The format of these posts is simple: let’s discuss a specific game or series!
Let’s discuss the Half-Life series. What is your favorite game in the series? What aspects do you like about it? What doesn’t work for you? Are there other games that gave you similar feelings? Feel free to share any thoughts that come up, or react to other peoples comments. Let’s get the conversation going!
If you have any recommendations for games or series for the next post(s), please feel free to DM me or add it in a comment here (no guarantees of course).
Previous entries: Earthbound / Mother, Mass Effect, Metroid, Journey, Resident Evil, Polybius, Tetris, Telltale Games, Kirby, LEGO Games, DOOM, Ori, Metal Gear, Slay the Spire
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HL2 is probably the game I’ve replayed the most. It’s just as amazing every time.
When I played it for the first time almost 20 years ago (gosh!) I expected all games would have this level of immersion onward. It was such a leap forward. Things I normally could expect from the real world applied to HL2 as well.
Oh, there’s roller mines hurtling towards me? Obviously I’m supposed to throw them down the cliff using my gravity gun. No explanation from the game about this. It just felt like I would do the same in the real world.
Is this immersion the future of gaming? I can’t wait to see what the future will bring!
Turns out 20 years later that HL2 was a one of a kind game. Other games might have better graphics and physics, but no game is HL2.
The graphics still impress me. It’s like the effects in Jurassic Park in that, while the overall tech has improved by leaps and bounds, the execution is so good that it still dazzles.
The original graphics, physics, and performance were incredible for the time, but to be fair, that’s not what you’re running when you download HL2 on steam today. The textures have been silently updated many times over the years. Your mind’s eye says “yeah, this is how I remember it”, and I’ve seen multiple streamers playing it for the first time thinking they’re seeing the original textures from 2004.
It does everything through clever game design, nothing takes you out of the game. No cut scenes or text popping up or freezing everything while dialogue is going on. You’re just in that world.
I adore this series. I especially have very fond memories of the original. I did not play it on release (I was still a toddler then), but I got it through the Valve Bundle on Steam and played it through at least 5 times. I’ve had multiple times in my life were I didn’t have access to a powerful computer, but similar to DOOM, Half-Life will run on about anything. I remember one of my playtroughs being on a horrible windows 8 tablet, and still it looked and played amazingly :).
Half-Life 2 then just perfected an already strong original. There is something just so satisfying about the environmental design and linearity of the levels. You just push through and know that you will find enough in your surroundings to make it. I find it strange that there haven’t been that many clones since (first person exploration action games). Most games either are to linear (COD) or completely open world or become a full-on immersive sim.
If you have any recommendations, please share them. Dishonored gave me similar vibes, but I miss the simplicity of Half-Life.
Black Mesa is an obvious recommendation, since it’s a modern take on the original Half-Life. Another game that I thought was similar to Half-Life in progression and physics emphasis was Prey (the 2007 Native American one)
I was a huge HL fan back in the day. I recently bought Black Mesa… and had it refunded pretty quickly. I played the demo… ten years ago? And enjoyed it then. But imo it just doesn’t hold up at all.
I really enjoyed black mesa, they added some new stuff to the zen areas if I remember right.
Too much new stuff. I think the fact that Xen existing was the difference between the free version and the paid version pushed them to pad Xen out way too far for fear that snappier pacing would feel like a ripoff.
Xen was really rushed and shorter than originally intended in HL1 though, and part of the idea with BM was to flesh it out properly. Might have gone a bit too far, but it was also one of the few places in the project where they could truly come up with something new and unique, and not just redo what Valve had made before them.
Hah, look at this n00b who didn’t even play HL as a toddler
/s
Maybe Dusk? It doesn’t have a puzzle element like half life but it’s got fun gunplay and movement and the art style is cool.
TLoU scratched a lot of the same itches, for me.
I know this is a controversial take, but I really intensely do not like Half Life.
I have issues with it from a narrative perspective. I have no idea who it is I’m fighting or why. It feels like an incredibly forced “oh, we need an excuse to throw some baddies at the player” premise.
But the main problem I had was mechanical. It’s just not a fun game to play. The gunplay was fine, but then it forces itself to throw a bunch of puzzle and platforming mechanics at you, and just…why? It’s so, so terrible at them. Running up to the edge and jumping will more often than not really in you falling because of a misalignment in perceived location and where the game’s engine says you are. Boxes, which you have to move around to solve the puzzling, fly around at a million miles per minute, making the fine control needed to successfully solve the puzzles very, very difficult. And ladders…don’t even get me started about ladders.
I couldn’t bring myself to finish the first Half Life, let alone start on the sequel.
