Jonny tries his hardest to hate the best game he's played all year.

What could I do in three and a half hours? I could fly to the south of Spain, slow roast a medium-sized chicken, watch half of the first season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, or write a sonnet to the girl of my dreams. What I don't want to do for three and a half hours of my already-much-wasted life is stare at a computer screen in exasperated fury as the game I have waited six years to play, and which I have now purchased from a reputable online store, refuses to let me play the bloody thing.

What I won't do, is dwell on the matter. You may well have experienced similar problems getting the game running so you'll know what I'm talking about (fret not, they have apparently been ironed out now). But darn it all - as much as that wasted evening wanted me to hate Half-Life 2, I couldn't.

Half-Life 2 is the first game I've played in a long time which has felt like something new. The last time any game made me feel I was playing something that was breaking this much territory was six years ago - Half-Life itself.

As a game, and as a shooter, Half-Life has been considerably outclassed since it's release, notably by Halo. But in terms of the jump it represented and the sheer thrall it held over entranced first-time players, nothing since has come close.

There's one way in which it hasn't been outclassed, and that's in terms of its narrative. What Valve did with the first game wasn't only breaking new ground for videogames, but for storytelling itself, creating a fully believable alternate universe for the first time - a universe which you could interact with (but didn't necessarily understand). All you knew in Half-Life was that you had to keep going.

It was unlike other games in that nothing existed to that Universe beyond what you experienced in the game. There was no beefing up of the story in the manual, no novels, no clue as to what was happening and why.

Some extremely clever expansion packs which saw you living through the Black Mesa experience from other perpectives (a grunt soldier and Barney the Security Guard) managed themselves to have hugely entertaining narratives without filling us in on the really important stuff.

Half-Life 2 does much the same thing, though it ups the ante considerably. You begin the game hearing the voice of the man whose harsh tones ended your first experience in the Half-Life universe. Beyond knowing that that elusive be-suited guy is possibly your boss, that you're called Gordon Freeman, you know very little, if anything.

After that all you know is what you see. You know that there's something weird going on. You know that the Earth has changed considerably and appears to be in the control of an oppressive alien race. You know that some really quite frightening Nazi-like dudes are chasing you over that rooftop. You know that you never tire of the radio static and distress call that goes out from every Metrocop you take down. You know that the drainpipe rattling means one of those horrible "fast zombie" things is coming up after you. You know that your 12 foot, indestructible robot war puppy of doom is the coolest thing in the world ever.

But what you don't know is what is going on. What is Breen up to? Where have you been for the last however long (apparently it's been 15 years)? What about your boss, the G-Man, what on Earth is he all about? And where do the Combine, the aliens, the zombies, fit into all of this? Are you even fighting on the right side?

Do not expect to have the storyline explained. Because, frankly, it isn't. This has caused concern amongst some fans but personally I think they're missing the point. As much as I'd love to have an explanation I'm quite happy to wait for it - or even not get one, because what the game does by not explaining everything is the more powerful experience - kind of like the film director that cuts away from the grisly death so you can imagine your worst. If Valve ever ties the ends up we'd be very lucky if the result was as amazing as we're thinking it will be.

So you're confused. That's fine. After all, you're Gordon Freeman - so think how he feels. One minute he's on an underground monorail to start a new job. Next minute he's teleporting in and out of an alien dimension. And now this. That's the point to the Half-Life experience. There is simply no more to Gordon Freeman than what you bring to him. He is a tabula rasa for your fantasy adventures . He is you, you are him...

Woah - cool!

The great thing is that despite being healthily confusing, the storyline isn't exactly complex. You know where you gotta go and what you gotta do - maybe that's all the information you're supposed to have - how often do operatives of any type know the bigger picture? What matters is that it's moving, involving, believable.

A lot of why it's so believable is the way it looks. I tend now to avoid talking about graphics in reviews, as they have become a bit of a moot point. Practically every game that comes out nowadays is aesthetically beautiful in its own way. Now, I'm not a technical man, but I think it's fair to say that Half-Life 2 does absolutely nothing new in terms of it's visuals. But, at the same time, technology, artistic sensibilities and pure imagination conspire to make it, as a whole, the most breathtakingly good-looking game in existence. And this from a man who'll take the punk art sensibilities of Viewtiful Joe or Ico over realism any day of the week.

