Gamers- does half life 2 get good?

Portal is a work of genius.

“When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your Damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!”

Can’t say I see a decently-made linear (or semi-linear) game is necessarily a bad thing.

+1, although I’m not sure you could get as many hours of gameplay out of a linear story as an open world.

If you really like Portal then check out The Talo Principle. It’s a FPS puzzle game with a cool, interesting, story. I really enjoyed playing it and will likely play through it again soon.

Can’t say I see a decently-made linear (or semi-linear) game is necessarily a bad thing.

Certainly did The Last of Us no harm.

Cave Johnson in Portal 2 is one of the greatest ever game voiceovers. Portal 2 in general is just a fabulously funny game.

Oh, in case you got covered in that repulsion gel, here’s some advice the lab boys gave me: DO NOT get covered in the repulsion gel.
We haven’t entirely nailed down what element it is yet, but I’ll tell you this: it’s a lively one, and it does NOT like the human skeleton

Cave Johnson in Portal 2 is one of the greatest ever game voiceovers

+1. Hilarious.

That’s a bold claim in a series that gave us GlaDOS and Wheatley.

martinhutch – Member
Can’t say I see a decently-made linear (or semi-linear) game is necessarily a bad thing.

It’s not, it’s just that they’re made differently now. While there’ve always been experiments in non-linear story telling (Colony Wars, Erasmotron, Deus Ex), big budget games tend toward linear stories because otherwise, making all that extra stuff gets really expensive, and most players don’t replay enough to see a fraction of it. Doing the kind of simulation that could improvise stories is a really hard problem that we haven’t solved yet.

Half Life 2 had the same mute protagonist as many games that went before, but put a lot of resources into building systems from scratch to simulate body language for non-player characters. Instead of cinematic cutscenes, the player was free to move around, and the NPCs would do certain things automatically like maintain eye contact, body position in relation to the player camera, etc.

Some techniques got copied by other studios, some didn’t, everything moved on. Cinematic cutscenes have survived much better than Valves approach at the time. Along with voice acting, studios and writers seem to prefer that for telling more emotive stories, with a bit more complexity than just casting the player as saviour. The Last Of Us is a good example.

Valve could make HL3 feel like a modern game, or they could make it feel like a Half Life Game, but doing both at once is probably a really difficult design problem. And maybe boring! Unless they start talking a lot about it themselves though, we’ll never know for sure.

They did do something with HL2 I wish more studios would copy, or could afford to: They hired an architect named Viktor Antonov to design City 17. With him, the developers wrote stories about each location, sometimes down to individual rooms, about what had happened there a few days ago, a few months ago, a few years ago and so on. Instead of dumping all that text in diaries or such for the player, they just used that as source material for design and built in all the physical details those stories implied.

(You might recognize a similar visual style from Dishonored, because Arkane Studios hired him too).

If we’re going for Cave Johnson quotes…

Those of you who volunteered to be injected with praying mantis DNA, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Bad news is we’re postponing those tests indefinitely. Good news is we’ve got a much better test for you: fighting an army of mantis men. Pick up a rifle and follow the yellow line. You’ll know when the test starts.

Oh, and if it makes you feel better, I loathed the Ravenholme bit of Half Life 2. Loved the rest of the game though.

I enjoyed Half-Life and played it through, but I gave up on Half-Life 2 after a relatively short time. I can’t remember why.

I gave up on Half-Life 2 after a relatively short time. I can’t remember why.

I’ve a vague memory that I got frustrated with it very quickly because it was from the era where you can’t walk somewhere that it looks like you should be able to because there’s a blade of grass in the way. It’s entirely possible that I could be confusing it with something else though.

My wife today started talking about the fact that No Man’s Sky is out on PS4. She may end up buying one before I do.. and then I fear I will lose her somewhere in the universe…

It’s been out for about 6 months and because it flopped you can now get it for £5. The updates have improved it but it was too much too late.

I thought that no mans sky look terrible tbh. nice concept, but yer decades away from a decent implementation of it.

Procedural generation almost inevitably gets bland and repetitive.

Nethack’s on the phone…

TBH, I’ve never got on with procedurally generated games (that’s the second time I’ve this on here today). It can work (Elite was PG), but a little voice in my head just thinks “design some levels you lazy bastards.”

Hah 🙂

I feel similarly, no matter how much variation or complexity you can put into the systems, it starts to feel flat and repetitive. That did take around 4000 plays for me with Spelunky…

The development required to make the systems things like Nethack and No Man’s Sky sit on isn’t exactly lightweight though.

About as relevant here as it can be anywhere: http://imgur.com/VKXhgCf

Here’s the original.

