Soooo.... I've been playing through Half-Life and all it's fun little expansions and such, and finally decided, "Hey, let's reinstall that Half-Life 2 demo I've got." So I did. And after waiting 45 minutes for Steam to update the demo (God only knows WHY it needs to update a DEMO. Even after I specifically told it BEFORE launching the game NOT TO...) I get in game, and start to set things up, and then I'm greeted with this.

... That's just a wee bit odd. Not to mention it makes it a pain in the *** to configure things when you can't read the options easily. But I press on, figuring maybe it's a silly little glitch. I fire up the level, and I'm greeted with a Gman that looks like this.

Ok..... Greenish eyes and a black hole for a mouth. I don't remember that ever happening last time the demo was on here.
Meh. Keep going... maybe it's playable.

Or not.
Every light in the level does that MASSIVE white box thing. The little Robot Cameras do it too. Blood spatters and bullet holes come off as black boxes. Civilians have either the same greenish eyes and gaping black hole mouth as the Gman, or have white eyes and a white mouth.
So uhm.... what's going on?
Quick look at the console tells me this...

Missing pixel shaders? Pixel shaders that are the wrong version? ... uh.... HOW? When it JUST UPDATED THE DEMO?

*sigh*

That right there? That's a big reason why I don't care much for PC games anymore. Too much damn work sometimes to make things run. Why bother with that when I can grab an Xbox game, take it home, put it in, and have everything WORK first time every time?

Anyway.... Suggestions?

KILL WITH FIRE

Looks to me like the demo didn't download properly. I suggest for you to just uninstall the demo and reinstall to see if that does anything.

that gman glitch is hilarious!

yeah, i'd suggest a reinstall.

i believe that the white line of pixels was a bloom/hdr problem

... Alright. Here's an oddity for you.

I've been messing about with Steam, and I decide, "What the hell, let's see if it'll update the demo again."

So I launch Steam. And Steam updates. Completely off topic, but I just love how it does that. It doesn't ask if you'd like to update now, it just does it. User be damned if for some reason they needed Steam RIGHT THEN.

Anyways, after steam does its thing, I tell the demo it's free to update when ever, and launch it.

No updating, but suddenly all the menus work like they should.

Yeah... I'm heading back in to see if it's going to work like it should now and if the game plays correctly.

Could just be a one-time thing. Or maybe artifacting.

Pft. So far only Anovis had the only real suggestion, that should help.

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]Could just be a one-time thing. Or maybe artifacting.[/QUOTE]
Not a one time thing.

I've been messing about trying to figure out why it was doing that for about 3 days now. And suddenly everything works just like it should.

Must be a Massassi thing. Valve and Steam figured out I was going for help and couldn't have that, so they made my game work.

Sooo... this thread could be about how much freakier Gman gets with Rainbow eyes and a gaping black hole for a mouth now....

I'd say it's about even with G-Man normal.

-for a given value of "Normal", that is.

It was probably an issue that was fixed when you updated steam, hence it spontaneously working after you, you know, updated steam.

Right click any game and click Properties, Local files tab. Then click Verify integrity of game cache. Steam will make sure that none of the game files are corrupted and fix any that are. Steam might have automatically detected one or some when you ran it.

Or it could have been incompatibilities between HL2 and your video drivers that a recent update fixed.

Wrong about Steam updating. Only the Steam Platform will it update without you really being able to do anything. If it's updating games, you can play another game on Steam and it will pause the update - hence making it when it's convenient for you.

OMG G-Man has been taken over by the Black Oil! Quick, call Mulder and Scully!