Half-Life Series

[Kanyhalos]

Well, HL2 is not one of favourite games, but I played it and good game, and I know that lot of ppl like it, so this thread can be a discussion of it.

http://orange.half-life2.com/

[nandersen]

One of my biggest favorites along with the original Half-Life.

The really great thing about these games is the modding support. You can find tons of SP maps and mods for the HL series.

[Balious]

about half-life 2. I have it on steam i brought it. Got to the water hazard level (one where you most of the time on a boat and at one point getting chased by a god damn helicopter) and when i get to a certain bit it just freezes automatically and doesnt load anymore (its one of those checkpoint places just after the helicopter part)

Can anyone help me try and fix this?

[EggChen]

Heavily scripted, boring and annoying. I cannot understand how it gets "best game ever" and all those sorts of awards.

Some specifics :

- You spend half the game in a boat or buggy that handle like warm shite. If I wanted that I'd have brought Micro Machines.
- You get a loading pause every 10 metres you walk (maybe slight exaggeration)
- The graphics were poor even for its time.
- NPC's are just infuriating ("Let me get out of your way Dr Freeman")... Just fookin move, don't tell me your going to!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- The weapons were poor, with the exception of the Shotgun.
- POSSIBLE SPOLIER - Ravenholme, which everyone goes on about was about as scary as trick or treaters are at Halloween.... and dull.
- POSSIBLE SPOILER - The whole end section where you only have the gravity gun is just dull, I wanted to play a first person shooter.

After completing it I re-registered the game to my Dad's PC and have never let it darken my desk ever again.

[ket]

Ditto on that. I absolutely positively cannot stand the HL series. The first game was trite and dull as hell with only random plodding about to keep you company, the same applies to HL2 and all of its add-ons. Poorest game series ever (and thats saying something coming from a person thats played The Matrix game).

[nandersen]

I found HL2 worth replaying a couple of times. Nice visual environments, the graphics are good and at the same time gentle with the hardware. This is probably the only DX9 game where you can max out every setting and still get 300 FPS.

The ability to interact with the environment that has some degree of physics/mechanics simulation is very refreshing compared to other shooters that I've played. There's a couple of nice "think rather than shoot" moments... and off course the humor: the scientific babble, Barney's comments and the over-protective fellow citizens are just great fun. A pity that you can't shoot friendly NPC though... that would teach them not to remind me to reload :P

Even though the gameplay is linear and heaviliy scripted I don't think that it matters that much. The game takes you through many different areas with lots of eye candy. Even the dead-ends are made visually attractive with plenty of detail. Ragdoll effects are really great in HL2.

Some of the weapons are really cool - the grenades are fun, the impaling crossbow bolts are great, the guided rockets are really cool and the white bouncing balls (let's call them ComBalls, shall we?) of energy that vaporize your enemies are just awesome. I don't know if the "bugbait" qualifies as a weapon but it is definitely entertaining.

[MeanderingBeing]

I really only played half-life for the shotgun and crossbow. They were deliciously gruesome. :P

[NatVac]

This is a review I emailed a few friends back in January, 2005. The synopsis of it can be had by reading EggChen's post above. While I enjoyed some of the gameplay (the same that nandersen mentioned), it literally took less time to play it than it took to "validate" over a 28.8K modem. I had the disks from the ATI offer, but it still required STEAM registration and access, and then I had to move it from my Internet box to my gaming PC, and then I had to attach a modem to my gaming PC when it demanded direct connection to STEAM. I came to really hate the early STEAM software during that period.

Here is the TMI skinny (part 1 of 2):

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I've now played Half-Life 2 on normal difficulty a couple of times, the second time through with a cheat that permitted me to use a particular weapon all the way through. Here's an _opinion_ on the game that's full of spoilers, so you might not want to scroll down if you haven't finished the game.








What's good about Half-Life 2? Great graphics engine, great modeling, great animations, mostly great physics, great professional voice acting. This is probably the best lip-syncing and facial expression animation we'll see for some time to come.

Even though this sequel to the "thinking man's FPS" really IS short, it's very full of pitched battles and obstacles which successfully give one the illusion of length. The game is a series of loosely-connected 3D action arcade mini-games punctuated by relatively quiet interludes which often contain micro-puzzles like those used to test chimpanzee intelligence.