The thing with pushing stuff and it moving really fast was actually a bug in the steam release. It finally got fixed last November for the 25th anniversary update.
I think you should give HL2 a chance. It can be enjoyed even without the first game. You have already played the first game a bit, so you know the deal (experiment gone wrong, aliens everywhere). HL2 takes place 20 years after the incident.
There’s fewer annoying platforming sections for instance. The puzzles also involves proper Havok physics, which is easier to manage.
The story is also a step up, with proper named characters. The baddies are also better developed and has a better reason to be the baddies.
Skill issue
When did you first play it and what other shooters had you played?
I’m not a big shooter player. I had played a fair bit of Battlefield 2 multiplayer, the CoD4 campaign multiple times, as well as games like Star Wars Battlefront 2 (the first game with that title…) and Mass Effect (I think at the time I had played only 1 and 2).
I actually thought I had played the Source version of it, but my Steam history says otherwise. I was playing the OG version, in 2014.
I think you have to take it within the context of when it came out. CoD4 and Mass Effect came out 9 years later. There wasn’t anything like HL in 98. Enemies that talked to each other and flanked you? Unseen before. Does it stand up to games now? We’ve learned so much since then. But I think you’d be hard pressed to find a modern shooter that didn’t trace its heritage back to HL.
Sure, and I am in no way suggesting that it was a bad game in its day (especially now that I know at least one of the issues I had with it was a bug introduced long after the fact). But I am suggesting that it doesn’t hold up nearly as well as some people like to insist it does. It’s the “Seinfeld is unfunny” trope, except that that relies on the idea that people today don’t find Seinfeld very funny; the difference is that I regularly see people saying that yes, Half Life is still an excellent game if you play it today.
And for what it’s worth, the game I have put the most hours into on Steam (and by 2x the 2nd place game—which is a more recent entry in the same franchise) was released just 10 months after the original Half Life. Granted, I’m playing on a 2019 remaster with upgraded graphics and some new QoL features, but it’s the same basic game, and had a vibrant community still playing on the 1999 version all the way up until the '19 remaster. It’s a game that I think really does hold up very well today, albeit in an entirely different genre.
Is it Age of Empires 2?
Thtat’s the one! (And my #2 is AoE4. AoM is #3, and AoE3 is #5. All these considering only Steam play time.)
Damn. I tried getting into it as a child but it was too difficult for me. The constant clicking and micromanaging gave me stress :P.
Watching the crazy speedruns of Half Life is mezmorizing.
This classic video of a segmented run is just stunning:
This is the current world record of an unsegmwnted run: https://youtu.be/nsr5qgpfaWI?
Very cool. What makes a run segmented or not?
Segments as in levels. So in segmented, you can try for example level 3 “Unforseen Conséquences” as many times as you like, and then pick your best time. In this way you can stitch together all your best times to make one segmented run.
Unsegmented I suppose just means a standard speed run: all in one session. If you get a bad time on level 12 you have to start all over at level 1.
If you get a bad time on level 3, you have plenty of chanses to recover on the next 9 levels.
Or, perhaps if you have a fantastic times on levels 3, 7 and 9 that earned time can be used to compensate on level 12, making the time possibly still good enough.
Gotcha. Thanks for the info
I like the whole series. Others are talking about 1 and 2, so I’ll add Half-Life Alyx. It’s a VR game, and at the time the PC VR scene was almost all indie games. I remember working out that if I wanted to carry more stuff I didn’t need to worry about only being allowed to hold two grenades, I could just pick up a bucket, fill it with grenades, and carry that around.
I also remember being able to pick up pens and draw on a whiteboard.
I’m not sure how it holds up these days, but at the time it was quite the experience.
How cheap is an adequate VR set these days? Probably still not cheap enough for this one game to justify the purchase, right?
I can’t imagine it being worth it for one game. The occulus quest headsets are probably the cheapest entry point, especially second hand, but you also get Facebook lock in, and they sell them at a loss so they can better show you ads and make more money. So I’d only go for the quest if you are desperate 😆. Objectively the Quest 3 may be a better headset than the Valve Index, but that’s because the Index is like 4 years old at this point. Many people still think the Index is better, but it depends what your priorities are.
A new Index is still like $999 all these years later. You might be able to get a used one cheaper, but probably not super cheap if it still works well.
VR arcades exist, so it might make sense to find one and play the game there if they have it! However, part of the appeal of Alyx is the use of the Index controllers (Knuckles) that have finger tracking fancy stuff. Arcades might be using the Vive Pro, so you’d have to check if they have Alyx and if they have an Index you can play it on.
