toblix

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I've noticed this trend too. There was a link on Slashdot recently to this article about how HL2 is not aging as well as HL1. I think this is total crap as I don't think that HL2 lacks characterisation or promotes epic scenery at the expense of more in-depth settings. The base in HL1 was impressive, but to me, HL2 has a much more cohesive story and is more believable.

I really started to lose interest in HL1 when Gordon got sent into space. And the giant baby creature at the end? Give me a break.

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Hmm, that article seems to be of the type that inadvertently tells you more about how the author has changed rather than his subject.

A lot of people didn't like the Xen levels (it's another dimension not outer space!) Me, I loved them. It was the most imaginative and out-there part of the game, and I have never seen anything like it in an FPS before or since. Sure the low-g platforming got annoying, but the concept and environmental design is still some of the most impressive to my mind. I was dissapointed that we didn't get even a short peak into Xen in HL2.

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I've noticed this trend too. There was a link on Slashdot recently to this article about how HL2 is not aging as well as HL1.

I thought about posting that article and bringing it into this discussion, as evidence supporting my "gaming autism" post. He goes on so much about the lack of characterisation and the lack of story in the game that I'm almost convinced he played it with his eyes shut.

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I thought about posting that article and bringing it into this discussion, as evidence supporting my "gaming autism" post. He goes on so much about the lack of characterisation and the lack of story in the game that I'm almost convinced he played it with his eyes shut.

What confuses me, other than that he tracks the state of games in an arbitrary percentage based on old review scores, is why he starts off by claiming to like it a lot, then goes off to bash some of the very basics of what actually made HL2 good. I'm actually not sure what is point is, or if he has one at all.

Also, he does some nice work throwing the utterly mediocre Quake 4 in there to bring out a negative association, when actually they have very little in common besides guns and viewing-perspective.

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A lot of people didn't like the Xen levels (it's another dimension not outer space!)

Either way, I thought it was a stretch.

What confuses me, other than that he tracks the state of games in an arbitrary percentage based on old review scores, is why he starts off by claiming to like it a lot, then goes off to bash some of the very basics of what actually made HL2 good. I'm actually not sure what is point is, or if he has one at all.

Yes! Thank you! I don't know what his point is either, yet this HL2-is-overrated trend is becoming so prevalent that the article gets linked by Slashdot. I just wanted to provide an example of one of the haters Marek was talking about in his original post.

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I think the thing was, he seemed to try and compare the games the same way he is obviously used to comparing video cards. He plucked some numbers out of thin air ("I give HL1 60%; I give HL2 80%"), then set about trying to explain where those numbers might have come from, as if they were the results of some objective testing like a graphics card benchmark or something. Seemed quite a bizarre way round of doing it, to me.

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His point isn't SO bad. Though I do disagree with him about HL2 specifically, his more general argument that the industry is starting to ignore smaller touches in favour of expansive and pretty graphics is relevant. I thought that HL2 did that far better than most, and he's holding it up as an example of a game that is particularly guilty of this omission. The specifics in his article kind of irk me, but I don't think his point is necessarily dead wrong.

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His point isn't SO bad. Though I do disagree with him about HL2 specifically, his more general argument that the industry is starting to ignore smaller touches in favour of expansive and pretty graphics is relevant. I thought that HL2 did that far better than most, and he's holding it up as an example of a game that is particularly guilty of this omission. The specifics in his article kind of irk me, but I don't think his point is necessarily dead wrong.

I don't really think he has a point anyway. There isn't detail in games these days? To what do we make a comparison to come to that conclusion? If you pick shit games released in the last few years and then compare them to a great game from yesteryear, say A Link to the Past, then of course they will look bad. What you have to do though, is compare them to an old worthless game instead. In my mind, I would think that the detail level is still better in the new bad game than in the old bad game.

No matter the quality of a new game, it is still built with a level of complexity that surpasses an old game most of the time, especially when you compare on a "quality basis".