The mini-games seem to start out the same way:

Good-guy grunt: "Hail, Dr. Freeman! You are awesomely [fast|good|smart]. We worship you; we will name our [frozen test-tube babies|pets] after you. Now [park your vehicle|curb your dog] before the baddies arrive and [go there|do this|follow me]. Today, Dr. Freeman, today!"

Our avatar-of-few-words -- no, make that NO words -- does what he is expected to do because he knows nothing will happen if he doesn't obey. Absolutely _nothing will happen_ if he doesn't get the turrets or park the buggy or talk with the good-guy honcho, save for the endless repeating of the orders. He meets up with [Alyx Vance|Barney Calhoun|the ranking officer], the good-guy honcho.

Good-guy honcho: "[Well met|Good to see you again|Glad you're still in one piece], Gordon! Uh, you can't get to the next [goal|good place] unless you can [eliminate the super-baddie-du-jour|go through a very bad place|defend the place until I {get there|power up the gizmo|hack the computer}|destroy all the {turrets|roadblocks|generators|force fields}|find the {silver|gold} key]. Here, you can do it with [this nifty vehicle-du-jour|this cool almost-uber-weapon with almost no ammo capacity]. Don't forget to [load up on ammo|get healthy|scratch yourself|find the bottomless ammo footlocker|figure out the trick or secret] if you want to succeed."

Repeat the above for a few levels, and then complicate matters by adding some fifth-column human help:

Good-guy grunt 1: "You're not leaving without me, Dr. Freeman!"
Good-guy grunt 2: "I'm with you, Dr. Freeman!"
Good-guy grunt 3: "I think I ate something bad."
Good-guy grunt 4: "Sometimes I dream about ... cheese. Here, have a medkit."
Vortigaunt n (they all look alike to me): "The Freeman must make hay." (or maybe that's "paste".)

The grunts say they're sorry when they get in your way, but they're not really sorry or they'd stop doing it.

One welcome change from the above was Father Grigori. Unfortunately the awful Ravenholm setting was required to make his character work so well. (I hope they paid the author of the Half-Life mod called "They Hunger"; this was pretty much a moldy rip-off.)

Only Judith Mossman and the G-Man come close to telling it like it really is: "Don't struggle. It's no use. Until you're where he wants you, there's nothing you can do." "Rather than offer you the illusion of free choice, I will take the liberty of choosing for you... if and when your time comes round again."

I never had the illusion of free choice. I didn't know where to go, but that was okay because there would only be one exit. How thoughtful of Valve to consider that the thinking man might have developed Alzheimers in the six years since the original game, so no real brains are needed to play this game.

By the time I reached the bad-guy inner sanctum, I had to render myself helpless twice to use the Iron Maiden transport system. Lara Croft has been able to climb for the last ten years, but our hero is helpless and has to depend on the fact that the bad guy is more abysmally stupid than he is.

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I miss Deus Ex. Right at the very beginning of the game, you start out with a pistol and a riot prod (stun gun), and your brother Paul Denton immediately offers you the choice of another weapon; either a sniper rifle, a dart-throwing crossbow with tranquilizer darts (can fire other types, too), or a rocket launcher ("GEP gun"). You can have a rocket launcher right at the beginning of the game! Of course, if you choose that, you'll find it inconvenient early on; blow up one guard and a dozen more come running -- and now you're out of ammo. So much for finesse.

No choice in Half-Life 2, though. After a lot of prologue, Barney presents you with a stupid crowbar, seeing how you made such good use of one in the original game. This is six years of progress? "Reset the player; we'll start from scratch."

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MaximumPC gave this game an 11, their first ever. They loved it for its consistent realism; Unlike MaxPC, I forgot to take the blue pill. I disliked the INconsistency and the lack of realism.

For example, the grav gun initially does not affect organic matter (Why? It has mass, just like inorganic! Oh. For game play...) -- except that you can push headcrabs away -- but not headcrab zombies. You can shove around some vehicles, but not others. You can pound or pull on some boards and locks, but not others. Maybe it's some life-detection safety mechanism in the grav gun, which gets broken in the Citadel. Yeah, that's the ticket, and I want to exchange it for a refund.

