Roderick

Half-Life 2

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I just wanted to say I bought Orange Box for the 360 and yesterday night I start playing Half-Life 2 for the first time. I didn't know what I had to expect, except the praise it had received over the years. And I have to say I quite enjoyed myself! I'm in about three or four hours, I just finished the vehicle segment.

I particularly like the atmosphere. It's so weird that all this alien scientist Black Mesa stuff is happening in a totally ordinary suburban setting, at broad daylight. It makes it unreal and creepy, and pretty unique. The first hour of the game was particularly well structured. I had to run from the Combine agents and despite my having no knowledge of the map or where to go, I seemingly always took the correct route when jumping across trains or crashing into people's living rooms. The game probably set up a dozen little subconscious hints at where to go, but never became explicit, so I felt really smart and the experience was seamless and exhilirating.

And hell, even the vehicle race across sewers and canals was fun, because they deftly kept it not too difficult and pretty linear. Even so, there were two parts where I became extremely frustrated, which happens ever so swiftly when you're operating a pregnant tank. At one point I got stuck between two logs, and the second time I couldn't find my way fast enough and it turned out I needed to find an obscure hole in a container and blow the lid off. The helicopter face-off was cool, but not really epic. For some reason it didn't work very well; I never felt like I was really doing anything but randomly shooting in the air hoping the automatic targeting reticule would lock onto the enemy. It just goes to show, even with a vehicle segment as polished as this, you'd better be damned careful what you do and give players enormous amounts of slack and benefit-of-doubt.

I quit for the evening at the Black Mesa lair of operations. Now I'm in front of some uber-spooky abandoned tunnel which was excellently set up with exactly two lines of dialogue; nothing more needed. I'm scared.

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If you hear a rattling noise mixed with hissing, FUCKING RUN! I hate the poison headcrabs. Hate them SO MUCH. Creepy little bastards scare the living hell out of me every time, even when I know they're there. I very rarely get legitimately scared by games/movies/what-have you, but those things get me on some basic level that just repels me from the screen.

...so yeah, have fun with them. Glad you're enjoying yourself. You have a few more vehicle segments to go, so I hope you don't hate them too much. "Highway 17" is actually a really well done chapter, despite your spending much of it in a car.

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What about

the fat men covered in infinite poison headcrabs?

Jeezus fucking wept. I hated them unless I had a bunch of explosives handy.

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Half-Life 2 is all sorts of awesome. If I didn't never play games again, I'd play this one again right now.

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I'm about halfway now after another run and it's still awesome. I got through Ravenholm (damn scary at times!), then the mines, and my god was it a relief to see light at the end of the tunnel and suddenly find myself in a suburban setting again. I love the schizo oscillation between this lazy afternoon sun citylife atmosphere and the insanely claustrophobic alien/zombie horror areas.

Then came the drive over the antlion beaches and I really got that Half-Life vibe again when I had to scale an enormous bridge, negotiating my way across perilous girders. For some reason, exactly that is what Half-Life is to me. Finding an obscurely placed path leading to the underbelly of some massive bridge and you constantly have the feeling of straying off the path and doing something you're not supposed to be doing and it's absolutely gorgeous.

I did get stuck again with my buggy though :shifty: But thankfully you can blast it free now with the gravity gun.

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Finished it today, in exactly four parts of roughly 4 hours each. I thought it was great. The ending was weird but sweet, very to the point and no overblown melodrama. Very much in line with the game. There were some things that could need clarification.

On the whole I was always confused while going through the game. I know HL2 is hardly the game for huge plot exposition through talking characters or -god forbid- cinematics, but it did leave me puzzled about what was going on. Never having finished HL1 I was only roughly aware of what happened at the end with the G-man, but even so I couldn't quite extrapolate what had happened to the world. Why is City 17 important? Why are the Vortigaunts suddenly allies? Were the Combine introduced in the first game already? All things that weren't very hard to fill in myself, but they did remain somewhat obscure.

I also love how the easy mode is exactly that -very easy. There were a few nice slightly challenging things, but on the overall I never had to worry about dying, so I had all the room to play leisurely and pay attention to the details and the atmosphere. Ha, even se the game freaked me out a couple of times. Very nice! Looking forward to playing Episode 1. Hopefully the G-man won't remain such an utter mystery forever!

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For me, 'Episode Two' is the pinnacle of the Half-Life 2 universe. It addresses some of your criticisms with much more character & plot exposition, greater direction, cinematic gravitas and dollops of emotional attachment elevating what's essentially a linear shoot-em-up into something else entirely.

'Episode One' on the other hand is just a slight improvement on HL2 - which I personally wasn't a great fan of, thinking it a bit too trite and especially lacking in terms of combat (what happened to the enemy intelligence or for that matter the variety). Of course it wasn't a bad game, but I can see with Episode Two what the were originally gunning for in terms of approach.

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On the whole I was always confused while going through the game. I know HL2 is hardly the game for huge plot exposition through talking characters or -god forbid- cinematics, but it did leave me puzzled about what was going on. Never having finished HL1 I was only roughly aware of what happened at the end with the G-man, but even so I couldn't quite extrapolate what had happened to the world. Why is City 17 important? Why are the Vortigaunts suddenly allies? Were the Combine introduced in the first game already? All things that weren't very hard to fill in myself, but they did remain somewhat obscure.

This fan-collated timeline is pretty cool, although it does go into Eps 1 and 2, so you'll only want to read up to 1.6.

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Yeah, the timeline is good and a must-read if you didn't quite get the details — but definitely don't go too far, as the plot continued in Episode One and Two is great.

One of my favourite details is the fact that the oceans are being drained, which is something I didn't notice at all when I first played it through but was all "Oooh!" afterwards. :tup:

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For me, 'Episode Two' is the pinnacle of the Half-Life 2 universe. It addresses some of your criticisms with much more character & plot exposition, greater direction, cinematic gravitas and dollops of emotional attachment elevating what's essentially a linear shoot-em-up into something else entirely.

'Episode One' on the other hand is just a slight improvement on HL2 - which I personally wasn't a great fan of, thinking it a bit too trite and especially lacking in terms of combat (what happened to the enemy intelligence or for that matter the variety). Of course it wasn't a bad game, but I can see with Episode Two what the were originally gunning for in terms of approach.

Nooooo! I agree that Episode Two was as good as Half Life has ever been, but Episode One was such a disappointment. The only marginal improvement over the original was in how you interacted with Alex, but the pacing, the level-design, everything felt so condensed after playing the original. This might have to do with the way different people play through games. I often take the scenic route because I've found that Valve usually pays attention to making it's worlds beautiful and immersive. However, Episode One felt so rushed. It had none of the heart-stopper moments of HL2 (like the

bridge sequence

or the

segment where you had to cross the sand without waking up the antlions

or the whole game for that matter. Episode One was just a rehash of the most generic parts of the original crammed into a 5-hour experience. Very :tmeh:

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You could be right, I honestly can't remember a damn thing about episode one aside from the train ride - I just have a vague recollection of feeling it was only a fraction better than HL2.

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