I guess this also applies to getting a Quest. It will be fun but not the full experience, Alyx was designed for the Index.
To provide a counterpoint, I think it can definitely be worth it to throw together a cheap VR setup for this game.
I personally went through Half-life Alyx on my original Oculus Rift CV1 and it was still an amazing experience. I don’t know where you live, but in my market a good condition CV1 is selling for about 10,000 yen (so that’s equivalent to 65 USD, but your market will probably vary).
This is PC VR though, so you’ll probably want a PC with at least a 1080-class GPU. Once you have the headset though there’s a few games from the same era which had simlarly incredible experiences like Lone Echo.
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Back when internet cafes were popular; this game right here was the cool shooter game being played.
A cafe near me would host monthly tournaments and would pay 3 times the hourly cost to the top three with nuke button banned. We weren’t really skilled in the game compared to the pro players; but we had our own weapons we were good at. I was good with SMG grenades and electric gun but never managed to hit top three; but all the matches were good times anyways.
There was a really good player that used arrow keys to look around instead of a mouse, and was insanely good with the railgun. Would somehow always end up at either first or second place. Wonder what’s he up to nowadays.
I played hl2 a long time ago (at least 10 years). It was a really good game when I played it and I suspect it will stand the test of time for a long while still.
That said, its not Something I’m especially interested in revisiting personallyHalf-Life and Portal had a huge impact on my life. In high school I was in the source modding community, so I’m probably too familiar with valve’s engines and games. I made a few mods, the most well known being hl2 classic, and it kinda got me into game development.
But needless to say, it’s a fantastic series. I had a chance to play alyx and it was nuts. It’s crazy how influential this series and its technology is on gaming as a whole.
And a fun fact: quake had a feature where level designers could make a light flicker with a pattern of brightnesses. There were some premade patterns you could select as well. These made it into the goldsrc engine, then source, then source 2 - so Alyx, Quake, HL1, HL2, Portal, Portal 2, and more have lights that flicker in the exact same way.
Half-Life was my introduction to FPS gaming; I loved every game in the series that I had the pleasure to play - Half-Life, Opposing Force, Blue Shift and Half-Life 2 (Lost Coast, Episode One, Episode 2). I never got round to playing Alyx; I didn’t have hardware that would cope!
Half-Life also spawned the CounterStrike series; I sank way to many hours into them.
My favourite game remains the original; I enjoyed the narrative and the occasional puzzle. I purchased the upgraded graphics pack (which also fixed a few glitches) and prefer the original with this pack to the remastered version of the game (Half-Life: Source).
The soundtrack was fun too
I’ve only played the first few minutes of the first Half Life (I know, it’s on my list™). I had to turn off texture filtering immediately; the game looks terrible otherwise. Question: Why did games of this era (Morrowind also comes to mind) look this way, i.e. blurry?
Blurry looks more realistic than blocky, especially on the low-resolution CRT monitors old games were designed for.
Now that we’ve got better screens and games with better graphics, we see early 3D as a stylized aesthetic and a lack of texture filtering fits that aesthetic better but these games’ actual goal they were made with was realism.
I remember my friend’s brother secretly installed a graphics card on the family PC and we first noticed because when we started playing Half-Life one day it looked all smooth and "milky.
I think they did it because they could? Like more pixels = more hi def. But of course the textures weren’t actually high res, so everything is interpolated
It holds a very special place in my heart.
I remember playing Half Life at my Grandparents house, my grandfather or Dad stuck me on Half Life (they had a PC) and I loved it.
I was only able to get past the first few zombies (by fleeing) before having to give up from being too scared lol. While I had played other games / consoles, Half Life was the first game I played that blew my mind and gave me a “wow” factor.
I think other than the original I think Opposing Force is my favourite of the expansions.
Thanks for the post; I’m due for a replay 😁
edit: typo
Ravenholm was terrifying! The fast zombies’ roars along with them jumping across buildings really got to me.
That hl2 tech demo way back when. The graphics and physics engine update from old game to new (I mean really against anything current) was unreal! Holy shit I’ve ever been more pumped for a game in my life!
Found it - E3 from 2003 https://youtu.be/4ddJ1OKV63Q?si=GhIZZF1Xc4M8OZ6R
I have replayed Half Life 2 a few times. Some parts of the game feel really goofy now. There are many physics based puzzles in game. Like needing to weigh down a see saw like platform with cinder blocks to get across a gap. I think at the time these were really revolutionary, but they feel silly now. At the same time, I’m hard pressed to think of shooters that still include that type of puzzle (but I also don’t play many shooters nowadays).
My current favourite half-life is Abiotic Factor, to be honest.