The same selectivity is true of other weapons. The once-awesome tau cannon is back, but it doesn't work in some situations where it should (my opinion, remember). And there's a fence or two that only the tau cannon can destroy even though they are already falling apart. Meanwhile, the .357 magnum revolver is better than a real pistol -- great distance accuracy and killing power -- but you can only carry two reloads. Let me get this straight: I can carry an RPG launcher and some rockets, but only 12 spare bullets? Cue Church Lady: "How conveeeeenient."

It's rock, paper, scissors for the weapons which have pretty much all been nerfed since the original. The only weapon you can simultaneously zoom and fire is the crossbow, and it's incredibly slow; no zoomed hitscan for you today.

"Oh, it's for game play," the fans claim. Fine. Let's see, where are those soundbites... Ah, here they are. "Make it stahhhp!" "It hurrrrts!" "Kill me now!"

In Deus Ex, the crossbow fires regular darts, tranquilizer darts, and flare darts. If you miss your target, you can actually retrieve the dart stuck to a wall or in the ground for reuse! And physics applies here; if the target is farther than the normal range for the crossbow you can aim/fire higher and watch the bolt drop over distance onto the target.

In Deus Ex, you can injure or kill the enemy according to where you shoot them. Wound them in their gun arm and they drop their weapon and run off. Shoot them once in the head with a stealth pistol or sniper rifle or regular pistol and they die. You can even track wounded enemy by their blood trail, and they'll open locked doors to get away from you. If you don't hit them in the head with the tranquilizer dart before they see you, they might have enough time to set off the alarm before they fall unconscious.

In HL2, to kill baddies you have to repeatedly shoot them with every weapon except the .357 (possible one-shot) and the blue grav gun and occasionally the RPG (against soldiers and the like). There's no visual evidence telling you how close you are to taking down a strider, and it takes a lot of rockets.

You can use a silent take-down in Deus Ex, either rendering the opponent unconscious by tranquilizer dart, or sneaking up behind them and using a riot prod to stun them or just bopping them on the head with a baton. Or kill them with a crowbar; that thing does REAL damage. Then -- get this -- you can loot the body for weapons, ammo, info and stuff like keys, cash or drugs, after which you can pick up the body to hide it. Why? Well, if an enemy guard comes upon a disabled ally, they'll set off the alarm and start looking for you!

I really miss Deus Ex.

You could save health and charge in your Deus Ex inventory, as well as weapons, although you were limited on capacity. You could have more than one kind of rocket launcher or weapons that you've enhanced with scope, silencer and/or increased ammo capacity, reload speed and rate of fire. You could improve your weapon-handling skill so that the sniper rifle stays rock steady to nail a target 3000 feet away. (Or start that way with a cheat.) In Half-Life 2, you can't even load the buggy with stuff because it falls right through. (Yeah, that's realistic.) And when you kill things, they instantly become intangible ghosts -- but ammo boxes can keep you from ducking enough to get into a vent at floor level.

There's just much more realism in Deus Ex, a game four or five years older than HL2. You can open the doors on cabinets and the drawers on chests and desks. Some are locked, and you need the key or a lockpick or the lock combination, just as with some of the regular doors - or maybe an explosive or even just the crowbar. That's very realistic. In Half-Life 2, the same busted green storage cabinet is everywhere, and you can't open it. Nor can you open the drawers on desks.

[continued]

[NatVac]

This is part 2 of 2 of my HL2 review, with SPOILERS and OPINIONS. You should not read it if either of those will bother you.



Here is the conclusion of the TMI skinny:

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For more HL2 inconsistency, take the crappy underground railroad. Or rather, don't take it. The simple linear pathway is blocked for normal people; there's no way this was ever used by someone else. In one spot, the Combine baddies will "corner" you in a giant storm drain and drop explosive barrels which happen to burst open a grate. Only then can you continue. It was a dead end up until then.

And what's with the ant lions coming out of the ground through the concrete -- on the fourth floor of the Nova Prospekt prison?

The game was so unrealistic in these and other ways so often that I had to abandon the idea of immersion/interactive fiction and just play it as a series of action arcade mini-games as mentioned above. Then it was reasonably fun, and I could tolerate that rural Ravenholm was connected to a big city by a mine, or that the Combine folks had to fight off their own headcrab and zombie allies.

