miffy495

Opposing Force is in the bag. Took about 7 hours, which is less than that review said, but also certainly more than a third of what Half Life took me. That was a lot of fun, although less well balanced than Half Life was. I felt like I died unfairly or was put up against over-hard challenges a bit too often, and the health was less well-spaced. I dunno. The whole thing was really good, and I can tell that for 1999 it would have been a revelation compared to just being a bunch of iffy missions in a pack like other games were getting, but you could really tell in the end that this was a Gearbox game, not a Valve one. Makes me wonder if the choice to include them in the replay was a wrong one, but the only non-Valve game I have left is Blue Shift. From what's been said, it will only take me 2 or 3 hours to beat anyway, so I'm going through it. I'm not sure if I said this earlier or not, and can't be arsed to check, but it really was different playing on the GLDSRC engine rather than Source. The platforming felt way better. I just wish that there hadn't been that fucking rope climbing stuff and any time I had to go down a ladder, I had a quicksave at the top and had to quickload about 50 times after taking fall damage before I could actually get down the damn thing. Thank god ladder-in-games tech has improved since 1999. On to Blue Shift now, which I have never before laid eyes on. This should be interesting.

Just finished Half Life Opposing Force for the first time since cheating my way through in ninth grade. Thoughts go in the Valve Re-play thread, same as with Half Life Source.

Need for Speed Hot Pursuit for $15 today! I bought it. We have a thread of thumb IDs for this, right? I'd like to populate my friends list.

My DSi's R button stopped working about a month after I got it. Turns out some pocket lint has gotten wedged in there. You may have tried it already, but after about 15 seconds with a can of compressed air, it was working fine and has continued to do so for the two years since. Maybe give it a shot if you haven't?

I know I need to stop getting my hopes up about wii games on this forum, but it's been out for over a week now and I was wondering if anyone else was playing it. I've put about 4 hours in now, and after adjusting to the controls, I'm really liking it a lot. The story so far isn't terrible, though the acting most certainly is. Samus herself sounds like a text-to-speech program, and your best buddy "I'm a black stereotype written by a Japanese man" McGee is mildly offensive at best, but the story isn't really why you come to a Metroid game anyway, is it? It gets the atmosphere really well. Not as good as the Prime games, but about on par with the feelings evoked by the GBA entries, Fusion and Zero Mission. The combat is actually really nice once you adapt yourself to the weird controls, though I do find myself wishing for an analogue stick more often than I'm sure Nintendo or Team Ninja hoped. While we're on the subject of Team Ninja, it's really fucking nice to play a game they made where I don't feel like a pervert for playing it. Samus is almost always in full armour, which is a huge relief after worrying about what they may do with the Zero Suit. For some reason, her armour disintegrates when you die, leaving you staring at a collapsed Zero Suit Samus with a "GAME OVER" written on your screen, but that's about it. All things considered, Smash Bros Brawl was more pervy than this, and that's a weird thing to realize. Aside from horrible voice acting, I'm liking this game WAY more than I thought I would. So yeah, anyone else playing? Any thoughts on things?

My thoughts on Other M are earlier in the thread. Long story short, I liked it a bunch but found specific things frustrating. The prime games are the prime games, so do it. Get the pack.

<--- bewildered.

I was in ninth grade and we took off homeroom period to cram into the school library and watch the news. In other news, as I posted in the life thread, Canada just finished electing a Conservative majority government and I am fucking disgusted with my country. Note to anyone who hears a statement from Stephen Harper over the next 4 years, 60% of the popular vote believes "Fuck that guy" so try not to hold it against us.

Fuck everything. It's a Conservative majority government for Canada. I can't fucking believe this. We're fucked. Harper can do whatever the fuck he wants for a while now, and this is a man who fucking idolized Bush. What the fuck is wrong with this country?

Is that that "slord" guy who's just been posting "neat!" in a bunch of threads? If so, and he's reading this, you sound like a bot. Please actually say something real or you will probably be banned. Junking up threads with useless things like that is not exactly going to endear you to the community. Just some friendly advice.

