I know the bit you mean. I didn't actually pin anyone to anything there, but at one point I killed a soldier so that his lifeless body was teetering over the edge of a railing above the sea. When I climbed up to him I couldn't resist giving him a bash with the crowbar to knock him off!

As far as I remember (and my memory is that good) it was always like this. Gamers always complained about the same things ....in fact, back in the day, it used to be worse...remember having to configure a boot disk to play
How we moaned about why it doesn't run on our HW. It all seems normal to me.

The thing is you dont NEED to upgrade for games, but people demand maximum performance.

Your X-Box is a geforce 4 core with No AA or AF, it runs in 800x600 res? but because they are all equal - what you see is what you get.

But for a new pc release, people dont like to have "second best" - most people are playing HL2 in 1024x768 minimum with AF at 8x and above and 4x AA. Now an xbox couldnt achieve that.

The point im trying to make is that you probably can play without lag if you settle for a low resolution, low effects and completely avoid any AA or AF.

So I dont think you do need to upgrade to play, but its nice.

I dont have mine running with all the bells and whistles on, I like to be able to get it playing at a fair old speed, and much how I wanted to buy a new gfx card for this, after seeing it play on what I use now I think its pretty good. I can even play it on my laptop at a respectable framerate.

I do have a gripe with it and thats that theres no insane difficulty level - hard just isnt much harder (in the earlier levels anyway).