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First off, i would like to say that i've played through Half-Life literally dozens of times back when i was younger and never encountered any game-breaking events or bugs like you describe. I actually remember very specifically that puzzle with the electrified puddle working fine. The thing with fan too, is news to me. I'm left suspecting that these are simply issues with running such an old game on new hardware, or that all the Steam versions of the game have issues, such as there are apparently issues with Blue Shift on Steam and how there are definitely issues with HL:Source. I find this rather upsetting. That thing with the elevator though, are you absolutely sure? I do kind of want to step in to defend Valve here, because that would the one exception in the game. Everywhere else, Half-Life is really, really good about giving every lift proper sets of call buttons. (Which was a pretty unusual degree of attention to detail at the time, when elevators in games were mostly just "You step on it and it will move. Get off it, it will return to its starting point.") Nevertheless, Half-Life was Valve's first game, man. You've got all the expectations hindsight has. When people first played that game, it was simply a new game from an unproven studio. You keep talking about it like it's supposed to be some masterpiece, which is an absurd angle to approach a game from, nothing can live up to expectations like that. As for the difficulty thing, shooters are almost always a better experience on harder difficulties. It forces you to play more methodically, and allows the battles to be more tactical and gives the enemy AI opportunities to shine. (Half-Life does have very good, albeit heavily scripted, enemy "AI". The soldiers will flank you and support eachother, but repeated playthroughs will show them doing the same things almost every time.) You know, but a game that initially appeared to be mindless run and gun can turn into something much more depth and nuance. Weapons selection for the roles they serve suddenly becomes a more visible and important element, use of cover becomes paramount. I do think Valve's games are balanced well enough to support an entertaining hard-mode playthrough, but you really need the skills to go with it though, otherwise it'll just be a punishing and aggravating experience that is hard to recommend. I don't think the hard difficulty in Half-Life actually makes the enemies smarter though, i think it's mostly just that by the increased difficulty forcing you to play in a more reserved fashion, it has more time to act out its routines and surprise you. The same holds true for a lot of shooters with strong enemy AI. (Halo, Fear, etc.)

My favorite part of HL2 was always the cliff-side explorations, just a big leisurely chunk of the game that you can take mostly at your own pace. So mellow and creepy and gorgeous. Poking through all those abandoned homes filled with headcrabs.

It's more just that Ubisoft has a small nation's worth of artists, designers, and coders making those games. Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood seriously had one of the longest credit scrolls i can remember. I don't know, they're trying to do too much too fast, i think. I like those games, and i like the mythology for the series, so i guess i'm on board for a while more at least, but i don't think they're going to be able to keep this up. Whether it's players burning out on the games because they've put too many out, or them stumbling over their ambition and putting out something truly wrecked and horrible, something is going to give.

So it's looking like that Guardian Heroes remake isn't being developed by Treasure.

I want an Eternal Darkness sequel that starts messing with you whenever you start feeling at ease. I would buy a vitality sensor for that.

I think we have some similar ideals. I would simply state it as - I feel that somebody should try to actually understand something before they decide they don't like it. I've personally frequently found that when somebody reacts strongly and negatively to a game, it's because they've missed some crucial element. The purpose of a game mechanic has elluded them, or they lack the proper context for the experience. In Half-Life's case - It's dated-feeling game, but had many important and ground-breaking firsts. (Example: At the time, nobody was doing such elaborate scripted set piece events like Half-Life has. Not just the story sequences, but the blast chamber monster and the battle with the invincible giant the tunnels.) Sounds to me, though, like you've done your due diligence in trying to understand a widely respected game. So what's left? Well, you don't like Half-Life. video games aren't like movies. video games are such a broad and strange medium, we don't divide games by their thematic content, but by how they fundamentally function. video games are also inherently mutable, they are changed by what the player brings to them. There simply isn't this one single experience you're trying to fish out, everybody will perceive it differently. This isn't like the way people can perceive the unspoken language of movies in different ways, it's not people experiencing one thing subjectively, it's people experiencing many similar things subjectively. What works for somebody won't work for everybody. At the point you've given the game a fair chance and determined you still don't like it, i don't really understand why you should continue to beat your head against it.

12 person multiplayer!? ... So that would be Treasure's fourth(?) XBLA game then, they've been really prolific for the service. I remember reading an interview with those Treasure guys where they were talking about working on XBLA, that they kind of felt that where all the fans of hardcore arcade-style games ended up. They had a theory that all the people who were playing their games on the Sega platforms ended up with X-boxes.

