Half-Life 2

[Sirian]

Though it has been six years, playing this game feels like I played the original just last month. All the good stuff is back. The gameplay works the same, though with a new engine and better effects. Weapons and enemies and especially the AI all upgraded in ways that left nothing important behind.

VALVe delivers again. If you liked the original, you'll love this one, too. They are going to make a fortune off this game. In fact, the game is so good, I'm not even going to complain about the draconian copy protection measures. Lacking spoilers, there are too many nasty things going on with the first pass to play hardcore, but I'm looking forward to trying that. That's where I had the most fun with the original: playing with no reloads.

Here's my first screenshot. This poor fellow was so forlorn, he bent over to kiss his ass goodbye.



"Hut one, hut two... Hike!" Playing center for the Indianapolis Colts?

Actually, he died like that. Whale of a head shot, for the body to collapse in such a way. First time I've seen anything like that. I don't normally aim for the head, mind you. Not on a moving target, at least. Better to hit the chest twice than miss the head on the first shot. So, um, I can't claim to be aiming at where I hit. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.

Love that shotgun. Although, of course, this being Half Life, one must be proficient with ALL of the weapons and figure out which ones are best for which tasks.

OK, enough blabbering. Back to the action.


- Sirian

[Bam-Bam]

Nice Shot, Sirian. Despite my earlier inclinations to hold of on the game--it looked too good to pass up now. So, I take the hour+ step to install the game, fire it up last night after the football game, and away I go.

Let's just say sleep was not on my mind. I did manage to grab a few hours before work today. I did not play the original, but this game is extremely addicting. I haven't gotten too far, and I am not a FPS veteran; however, the engine and gameplay are unlike anything I have seen. I think this will renew the laptop wars ™ in my household. It also may mean I should bank sleep to anticipate my wife's upcoming business trip.

I'll post any interesting screenies from the next session.

[Sirian]

I finished the game today. Whew, what a ride. The climactic chapters will not disappoint. The "wow" factor is off the charts intense. So was the original, though. And frankly, it plays the same. The graphics are older (original Quake engine), six years older, but if you enjoy this game and missed the original, go back for it. You won't regret doing so. PC Gamer mag rated it the best PC game of all time. All things considered, I would have to agree. Does HL2 raise the bar on that? Arguably, yes, but chiefly on the technical end. The story, atmosphere and gameplay are "more of the same". A sequal true to its roots: imagine that.

So I've pumped it up to hard to replay, and so far, I've been reloading only from autosaves. Dying more than I'd like, but three times I dropped into the red on health and pulled it out by the seat of my pants. Whew, what a ride. Plays faster when I know what to expect, and when the threats are increased, and when I am not pausing (at all) to save. Not sure about managing this hardcore, though. One pass? That was doable in the original. I made it to the "big cliff" scene (about two-thirds through the game) with zero deaths or reloads. Some of the situations in the sequel are more dangerous, though. Very easy to screw up. I may have to play kitty and give myself nine lives.

If you're playing on Easy, though, restart on Normal. Only go back to Easy if you become so frustrated on Normal that it cuts into your fun. That "helps you aim" thing is not a crutch you want to train yourself to rely on. The experience is a lot more intense without the "help".


- Sirian

[Sirian]

This screenshot marks a watershed moment for me:



I was moving quickly. I snuck up behind this enemy soldier and finished him in one blast. This is quite probably the single most impressive AI moment I have ever seen. It took me more than half the game to sneak up on any enemy this closely. I had picked off unwary foes before, but always from a distance. On this one, if I had had a knife, I could have used it.

What is so impressive about this? Well, for starters, most game AIs are hardcoded either with vulnerabilities or with deus ex machina. That is, either the AI is stupid or the AI is smart -because- the developers have taken a shortcut and infused it with heuristics (at best) or blatant cheats (at worst). Half Life 2 is no exception: most of the behavior is scripted, meaning that every situation is deliberately conceived and crafted. This one.... wasn't. This enemy was not scripted to play the sitting duck. I was looking at the AI here, not at the game scripting. And this was the most intricate, realistic gaming moment I may ever have had, to date, involving AI.