Every environment is so alive, so real. Which is only helped by the most believable physics simulation in gaming. Everything acts exactly how you'd expect it to. Bottles smash into shards when you throw them at the heads of the gestapo-like Combine cops (not wise at the start of the game when you're otherwise unarmed...but you'll do it anyway). Shards that can then be picked up. Televisions can be defenestrated (look it up, trust me, it's a word well worth knowing). Wood floats in water. Barrels roll. Sawblades when thrown will cut whatever they hit, in twain. Radiators, flung with enough force, can take down an entire enemy squad.

Flinging things with enough force will not be a problem once you get hold of the gravity gun, which allows you to blast objects out of the way, or drag them towards you, or, you know, fling them with plenty of force. It's a great idea, and one that allows for some new types of gameplay, new types of puzzle-solving, new types of combat - knocking out the right support strut here or there for example, can have painful, but always hilarious consequences for your enemies.

One of the main reasons Half-Life 2 is so believable is the eerily accurate portrayal of other people in the game. The animations, in particular the facial animations are spot on, to the point where it can often be pretty spooky. Voice acting too is top notch, as you'd expect, and you grow such a bond with some characters (such as Barney - who seems to have turned into The Gillette Man) that you're elated to get to catch up with them later in the game.

I'm going to have to start thinking about wrapping this up soon. I mean, my fingers are going to drop off, and you're probably itching to get on and order the game. So I won't have the space to talk about how the music, which is sadly heard only rarely, is in a league of its own, about how much fun it is storming a heavily guarded prison with only an army of man-eating bugs for back-up, about how cool your airboat is, or about how difficult but enjoyable it is taking down huge three-legged war machines or heavily-armed gunships.

Believe it or not, reviewing good games isn't very easy - it's more fun to be critical. And of course it's hard to sound genuine - especially as superlatives don't give a huge amount of range for expression. Sometimes it must seem that every other game is the "best" this or that, and sure, there are a lot of great games out there. But this, this is new.

Half-Life 2 is the summation of everything about gaming that has been great up until now, rolled into a sweet 4 gig bundle of joy. If you had to choose a game to demonstrate just how far games had come in every respect, how developers have learned to engage players on an emotional, even primal level, and how immersive and believable games have become, this would be it.

Simply put, Half-Life 2 is the flagship of the videogame form. There are lots of games coming out in the future that I am very excited about, but if anything comes along in the next five years which outclasses the experience on offer here I would be extremely surprised. Besides, the way this game puts you through the ringer, you'll probably need that long to recover.

Jonny Austin

Half a life is more than enough for our Jonny...

It's a sad fact of being a games journo that you find it harder and harder to really be amazed by footage of new games. Not that games aren't still exciting - of course they are - but when you have to play dozens of excellent new titles a month there's obviously some desensitisation.

Stuff like Halo 2 on Xbox looks great, and we already know it's going to kick ass once we play it, but viewing footage of the game didn't cause us to whoop like US games journos at a WWE mud-wrestling jamboree. Half-Life 2 though. Wow. Watching the short videos that have so far been released onto the web had us gasping, laughing, rewinding, and in some cases, dropping dead from shock. This is truly amazing stuff - light years ahead of any other game on the release schedule of any other system.

Half-Life is a game that needs no introduction to most PC gamers. But just in case, here we go. Over fifty Game Of The Year Awards. Eight million copies sold at retail worldwide. Facilitated the most popular online game in history.

That's some mighty impressive figures. And well deserved too. When Half-Life first emerged in 1998 it sent a shock through the games industry and especially the PC gaming community. First-person shooters were still the new thing, but had grown somewhat tired.

With its blend of gripping sci-fi storytelling, balanced combat, fearsome enemy AI and scripted yet interactive sequences, Half-Life changed gaming forever. As bearded and bespectacled everyman Gordon Freeman, you started the game as you began a new job at a top-secret underground facility, and before you could even enquire about cigarette break allowances you were trapped in no man's land as a war raged between government black-ops soldiers and a hideous alien invasion force.