This is a good point, actually. That first Half-Life is structured a lot like a survival horror game. Though i think elements of that do strongly persist into the sequel. (A lot of the cliff-side explorations of abandoned dwellings, and really just the entire Ravenholm sequence.)

All the problems you have with the game are so general, i can't think of anything to tell you that might help you enjoy it more. You're basically saying "Yeah, i see all the cool things this game does, and none of it works for me." You don't seem to be missing anything, exactly. Are you bad at shooters? Do you feel like you're missing the gameplay fundamentals? Heh, I don't know. I mean, but whatever, so Half-Life doesn't really "work" for you. It sounds like you gave it a chance in earnest and it still didn't really click.

I refuse to get hyped until i see games and hardware, is kind of where i'm at with all this.

So on that bangai-o level editor, you can place a thousand enemies in a single map. That is a significant increase from the last game. (In Spirits, i believe it was like... fifty.) The 360 struggles soooo hard to keep up, it's amazing to see how many projectiles that game can render.

I think the first bullet hell game i played was probably Mars Matrix on the Dreamcast. Hah, and Psychic Force 2012, that is a game i had completely forgotten.

Guys, guys, but you're forgetting that Read more»

Acceleration of Suguri or Senko no Ronde? Senko is very, very awesome. It's kind of a simpler Virtual On, they both are, if you're familiar with that at all. (Speaking of which, I can't recommend the port on XBLA enough.)Anyways, Senko no Ronde, Ubisoft localized the first game world wide, unfortunately rebranded with the generic-ass "Wartech" moniker. The new name is just on the case though, they left the game itself almost completely intact. ... And of course it was ripped to shreds by the western critical community, so our chances of seeing Senko no Ronde Duo are nothing to nothing. Still, "War Tech" is commonly available though, in bargain bins everywhere. Very cool game, lots of fun, surely worth 10 bucks.

It's a new game, and it has more in common with the DS game than the Dreamcast/N64 game. I'm not very familiar with doujin scene stuff, but... Google tells me that is the immediate predecessor to Acceleration of Suguri, which is a game i am peripherally aware of. (A localized version of it came out on PSN a while ago, and looks an awful lot like G.Rev's Senko no Ronde.)

I was expecting a game where the core systems didn't hold up outside of the scoring gimmick, but i found that for the most part they do. I thought the game had an interesting and varied campaign with a lot of cool scenarios. I like the goofy setting and the fiction they concocted for it. I even liked the characters and felt there was a surprising amount of effort devoted to their story arcs. I'm also of the mind that over the top gore and infantile swearing can be pretty hilarious when handled right, so i'm kind of the audience for that game. I also think the visuals are wildly uneven and that the nuts and bolts of that scoring system wouldn't really hold up under scrutiny. I mean, so I don't think it's a great game, and i have no real intention of ever playing it again, but i thought it was a fun ride.

Oh god, some of these levels, this game was designed by assholes. Heheh. They do eventually give you a mercy-skip after you fail a stage a certain number of times, let you move on ahead. There's only one level that's really giving me trouble right now though. Probably the hardest Bangai-O game though, i think. There's a pretty fully featured map editor, which is no surprise. Looks like you can use custom maps in the co-op too, and also trade with friends? I don't know if it's some peer to peer thing, or if there's an upload space, i haven't really tried it out yet. Either way, it's probably not as awesome as being able to turn a level into an MP3. Not sure how functional the co-op netcode is, haven't tried it.

Game Set Watch i find more valuable for the editorial content, the bits of news they post are often very esoteric and random. Interesting stuff, to be sure, but i generally haven't really found it very useful for keeping up to date. Giant Bomb might actually become a very valuable resource though, that crew had stated their intent to step up the news coverage, and they're doing a pretty good job so far.

We're just talking up to date rumor mongering and news? Joystiq and Kotaku are the big ones, i guess. Just for the sheer breadth of content they post. RPS is where i go to stay up to speed on the PC scene. I've always liked Siliconera, i don't think they can really be beat if what you want is news on niche games out of Japan, heh. I unno. Most of the other sites i read are more for editorial content, or really specialized. Some of those main sources like Kotaku are such news aggregating monsters that a lot of the other blogs that try to compete in the news game can't really keep up, you have to start looking into really specialized blogs to find anything the big ones haven't touched on, and then it really just depends where your interests lie.