There was also one AI low moment. I don't want to give away spoilers here, but there was one very tough scenario that I cheesed my way around (in part) by finding a hole in the AI. I wasn't really looking for one, but there was a single situation that proved (for me) twice as hard as any other in the entire game, and by the eighth attempt to get past it, I was digging rather deeply into my bag of strategics.

I told Bam-Bam that HL2's forward strides are chiefly technical. Well, that would include the AI. The AI in the original was already good, but this one is really good. That screenshot above shows just how good, by revealing that the AI has no cheats. When not in a scripted moment, it works off of realistic factors, taking no shortcuts. I'm damned impressed.


OK, in other news... What follows may be considered a mild spoiler, so read down at your own risk.

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I was slow to catch on to where exactly the story was headed. I finally figured it out, though, at... well, never mind when I figured it out. It was later than I should have, but well before it was slapping me across the face with a dead trout.

They say a picture's worth a thousand words. That would make this run worth 5K.












- Sirian

[Sareln]

ooo.. purty...
too bad my comp can't run it like that, but even then the game is amazing.
Sirian, I think I spent like 2 more hours in Ravenholm then I had to 'cause I was messing around with the gravity gun.

[Sirian]

I used the gravgun a lot more on my second time through Ravenholm (on hard) than I did the first time around. Being more crunched for ammo, some lightbulbs went on in my head.

- Sirian

[Sirian]

I've been playing some HL2 Deathmatch this weekend. It's not Descent, but I like it a lot more than Quake. (I never got into Unreal. I didn't like the controls on the original, and they could not be changed. Fatal mistake as far as my puchasing dollar.)

There are some elements that are not as well balanced as I'd prefer, but overall, it has been good fun. Some maps are better than others, of course. Gives me the itch to try my own map, but no. No, I must resist that temptation. Must... resist...

Anyway, here are some of my best outings so far:









Cy, do you have HL2? I can't remember. If you do, we should get together and shake it up. Also willing to hook up with others. Planning to talk ME0003 into some of this activity.


- Sirian

[Cyrene]

Cy, do you have HL2? I can't remember. If you do, we should get together and shake it up. Also willing to hook up with others. Planning to talk ME0003 into some of this activity.


- Sirian

I finally broke down and got it this weekend.



First off, the whole Steam thing sucks donkey balls and blows chunks. This is the last game I’m buying from this group of clowns unless I get CLEAR information from the net that they have reformed their ways. It is intrusive, abusive, asinine, and inefficient. And insulting. REALLY insulting. Look, I play MMO games more than anything else these days. I am used to having to check in with the company server, have my files scanned, and get auto-updates before every play session. These asshats, however, have gone WAY beyond the pale. I pay the money, and what I get is STEAM. I can’t start Half Life2. No, I have to start STEAM. Then I ask it mother-may-I if I am allowed to play the damn game I paid $$$$ for? I didn’t buy STEAM. I bought Half-Life2. I don’t even have the skunk-sucking OPTION to play Half-Life2—all I can start is STEAM. May Viagra-enhanced, incontinent, gaseous, smelly llamas romance their shins!



I have only gotten about one fourth to one third of the way through the game. This only took me 3 hours, though, which is alarming. My only deaths so far, playing “normal” difficulty, were due to (1) not recognizing a slippery ramp as slippery (BAD programmers—I thought traps like this went out of style with TR 4, and (2) ill-advised interactions with exploding barrels (x4) 8-0.



The engine runs pretty well—I get good frame rates on an aging system that is behind the gaming curve ATM (2.8 Northwood @ 3.02, 1 gig ram, 9800 pro oc’d to to xt). I get the occasional sound skip, and a nasty tone whenever I die 8-0.



The visuals are a highpoint. A lot of imagination went into the detail. That is first rate. So far the sound field has been decent, with only a few positioning mistakes. It is a Miles implementation, which is solid but unspectacular. OTOH, Miles has less screwups than EAX, which is fantastic when it works and craptacular when it doesn’t…



The voice acting would have gotten 4 stars before I Played Doom3, which set the bar so high I never expect to see the like. So I give it a “good”.



