5. Half Life 2
The recently announced Half-Life 3 reminded me of the launch shambles of its older brother, Half-Life 2 on Valve's industry changing download client Steam. The launch of Half-Life 2 was the perfect game to show off the capabilities of Steam, due to it being the most anticipated game ever, at the time. Now that you have all returned to leave some angry comments after scavenging the internet for any information on that Half-Life 3 announcement I mentioned, as you can tell I lied. So if you don't mind will you calm down and continue reading please? I could be doing with the views. Half-Life 2 now sits in the unreachable echelon that many FPS strive to achieve and is still the most beloved FPS to date, with fans foaming at the mouth for the third in the series to reveal itself from beneath a head crab. The game was such a commercial and critical success that many of the fans have chosen to forget the ugly launch problems it suffered, problems that partnered with the launch of Steam. Players were unable to validate their codes for the game, which was a mandatory step at the time, which of course caused Valve's servers to become overloaded with crowbar wielding frustrated fans. Valve let customers pre load the game in the weeks leading up to the official release, with some not realising they needed to have an internet connection to validate the game before playing could commence, even a store bought boxed copy, which was another kick in the balls for Valve's legions of unconnected fans. So here we are now, almost a decade later and Half-Life 2 still, deservedly, gets its praise daily for what a fantastic game it is, and has managed to climb through the rubble of a shaky launch, along with Steam, to be the darlings of the PC gaming community.