold over 12 million copies. Half-Life 2 was highly acclaimed by both the public and critics alike, and has since been called one of the greatest games of all time. It received an aggregated score of 96% on both GameRankings and Metacritic. GameSpy, VideoGamer.com given perfect reviewing scores and IGN, GamesRadar, and Eurogamer gave near-perfect scores, while the game became the fifth title to receive Edge magazine's ten-out-of-ten score. Critics who applauded the game cited the advanced graphics and physics. Maximum PC awarded Half-Life 2 an exaggerated, unprecedented 11 on their rating scale which normally peaks at 10, calling it "the best game ever made". It received 10/10 from Edge and Eurogamer ,VideoGamer.com ,9.5/10 from Game informers, 8.5/10 from Game trailers, 9.7/10 IGN, 11/10 Maximum PC (you read it right) ,9.2/10 from gamespot.

Awards

Half-Life 2 earned 39 Game of the Year awards, including Overall Game of the Year at IGN, GameSpot's Award for Best Shooter, GameSpot's Reader's Choice — PC Game of the Year Award, Game of the Year from The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, and "Best Game" with the Game Developers Choice Awards, where it was also given various awards for technology, characters, and writing. Edge magazine awarded Half Life 2 with its top honor of the year with the award for Best Game, as well as awards for Innovation and Visual Design. The game also had a strong showing at the 2004 British Academy Video Games Awards, picking up six awards, more than any other game that night, with awards including "Best Game" and "Best Online and Multiplayer. Guinness World Records awarded Half-Life 2 the world record for "Highest Rated Shooter by PC Gamer Magazine" in the Guinness World Records: Gamer's Edition 2008. In 2009, Game Informer put Half-Life 2 5th on their list of "The Top 200 Games of All Time. Half-Life 2 was selected by readers of The Guardian as the best game of the decade, with praise given especially to the environment design throughout the game. Half-Life 2 won Crispy Gamer's Game of the Decade tournament style poll. It also won Reviews on the Run's IGN's Best Game of the Decade and Spike Video Game Awards 2012 Game of the Decade.

Reference

1.Wikipedia “Half-Life 2”