Character control is poor. It is hard to tell exactly where I am standing, if I have made a jump or not or why not, and the response is sluggish. I routinely get stuck in doorways and the like, and have to either jump or duck to get past, even when there is no obvious barrier. UT2004 is the gold standard here (with Lineage2 which uses the same engine), but this is worse than the TR series and EQ2 (but about on par with Doom3 ).



I’ve only driven one vehicle so far, the air boat. I REALLY liked that, but, unfortunately, they hosed up the controls. After schooling me for a couple of hours that there was no free look in this game and that where you looked was where you went, they reversed the decision in the vehicle and now there is free look, and you only go where you steer. Thanks guys. I hope you get a flat on the way home. Wankers.





Overall so far I rate the game mediocre and not worth what I paid. It is better than Doom3, but I also quit that one about half-way through out of boredom. When it hits the $20 range, and IF they cut out the STEAM horse-hockey, I would recommend it. For perspective on my warped opinions, I rank it like this because: for a pure shooter, it is below UT2004 because of character control; for a mixed puzzle/shooter, below Tomb Raider 4 due to poorer character control, poorer puzzles, and more scripted; for a mixed adventure/shooter below Outcast for poorer character control, poorer MOB AI, poorer story line, poorer music implementation, and more scripted. Given trade-offs, that makes it a hair better than Doom3 and about even with Tomb Raider 4.



Sirian—I’ll try the bots out, but I don’t think I’ll be interested in death match unless I can adjust to the character controls and (lack of) responsiveness.





Oh and, ermmm—I’m glad you love this game, and I hope everyone else who paid $$$ for it loves it too…



--Cy

[Sirian]

Brutal.

Sorry about the Steam thing. I'm with you on that one, except not quite as annoyed. They're lucky they didn't come out with this one when I still had dialup. Of course, I also remember all the hoops that game makers made us jump through in the 80's and 90's to deal with copy protection. I'm sympathetic to the plight of the developers. If piracy weren't a serious problem, nobody would be going to such extremes to combat it.

By the way, I did try Unreal. The original, that is. The controls were, to borrow your turn of phrase, Craptastic, and they were not configurable. That was a sin for which they remain Unforgiven, as I have skipped that entire franchise since then. I can be just as brutal as you. I think that's why we get along so well.

If this one's not your bag, then we'll just have to wait for one we both like to get into an FPS game together.


- Sirian

[Cyrene]

Half-way(ish) update.

Steam still upsets me every time I start the game.



I have grown to enjoy the game more though, as I have gotten deeper in. I’m around half way I guess, driving around in the buggy, after about 8 hours play. That buggy handles like a wheeled turd, btw—reminds me of some of the PlanetSide vehicles (memo to self—check and see if they used the same physics engine [havoc]).

I warmed to them when I got a gun on the air-boat—now THAT was fun! The “Hooper” falling-brick-chimney-ripoff was an eye-roller, though. Actually, a lot of the time I feel like I am trapped in some alternate reality and stuck in some b-grade Val Kilmer spy/action movie.



The pistol range/accuracy HAS to be a bug, right? You can stand in the next county and pick Combines off with the pistol and they won’t return fire…



An extended interactive scene with Alyx AND getting the gravity gun all at once is certainly enough to smoothe over a lot of issues! Alyx is fun to erm, be around, but she is starting to remind me of a couple of abortive girlfriends—nice to look at, sweet as pie and flirtatious, yet, somehow, every time I see her she has something she wants me to do that turns out to be WAY more work than was described…



I actually laughed the first time I threw a 5 gallon paint can at a zombie and it dumped white paint all over him—what a nice touch. And I never would have wanted to visit Ravenholm BEFORE the “troubles”. I have seen some interesting décor in my time, but never a town singularly furnished with old washing machines, full paint buckets, explosive cylinders and barrels, rusted large block v8’s, cinder blocks, and enormous circular saw blades. Not that the saw blades aren’t FUN, mind you—just very odd. Especially given the rather singular lack of, you know, SAWS that they would belong to…



I have upped the game’s rating to about equal to TR IV at this point, and think I’ll make it to the end.



--Cy



ps—but man they need to work on the collision boxes around doorways…