So, Steam’s finally back up, and as a result, HL2:GOTY is finally accessible. That’s good. I e-mailed the various sites I’d e-mailed before when it wasn’t working, and mentioned the problem had been rectified. Ended up on Kotaku, as A_B pointed out in the comments below. Though I figured it would be fixed, the fundamental problem is that most companies won’t do crap without a damn good reason to do so, and bad publicity is something that’ll make a company get their butt in gear. Not that that had anything to do with this situation, but the issue was that I wasn’t about to sit there and wait without *any* sort of response from Valve for *days*. That’s just really poor customer service, and it’s STILL a poor response, even though as compensation, they’ve given the people that got stuck with un-working Steam over the weekend a free copy of Counter Strike: Condition Zero and the original CS via Steam.

The good part, which I feel unabashedly great about saying, is that HL2 is stunning. I know I’m about a year late to the party, but so what – it’s *still* excellent, and *still* one of the best looking games in existance. The facial animation is still a little “uncanny valley,” but still better than any other game so far. City 17 *feels* like a real place, and the action that they guide you through is so well orchestrated it never really feels as linear as it really is. It’s great stuff, extraordinarily designed, and the only game *since* Half Life to really tell the story the way that Valve does it, with atmosphere, and without ever taking you out of character. Excellent, excellent stuff.

So, given that the GOTY *works* now, I can recommend the content without reservation. Since I’m still a little leery of Steam, though, I’d have to say that fundamentally, I think I’d recommend the xbox version over the PC version, as you don’t have to deal with patches, audio stuttering, and various incompatibilities, as well as the Steam issue. Maybe it’ll have other weird glitches, but who knows – given how well it runs on my old, crappy PC (even though it looks a WHOLE LOT BETTER on my work machine, which is a beast), it’ll probably run great on the xbox.