Bangai O: Missile Fury is up on Live, it seems pretty fantastic.

Yeah, i remember Opposing Force being pretty tough in spots. It had some great little scenarios though, the bit where you're crawling through the pitch-black sewers with all those giant aliens always stood out in memory. A lot of cool weapons tool, like the barnacle grappling hook, and the xen teleporter gun. (Did you notice that each "map" in Opposing Force had an alternate Xen area you could teleport yourself to? Sometimes they're just traps, but sometimes you'll find supplies.) Well, Opposing Force certainly wasn't the only well-produced FPS expansion pack from the time, i'm also particularly fond of Mysteries of the Sith, the Jedi Knight: DF2 add-on. I think the Gearbox add-ons bring some important perspective to the series, as they were for a very long time the last anybody had seen out of Half-Life. (Six years between HL1 and 2.) It's also fairly interesting from the perspective that two of the most influential independent developers in the west both did their first work on Half-Life. I mean, Opposing Force was Gearbox's first game, just as Half-Life was Valve's. Still... Going to be completely honest here, Blue Shift is kind of a bummer. As i remember, it tried to be a little more low-key and atmospheric, but it ends up feeling like an amateur level pack more than anything else. On that note, how weird is it that platforming is such a persistent element in those original games? Even then, it was pretty commonly accepted that first-person platforming was a horrible thing people shouldn't do.

Naah, i've tried canned air, it does nothing. I could probably try and rip the whole unit apart to clean it, but that'd void the warranty that i'm not taking advantage of anyways.

It's probably a pretty amazing time to get in on the PSP, it seems like a lot of places are trying to purge their stock, all kinds of stuff is just ridiculously, offensively cheap. A couple months back, i had grabbed a bunch of games for just nothing. (If you're at all interested in what they were, it was Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny, Dracula X Chronicles, Loco Roco 2, and the sequel to the tragically overlooked Pursuit Force.) Just yesterday i picked up another one too, i've always been interested in checking out the Ys games, and i found a copy of Ys: Oath in Felghana for very cheap. It is a frantic and awesome action RPG, and i would recommend it, except nobody has been releasing these games in Europe.

At least that's just a cosmetic defect. The triggers on my DS lite don't even work anymore, and my DSi was starting to bug out too. I mean, and i know people who have had the same problems with multiple DS's, and i've done my google searching and found that it's fairly known issue. Seems to just be wear and tear/dirt on the contacts/combination thereof, but it doesn't make sense. Why are the newer-model DS's so finicky like that? I've never had a problem like this with any other handheld or controller. My original DS still works flawlessly, and i sure put that thing through a hell of a lot more abuse than my DS lite or DSi ever saw. I guess i could take my own advice and see what Nintendo support has to say, but... I unno... I'm lazy. Heh. Such a pain in the ass though, i hope the 3DS is built better, but there's no real way to tell this early on.

I've got like... in the area of fifteen to twenty hours on Shadow Wars, and i have had no problems with the game. (Though i haven't been playing with wi-fi on, just in case. You know.) The total amount of time i've spent on my 3DS is probably up in around a hundred hours, and i've had a pretty flawless experience with the system. Aside from that, not every launch defect is the Red Ring of Death. Both the DS and the PSP had launch woes that were eventually forgotten with time. (And... really basically every system post rise-of-the-internet.) Whatever the problem is or was, it might have been a small enough issue that Nintendo was able to deal with it quietly and move on, replacing defective units as those afflicted called in for support. I guess... If you're really concerned, call up Nintendo support and see what they have to say. I unno. For these known launch issues, they'll probably replace your system without fuss. If you wait a long time until your system really fails, they might not. The second Edgeworth game? The DS game? I know there was some talk out of one of the branches of Capcom or something saying they weren't going to localize it, but later they tried to spin it as there being no plans to localize it currently. It really doesn't look good though, they'll probably skip over it to publish more 3DS games instead. (I'll be upset if it doesn't make it out of Japan, it'll be the only one i haven't played.) If you're talking about the Phoenix Wright vs Layton game for the 3DS, i have heard nothing regarding whether or not that game will be released outside of Japan, those recent stories weren't relevant to this game. (In fact, it probably bodes well for it, by not releasing the DS game, they might be skipping ahead to release the 3DS game as soon as possible.)