Gone are the jumping puzzles from hell (aka Xen) where you could fall to your death. In their place are the "step lightly or you'll [wake the ant lions|activate the turrets]" puzzles which were admittedly less irritating, along with their relatives the "don't step in the [radioactive muck|electrified water]" puzzles. I did a lot of quick-saves in those places. As one player noted, you can't step on the sand but you can dump stuff on it with a lot of force. Eh.

The pathways on each level are generally mazes constructed from conveeeeeniently collapsed structures or wrecked vehicles or train cars. If you penciled your path on a three-quarters view of the level, it would look like one taken by the fat little kid on the comic strip called "The Family Circus".

The puzzles were better in Tron 2.0. Heck, there was more immersion AND gameplay there as well, accompanied by a more satisfying story. American McGee's Alice was more consistent than HL2, with much better continuity inside of Alice's insanity than this series of unrelated levels strung together with long "Loading" pauses.

Innovation? There's really nothing new in HL2. System Shock 2 had the psionics [guy]* with the ability to grab stuff from a distance like the grav gun. In Deus Ex, what you grab is rendered transparent, so you can see where you are going while you are carrying something, and you can lift really heavy objects with the strength augmentation. I didn't notice any advance in AI in HL2; we saw the same grenade-tossing AI in the original Half-Life.

The HL2 endgame was a joke, and probably the first one in a long time that I finished without needing to retry even once, let alone over and over. Some of you might recall Quake and the original Half-Life where you likely died a lot just figuring out the secret. "Have I mentioned Deus Ex? Deus Ex." There are THREE different endings possible in that game and all are believable.

I can envision the Amazon page: "People who enjoyed Half-Life 2 also enjoyed: 'Plan 9 From Outer Space' and pet rocks."

How small the difference between "SLICK" and "SUCK". [A friend] noted that there were interesting "emergent effects" from the open-ended gameplay in Deus Ex, like using deactivated proximity mines as "stepping stones" to scale building walls. The only "emergent effect" I noted with HL2 required a room deodorizer.

Half-Life 2 actually pushed Deus Ex higher on my chart; I'm now playing this old game again for maybe the sixth time (GOTY edition; doesn't need the CD/DVD**) and it still has new stuff to offer. I can already feel my IQ returning to its normal levels.

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*[I had a different word here: s p e c i a l i s t, but the forum makes that "cil" for some reason.]

**Deus Ex GOTY was published on a DVD that came free with an issue of Computer Gaming World magazine.

Each of the 75 (!) maps (plus three training maps) loads in less than five seconds. Compare that with HL2's coffee breaks. Deus Ex needs about a fifth the drive space needed by HL2 -- I'm not even counting the space used by CS:Source -- and yet the game can take five times as long to play. And then there's replay value; there are so many different ways to do something and so many different upgrade pathways that it is an unbelievable value.

[DARK TEMPLAR]

This isn't exactly the right place but what the hey, does anyone of you have half life opposing forces?

[jamie1992]

I got it somewhere yes.

[Balious]

I think this topic should be renamed to Half-Life Series or something instead of just 2. Make more sense instead of having multiple threads on the same game series.

For example instead of having a topic for metal gear solid 1 and 4 we could have a metal gear solid series thread

done.
busetibi

And no i don't have it . Anyone care to be friendly and give me all of the half-life series? I only have 1 on ps2 and 2 on pc. Im a poor person as you all may know when it comes to buying things for myself.

[nandersen]

Last I checked in my local game store I could get HL as cheap as 10$ - I have a CD exactly like that. What I did was downloading Steam and activating the product on Steam. I was surprised to see that this registered as not only HL but also Opposing Force and Blue Shift
Nice deal for under 10$ if you ask me...

By the way this is what my CD box looks like (except that it's in english): http://i.neoseeker.com/boxview.php?iid= ... type=front

[DARK TEMPLAR]

I got it somewhere yes.

Good then I've got a guestion, I'm stuck in a point where I have go trhough some teleporter or something to catch freeman but first I have to open a door, the problem is that the game crashes the moment I try to open it. Do you anything about that