Chosing HL2 as an example just breaks his argument in every possible way. It is, objectively, a good game and most would even say a great game. The detail is astounding, with individually placed props to be found in every part of the game and fantastic art direction abound.

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Although I suck at getting point, isn't (part of) his that imagined details are teh bettar than actual detail? That while the mountains and cliffs looked like shit in HL1, you imagined the huge landscape beyond and got a sense of the scale of the Black Mesa Complex (which is true), and in HL2 most of this detail was actually shown because it was technically possible, and then everyone is impressed and now it's worthless.

That was the impression I got, anyway. It gets me thinking. In HL there was this real feeling of travelling across a vast secret base that had some stuff on the surface but was mostly a huge underground complex, and the path you took through it was just the one that happened to be available to you (ie. that's where the vent shaft with the busted grating led). There was this deep, almost primal desire to get more of Black Mesa, to see more parking garages and laboratories and places where liquid with crates in it went through these large crushers and so on. In HL2 that exact feeling only got me in a few places: Black Mesa East and Nova Prospekt.

I think this is because Black Mesa, Black Mesa East and Nova Prospekt were complexes built by the characters in the game, and only a small portion of them was actually revealed. City 17 and the coast felt like real environments, and they're supposed to be bigger than you can ever experience fully. Can it be that my desire to experience all things and places in a game is never fully satisfied in Black Mesa because I'm used to being led through the entirety of a "level" or whatever, but in a city I'm used to just see the parts where I'm going and ignore the other stuff?

I just realised I don't know where I'm going with this, only that that specific "feeling" of having to see more is more present for me in HL than in HL2, I think.

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Of course, there's also the fact that Black Mesa in general was downright cool in basically every single way.

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I totally still hunger to see more of the HL2 coast. I want to take a plane and fly around it.

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I think that those rejects are more or less reactions to the crappy "99%!!!!"or " Game of the Century' headlines lots of paper mags and websites were displaying around the release date... after that, I don't know, doesn't glorifying a game lots of people are bashing stand also as an elitist reaction ?

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Ah, I see you've reached the point where the analysis starts going all circular and shit :)

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Attempting to lineate this circular argument...

The author claims that the suggested detail of HL1 is superior to the paraded detail of HL2, and yet isn't HL2 the more elliptic of the two? In HL1 , we know what is happening, why and how. In HL2, we are presented with a world into which we have awoken confused and horrified. We know nothing outside this city/state (in HL1 we can assume the outside world is oblivious and contemporaneously regular) of the world order, and inside it only what we gather from incidental detail. Surely that is the strength of HL2, hailed by critics as setting it apart from its contemporaries moreso than its graphics and other qualities?

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I think the scope of suggestion that the author was referring to wasn't "what is happening 100 miles from here", but rather "what might be happening just round the corner". Hence how he puts the HL1 Barney, and his "wow isn't this place big" comments, on a pedestal.

Within that context, I think the author's gut feeling was that the suggested detail HL2 provided was merely "go a few blocks down and you'll just find more civilians being brutalised". In Black Mesa/HL1, there was always the potential that you'd stumble across another clandestine test lab, harbouring another gauss cannon or other exciting secret. Contrasting the two, more anonymous people living or dying miserably might seem mundane, especially if you are the kind of guy used to fetishising sci-fi and electronics.

To boil the author's point down to its base minimum, he just preferred Black Mesa to City 17?

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To boil the author's point down to its base minimum, he just preferred Black Mesa to City 17?

I honestly think you're giving him too much credit. It's more along the lines of him failing to express valid thoughts on the gaming industry by giving terrible examples using two of the best FPS-games yet produced.

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I certainly agree with you that the author doesn't really have any valid points (at least not any that he presented any strength of argument for). But what he did achieve with his disjointed rambling was to create a decent Rorschach pattern, so I'm just finding it interesting to see and respond to what other people find in his article. :)

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But what he did achieve with his disjointed rambling was to create a decent Rorschach pattern

With a description such as that, I find it hard to disagree. :tup:

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