May 2007 Archives

Less than two weeks ago I posted about ATI bundling in a version of the Valve's Half-life 2 collection called Black Box.  Then today I see this story on IGN that it has been canceled.  Admittedly it is only the retail version, but still ATI has done it again somehow.  Next it will get delayed to next spring or something.

While doing some research the other day I came across the Microsoft Office 2007 Suite comparison page and the Adobe Creative Suite 3 comparison page.  I was quite amazed by the sheer number of options that each offer.  Also the products included in each keep growing with each generation of the product.  I can't quite see the benefit of having so many packages that overlap with eachother.  It seems that there should be a base package and then packages that build of it.  With both suites I have spent a lot of time finding which offers the right mix without missing anything or paying for something I don't need.  Also it is hard to believe the price of the largest Adobe package, $2499, um yeah.

Way back in the Summer of 2003 ATI (now AMD) announced the 9600 PRO / 9800 XT line of graphics card and said they would include Half-Life 2.  Subsequently Half-Life 2 was delayed by Valve from its originally announced release date of 9/30/2003.  As a result ATI simply included a coupon and it was assumed the game would follow shortly.  A story about this is here.  In it ATI details on 10/25/2003 that they are throwing in some older games to make up for the delay.

Fast forward almost a year to 10/18/2004 and the game finally has gone gold as can be seen here.  The game was finally available to those with coupons more than a year after most had bought their video cards.  In the meantime the cards they bought had aged quite a lot for video cards.

Now today ATI/AMD has officially announced that they are bundling Half Life 2 : Episode 2 in the Black Box package which also includes Team Fortress 2 and Portal with their latest graphics cards.  A picture of the voucher is here.  This game has already seen various delays and is currently slated for Quarter 3 2007.  Why ATI is doing this again who knows.

At this point I just hope something doesn't happen to delay the release of HL2: EP2 even further.  It will already have been close to 3 years since the initial release of HL2 and the second of its "episodic" content.  HL2 episodes are even worse than Sopranos in their release schedule.