I recently purchased this game and had major problems as it was bugged to hell. However, I discovered how to fix the errors I was getting after sifting through loads of forums.

The purpose of this is to provide aid to the people with problems with this game.

[u:ae53cecd09]PROBLEM 1[/u:ae53cecd09]

When installing the game, it tells you at the end you need to download the rest (I had 55%). This is roughly a gig of downloading. I have dialup.

I eventually discovered after searching places that the dvd/installer thing has a bug. It does not install everything (or anything for some people).

The solution is to reinstall and reinstall until it only needs to update. The game is there, the installer lies. You DO NOT need to download loads of stuff.

[u:ae53cecd09]PROBLEM 2[/u:ae53cecd09]

The game randomly freezes with looping sound and the only way out being the reset button.

On the steam forums, it was also said that you needed to change your drivers. However, I did not touch mine and did not have any adverse effects from changing them.

The solution is to set your graphics options in HL2 Episode 1 in a unique way. Change Anisotropic Filtering to Trilinear. Also turn Anti-aliasing off. I found that it crashed, even on 2x (although the Steam forums say that it should work on 2x and 4x).

Also, while I did not do this, it is also said that you should switch off adaptive anti aliasing in the catalyst control centre.


This all seemed to solve my problems.


I am no genius, I did not discover these myself, they are off the Steam forums. I am merely posting them here to save people the trouble of looking them up.


As a final warning, Half-Life 2: Episode 1 is NOT long. I completed it in less than half a day (just over three hours).

My recomendation is to wait for it to drop in price before buying it, because although it is cheaper than most new games that are released, it has far less content than a normal full release game would have.

ONLY POST ABOUT BUGS [i:ae53cecd09]AND[/i:ae53cecd09] FIXES HERE PLEASE. USE THE GAME CHAT SECTION TO DISCUSS EVENTS.

NO SPOILERS HERE.

Don't want HL2:E1, but if I change my mind, thanks for the info, but knowing me if i did id buy it straight off steam.

True, but as you know that option is unavailable to me as I have dialup.

HOWEVER, there [i:89bf6abce5]may[/i:89bf6abce5] be broadband in sight in the future.

It also seems to not like offline mode too much.

It works online ok though. With the settings stated above.

Are you not in a broadband area? If you are - broadband is very cheap these days, some packages are around ?9.99; cheaper than some dialup packages!

We have recently become an area available to Broadband.

However, my parents need, um, time to 'decide' which company to use.

Therefore I am cursed with dialup.

As is already mentioned above.