The bit with the turrets in Nova Prospekt is honestly the bit that puts me off playing through again. Much like the forest fight in Ep.2 it’s a horrible grind that has to done just right or it wont work Don’t even get me started on the achievements!

That said, I do love HL2. Black Mesa was awesome as well though I didn’t think their Questionable Ethics were questionable enough.

Off the back of this thread (and finally remembering that Steam now works on Linux) I’ve been playing HL2 a bit over the last week or so.

Never played it back in the day, but it holds up well for its age IMO. It is obviously totally on rails, but is good fun so far (still in the canals for now) and the graphics and gameplay have impressed me given the game’s vintage. It was mentioned earlier, but loving the lack of cut scenes and the obvious work that went into trying to make ‘story advancing’ characters react to your movements etc.

Try Mirror’s Edge for a slick arcade style change of pace not viewpoint.

I decided to stick with it. The coast road very nearly broke me (though it had some nice world design stuff, the buggy sections were just terrible, actually worse than the bloody airboat. The antlions were kind of cool though (nice to finally get a new enemy, after killing 1 million combine troops). Enjoyed Nova Prospekt and Anticitizen One, especially the defence sequences (though it’s also really driven home the repetitiveness and basic crapness of the shooting, and how bad all the script is. Also,I may have killed hundreds of my own antlions). It briefly remembered about the gravity gun and threw in some really tacked-on puzzles, and it also turned up the hateful platforming, but at this point I’m getting used to this bullshit.

I’ve achieved a sort of grudging respect for the railey-ness of it all though. Like, you don’t need to think about what gun to use- the level will provide more of whatever the best ammo for a situation is, so there’ll be a box of shells right at the start of a tunnel section, or a load of grenades near turrets, that’s so stupid it’s almost genius.

It’s on track for a solid 3 out of 10. And it’s made me want to play Stalker again, which has some of the same feel, attached to a good game.

Get real 😉

http://atariage.com/forums/forum/60-8-bit-high-score-club/

Fancy a challenge 🙂

Ps Quake2, Dark Forces were great. The new procedural stuff…bit .meh..
Pss check out brutal doom… 🙂

I was 13 when I started playing HL2 (had it for Christmas) ….

Im 26 now, how are you just playing it now? 😆

My 14 year old is currently playing HL, only about 18 years behind me!

The bit with the turrets in Nova Prospekt is honestly the bit that puts me off playing through again. Much like the forest fight in Ep.2 it’s a horrible grind that has to done just right or it wont work

<cough> Transport the turrets using the gravity gun from the first bit into the second bit, and so on. You end up with about five or six turrets for the hard part. Also look for a balcony you can’t reach in the cell block bit. Stack some boxes, and sit up there while your turrets massacre away.

I thought it was crap, never bothered to finish it.

Yeah I carried a turret there first time round, was a great ammo saver. Just more a PITA keeping grenades away from everything tbh.

Finished! No it does not get good, to answer my own question.

Philistine.

Sentenced to 24h of Duke Nukem Forever.

It was very good at the time. 13 years ago. But FPS’s go out of date quite quickly. If I revisited it today I doubt I’d enjoy it, mainly because I don’t usually enjoy re-playing FPS shooters once I’ve been through them once.

Finished! No it does not get good, to answer my own question.

From what I remember, there were only a few levels which I didn’t like (the one with the Hover craft and the ones with the ant lions) but this was in 2004 and there was no better FPS at the time.

I’ve a vague memory that I got frustrated with it very quickly because it was from the era where you can’t walk somewhere that it looks like you should be able to because there’s a blade of grass in the way. It’s entirely possible that I could be confusing it with something else though.

HL2 didn’t have this. Obviously you were very restricted in where you could walk, but if you couldn’t go somewhere, there was always a large obvious structure in the way.

Even Half Life 1 didn’t suffer from this if I remember correctly.

grannyjone – Member

there was no better FPS at the time.

I’d rather play Outlaws, AVSP, Medal of Honour, Quake Arena, Battlefield 1942…

(HL doesn’t have invisible walls but it does have painted on doors and cities that are made out of one corridor. How was your commute honey? Well I walked past 50 painted-on doors, ran up and down some identical stairwells, climbed on a roof for a bit, went down a tunnel, had to wait a while til an obvious scripted event blew a hole in a wall, backtracked a bit because there was an invisible forcefield…)

I loved half life 2, and recently replayed it along with EP1 and EP2, with the difficulty cranked up I still loved it. One of my all time favourites.

Back to playing CSGO again now though trying to keep up with the youngsters.

The thing I dislike the most about games like HL2 is when there is a puzzle and I get stuck for ages running Gordon Freeman round in circles not knowing what I’m supposed to do.

HL2 is not the worst for this at all but its bad enough. Batman 2: Arkham City is.