Yup, on to the Gearbox stuff. Played the first half hour of Opposing Force earlier tonight just because, and have to say that it feels really weird moving from the Source engine backwards to whatever the engine they originally used was. The movement is definitely less "skate-y" on the ledge-walking bits, but oh my god was trying to swing on a rope in the training course fucking insufferable. 1999 was not kind to physics. There's also a really weird thing where instead of popping "loading" up on the screen when transitioning between maps, the game does a weird "contacting server" thing and looks like it's going to bring me into a multiplayer lobby. Am I remembering incorrectly, or has that always been there? Nevertheless, the intro section still felt great and I'm looking forward to going through it for real. One thing that I did a lot in junior high that I don't do now is use cheat codes. Beating Half Life today wasn't the first time I've been through the game, but it was the first time I did it legitimately. Opposing Force will be the same way, and I've never even looked at Blue Shift before. In my defense, when I did all that cheating I was 13. I'm a better person now. Still, it's quite the experience to play through these games and actually beat them, rather than just complete them. Whoever it was who mentioned getting to the giant blue cyclops-y thing in HL1 and turning on a bunch of cheats, I think you may be missing out. That section didn't do anything for me either, back in the day. Getting through it this time around was terrifying, having to sneak past the damn thing and eventually lure it into the generator so I could throw the switch and fry the bastard. I was just killing time waiting for my girlfriend to get home, and read Gamespot's reviews of both Opposing Force and Blue Shift from back in the day. It's really weird to see the way that they were talking about game length back then, especially compared to now. Apparently Opposing Force is "nearly a third the length of Half Life at 10 hours" when Half Life itself took me less than 11. Blue Shift is called criminally short at "4 to 10 hours," which I believe is the range of nearly every non-RPG released in the past few years. Good ol' changing standards.

Bah, who's consensus are we talking about? As far as I know, Valve has never confirmed anything and we're allowed to read into it what we want, yes? Fuck the common opinion, our story is cooler.

Well, that's it for Half Life Source. All told, Xen took me less than an hour, and that was including forgetting how to beat Nihilanth aside from that it had something to do with his head. Y'know, I actually had no problem with Xen this time around. The jumping bits were way smaller than I remembered them being, to the point where they were largely inconsequential. With what I know about the Half Life story now, it was also pretty obvious from the way that they were acting that the Vortigaunt were enslaved and used as labour in the factory that seemed to be incubating those soldier things. In fact, given that the soldiers had the same chest-arms as the Vortigaunt, I can easily see what Gordon blows up on Xen being the same sort of thing as the Citadel on Earth, with Vortigaunt civilians being captured, put in those weird pod things, and turned into the soldiers. Nihilanth also had that little chest arm, which would suggest that he is the same species as well and possibly is to the Vortigaunt what Breen is to humanity. Maybe I'm reading too much into this and giving Valve too much credit for having their shit together all the way back in the first game, but in hindsight, and knowing what HL2 gave us, it all really does make way more sense than it did in the day. Anyway, that was all pretty cool. I'm especially impressed that the gameplay itself held up so well. I had remarkable amount of fun with it, and don't feel like I've lost any steam (heh) in wanting to continue through the whole series. Even almost 15 years later, Half Life is still a great, great game.

Yeah, I've had "serious" Trek fans berate me for liking Voyager, but I think it's just good fun dammit. It's a bit silly, and the first couple of seasons are really slow, but it finds its groove nicely. Personally, the one I didn't enjoy much was Deep Space 9, which I found to be plodding and preachy, with all the others sitting comfortably in my "not the best thing ever, but very fun" zone.

Half Life: Source is in the bag, part one of my Portal 2 inspired Valve replay. Next, Opposing Force, the Blue Shift, HL2, both Episodes, and both Portals. The whole Black Mesa/Aperture universe in one long run, just for kicks. Half Life Source completion time, for those interested in trying the same, was just over 10 hours. I'll be posting more detailed stuff in the "Valve re-play" thread that was created for this purpose.

Late May, unfortunately. I want it so bad.

How is Pokemon Black/White enhanced by DSi? Also, got my second hit yesterday. That person had 33 other hits, so Drath if you come to Calgary this weekend all is not lost. Hell, come see Rubber at the Plaza this afternoon or tomorrow evening and my 3DS will be asleep in my pocket ready for a streetpass.