Fast forward to 2003 and it seems we're in much the same position. First-person shooters are still the staple diet of the PC gamer, but the genre has again grown stale. The last big FPS release, Unreal 2, proved emphatically to many that the genre was running on fumes. Uninspired combat, plodding plotting, overblown weaponry, schoolyard female characterisation - it seemed that the first-person shooter had nowhere to turn. Except from, of course, down another identikit sci-fi corridor.

Until recently, when Valve, who developed the original Half-Life, made their shock announcement. Half-Life 2 has been in development for five years, and it's practically finished. The release date is September 30th 2003, a mere couple of months away at the time of writing. And best of all, the indications are undeniable that Half-Life 2 will catapult the genre into an exciting new era once more.

At the end of the first game, the enigmatic G-Man, the evil besuited fella who was somehow behind the mess, offered Gordon a choice. Work for him (quite possibly in The Pursuit of Evil™), or be ripped apart by his army of extra-terrestrial lapdogs. Mmmm, there's a toughie. Half-Life 2 assumes you chose the latter, natch.

Valve aren't releasing plot-specifics yet, but we do know that the game takes place "not long" after the first title, and in the fictional European City 17. We also know that the tubby and loveable security guard Barney appears, having survived the first game, which is good news for his army of fans - Barney's popularity even led to his own spinoff - Blue Shift. Oh, and there is no trip to the alienworld of Xen this time. We didn't actually mind it - but most of you hated that part of the original, so Valve has left it out.

One major new character is Alyx. The daughter of one of the scientists from the original title, she will fight side by side with you at numerous points of the game. Alyx is a laudably refreshing portrayal of a woman in an FPS, in that she doesn't feel the need to wear skintight PVC and thrust her cleavage at you all time, but what's most remarkable at this stage is that Valve are using her to show off their stunning new facial animation technology. This time around, people, move, speak and act in a thoroughly believable, and importantly, human manner. One of the strong points of Half-Life was that for a game it had many surprisingly emotional moments, and with lifelike characters Valve are looking to seriously expand on this oft-neglected area of videogame storytelling.

The aliens have also made the required leap, and now are more frightening than ever. All the old favourites, such as the Head-Crabs and Barnacles are back but this time they're joined by bigger, more pant-wetting aliens, such as the Antlions, which can smell human sweat from a great distance and swarm towards you in great numbers, and most impressive of all, the Strider. These humungous, tripedal horrors are seen stomping all over City 17, bringing to mind the ancient BBC sci-fi series Tripods but with a considerably bigger budget (and no French lad called 'Beanpole', at least we presume).

Of course, the armed forces will be making their unsubtle presence felt, and this time, they're even smarter. One of Half-Life's most impressive features was the scary AI, which had soldiers working effectively as teams to flush you out and take you down, and this has clearly advanced as far as everything else in the game, and it's not just the humans you have to worry about - some species of alien are now remarkably intelligent as well. They'll remember where they last saw you and hound you regardless of where you run or try to hide. It's all very well pushing a filing cabinet against the door and hiding in the corner sobbing, but after a few silent seconds there'll be a rap-rap-rapping at your chamber door, and a huge splintering crash followed by the crack-crack-cracking of your skull if you can't find a way to fight back.

Perhaps Half-Life 2's most amazing advances are in the area of physics. Valve seem to have provided something that gamers have been crying out for, for a long time - a realistic environment where the only limit to what you can do is your imagination. Wood acts like wood, metal acts like metal, and water and fire have exactly the kind of behavioural properties you'd expect them to in real life.

This creates a kind of toybox effect, where the developers put you and hundreds of highly intelligent creatures and NPCs into a realistic world and stand back to watch the effects. The possibilities are endless, as you and your actions can have huge repercussions on the environment around you, which allows a massive amount of freedom in deciding how to deal with situations, as you put what we all naturally know about weight, force and inertia, as well as Chaos Theory, into practice, with staggering and sometimes unpredictable results. That huge enemy might be shaking off shotgun blasts, but if you're clever you may be able to figure out how to crush it beneath a huge metal skip, if you can drop it from high enough.

Despite the stunning looks and advanced AI and Physics routines, Valve are promising that you won't need a monster of a machine to play the game. The kind of figures being thrown around now for minimum spec are a 700MHz Pentium III with a TNT graphics card, so this should definitely be accessible to most gamers.

The original Half-Life was so good that gamers are expecting the impossible from Half-Life 2, and yet on the evidence we've seen we remain totally confident that the sequel is going to deliver what it promises, and much, much more. Book your ticket to City 17 now, because you do not want to miss out when the fun starts.

Preview by: Jonny Austin

Interview with Gabe Newell

How's it going?

Pretty good. Thanks for asking.

Standard question first - what's your name, age, role and favourite game that isn't one of your own?

Gabe Newell, 40, managing director, Mario 64.

There must be a lot of pressure on, because everyone's *really* looking forward to HL2 - are you getting the games equivalent of second album panics?

Yep. We've received a great deal of support from the press, from retailers, from fans, and from the online community in the years since the original Half-Life shipped. Now it's up to us to pay them all back, and, yes, we are terrified that we won't deliver.

Is the levitation gun (if you could give us the real name, we'd sound way better!) used to levitate / fire things about in the tech demo trailers going to be in the game?

Yes. If you have a system in your game - shaders, particles, physics, whatever, and you want to have it be about gameplay and not just presentation, then you are probably going to give the player some straight-forward method of having an input into that system. You could restrict the player to having indirect or "realistic" methods of input a la Trespasser, but that proved to be such a disaster that none of us tinkering with physics ever want to bring up Trespasser. Especially not in an interview - nope. You'd have to be a total gnork to say "Trespasser" in an interview where you want people to believe physics could be fun.

Can you / are you willing to comment on Doom III?

Sure - I think the thought police are over at Monolith this week. I think Doom 3 looks great. I'll buy it.

What's the official minimum spec machine for it, supported operating systems etc?

Windows 98 and later, Pentium-III 800, with a DX-6 level graphics accelerator.

How would you describe the game to someone who's not a hardcore FPS fan, why is it going to rock their world and have them running to upgrade their office PC to play it?

We've shown Half-Life 2 to a number of very casual or "so casual they don't" gamers. The characters and the world interactivity seems to be the key for them. Usually they tell us "it looks just like a movie, except I'll be in it", and we grit our teeth and say "Interactive Movie" is a Really Bad Thing, and they are not to say it again, or we'll take away their Half-Life 2 hat.

It seems like guns alone won't be enough - what else can you use to survive?

I was showing some people down in Hollywood the game last week, and was going through zombie town, showing how I could "Rambo" my way through with guns a-blazin, or I could "MacGyver" my way through by paying attention to the world and being clever (it's easier to be clever when you helped design the level, of course). We're trying pretty hard to reward people for thinking about what's in front of them and the tools the world gives them that could be useful.

There seems to be a sense of a free world, in which you figure your own way out to deal with stuff - or are there pre-set triggers (such as the pipe swinging and knocking everyone out)?

The physics gives you a lot of freedom to approach things your own way, but we also try to insert more discretely authored experiences to give people a sense of "that was cool" without having them feel too much "that was really contrived."

What's your favourite new feature?

The character technology.

Are we correct to assume it'll have WON authentication or something like it in place to whack nasty people with?

It will use the Steam authentication and anti-cheat technology.

Does Half Life 2 have its own anti-cheat code at the heart of the game?

It will use an updated version of what's out there on Steam.

Will it be a exclusive to any one server provider or will All Seeing Eye work with it?

We think of third party server browsers as being MODs. We love MODs, not least because our customers love MODs.

Did the success of Half-Life take you by surprise, and how has it influenced the design of HL2? For example, will you be keeping support for the large modding community?

Yes, we were quite surprised. We've tried to learn from the original so we have made the new engine much more flexible and approachable for MOD authors (e.g. MOD authors will find it a lot easier to add network entities, they will have explicit control over all of the rendering on a per-poly basis if they want to). It's challenging, because now there is a great deal of more functionality, and the art bar is a lot higher, so the MOD teams will have their work cut out for them.

When will the HL2 SDK (Software Development Kit - so happy MODDers can get going tinkering with it) be released?

Hopefully we will start releasing pieces of it to a broader group of developers starting in August. Some developers already have the engine, such as Troika.