That was really good. I loved the way that you actually managed to avoid talking about The Walking Dead most of the time, as I have never read the books and was more interested in just hearing you guys be funny. Pandemic is one of my favorite games, especially with the expansion that adds in the mutating purple virus. That thing will fuck up a game fast. If you haven't tried it, I highly recommend it. There is also an optional "Bio-terrorist" role for one player to antagonize everyone else with by releasing new strains in various cities. Trying to track down that player and keep them in custody while also stopping the outbreaks becomes a really intense game. Never played as the bio-terrorist myself, but have played 4 or 5 games where one was present and it totally changes the dynamic.

Yeah, I watched that hour-long HL2 E3 announcement demo (which is what I'm pretty sure you are talking about) so many freaking times in 10th grade. I was unbelievably hyped for HL2 all through 2003, and then they invented another year of development time. I stuck with them though, and just kept watching that video until HL2 came out. That hotel thing seemed like the pachinko bit from the same video though, more tech demo than gameplay. I was just impressed as hell that they kept that bit where you're fighting the airship on Highway 17 in the game. Man, I can't wait to get to that point again on my playthrough.

Fair enough about Stalker. I haven't played it for more than about an hour, so I was working on assumptions. I think Cryostasis may even be more in that tradition than Metro though, and the story is also one of those where you never know more than your character, despite how fucking crazy it goes by the end of the game. I ended up going to a few websites to try and see some player theories on exactly what happened, which I hadn't actually done since I wtf'ed after fighting Nihilanth. Play that game. I'm not positive that CoD owes a fair amount to Half Life. There are a bunch of games that had big setpieces and fantastical stuff going on before Half Life that were still level-based, and in fact had pretty much the same structure as Call of Duty. Hell, Goldeneye on N64 I can see as more of a direct influence than Half Life. That's not to say that the Infinity Ward crew wouldn't cite Half Life as an influence, but nothing that they've aped is what Half Life was revelatory for, just something that they did well that others were also doing. Half Life I take to be interesting because while the critical path is extremely linear, the levels do still sprawl and encourage exploration before you take it. What I associate with Valve games and would call something following that tradition is that journey that you mentioned. It's a long series of events that you are never removed from, you are the main character every step of the way. Also, a lot of what they do so well is foster a sense of urgency, often through fear but not always, that will keep you moving through this linear plot. Most of all, it's the context. Never being told what's going on explicitly, but being able to glean as much or as little as you want from the setting. Very few games have taken that approach to telling their stories, and that's what I wish more people had taken from Half Life these almost 15 years later.

Bummer. My only internet connection is wifi on my laptop at work, and I refuse to install itunes to anything other than my desktop on principle (I don't want to install safari or any other apple software, and they'll be constantly prompting me with that bullshit from the second I install itunes). I download all my podcast directly to my ipod through the same wifi connection. I guess I'll just listen to this on on my browser and hope for an itunes feed at a later date. EDIT: Also, for the record, Mario Sunshine kicks all kinds of ass.

Canada won't shut the fuck up about it (they're our royals too, after all!). A surprising amount of monarchists have shown up, given that we're not even on the same fucking continent as the royal family. There have even been front page news stories in my city about "this woman who works downtown looks a lot like Kate Middleton and her name is even Kate!" Seriously? What the fuck, everyone? We have a federal election on Monday, and this is the front page news? In closing, fuck the fucking royal wedding.

Not if you ramp off a stegosaurus. That shit will mess up your undercarriage.

True enough. Also, games like Call of Duty and such that people describe as following the lead of Half Life really aren't. They're still level-based, just very story-heavy and highly scripted level based games. Much like, say, Jedi Knight (as Sno alluded to). It's actually kind of weird when you think about it how relatively few games have actually followed Valve's lead in this regard, given how well-loved their games are. Oddly, most of the examples I can come up with are from Eastern Europe (the first three that came to mind were Cryostasis, STALKER, and Metro 2033). Maybe that's why I'm finding Half Life 1 so refreshing when playing it now? Probably not important, but interesting to think about.

Goddammit that leaflet you linked is infuriating. I'll be watching your referendum almost as closely as my own country's election, now that I know about it. Keep fighting the good fight, Nach.