[Anonymous]

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

what exactly do you mean by "derivative of internet memetics"?

[Broco]

I think it means that he's blaming the fact that fans liked to overrepeat the game's funniest lines on the game itself. Chauncey, you must really hate things like The Simpsons and Monty Python, then.

And that makes another person saying Valve's art direction is boring. I'd rather say that the art in Portal and HL2 is nuanced, tasteful, and quietly beautiful.

[Dracko]

What's wrong with hating The Simpsons or Monty Python?
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[idle]

[Anonymous]

[idle]

[HarveyQ]

it's not as though there's anything wrong with writing "quotable" humor anyway. i mean when you create anything humorous (or otherwise) you want it to be memorable.
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ghosts appear and fade away

[Dracko]

Random humour is not tongue-in-cheek.
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[idle]

Portal's humor seemed fairly consistent to me.

[Anonymous]

[geinou]

Oh man, Portal. After the whole "kill yourself"-thing I got bored like a whore having no customers for a whole evening (see, she isn't getting any money, which isn't good for her, because she needs this money! This is crucial!) Seriously: Was this part necessary? It felt like three more hours, yet it was only one, I think. I wanted to end the game very fast. But it didn't. It went on and on and on, and finally I saw the credits. It's good game though. But I didn't like the last part (after the "kill yourself"-thing) at all. Yeah. :(

[Dracko]

[notbov]

the whole "cake is a lie" bullshit was just a one off thing that people just happened to have jumped on and used endlessly. even if it was going for meme status, at least it still has context within the story of the game (not being the first test subject, glados being batshit crazy)

now, if you want to talk valve doing forced memes, we can talk about how francis hates everything, how ellis's buddy keith does wacky things and large chunks of tf2

[Lasakon]

Having a Johnathan Coulton song in the game is blatant nerd pandering.

[Winona Ghost Ryder]

[Dracko]

I don't get Psychonauts either.
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[parker]

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

[boojiboy7]

Just to be clear, of course I don't blame Portal itself for the annoying habits of nerds. That is stupid, though one could point out by making the"cake" such a central point of the game (I have no idea how many times Gladdos offers it to you, but it's a pretty large number), and then turning it into a joke, the writers probably knew what they were doing. But that is fine. It was amusing enough when I played the game, and it just gave me another thing to ignore on the internet for a few months.

No, my previous comment on Portal 2 was mostly just the hope that they don't bring the popular jokes of Portal back for the sequel. I will be entirely happy if there is no mention of cake or companion cubes for all of 2, though I am betting the cube at least will probably show up, which will make me rather sad. Would love to be proven wrong, though.

[Winona Ghost Ryder]

I remember in the Game Informer interview, the writers said that they would avoid all the big jokes from the original. My guess is that the "humor" in Portal 2 will heavily focus on the Personality Cores, as they have partitioned areas of the lab for themselves.

[boojiboy7]

That would make me happy, at least in terms of the story. No one has been able to fix my general unease with the Source Engine itself, but I have largely been able to just ignore it (or at least just take it as a given and move on).

[chevluh]

Well, at least in that article most of the quoted humor came from GladOS' barely concealed bitterness regarding the player killing her in the previous game, and the silly names given to various Aperture devices.

[Booter]

people, people.

the physics in HL2 were REVOLUTIONARY when it was released in 2004. i am an incredibly skeptical gamer and was literally in awe of being able to manipulate objects in the game as in real life.

[bloody heartland]

[CubaLibre]

Didn't play Psi-Ops, but I thought the physics puzzles were awesome in HL2. They're maligned now as boring or obvious or silly but I thought they were great. There's a simple kinetic joy in manipulating objects and watching them interact. I still remember that one where you have to use the floating barrels in the underwater cage to lift the hovercraft ramp to the surface fondly.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[boojiboy7]

Whereas I saw that as a boring box puzzle in 3d, and was more annoyed by the lack of precision afforded by doing a box puzzle in that way.

[bloody heartland]

Yes, that was very banal and not a great use of physics.

[Dracko]

Remember this?



Why didn't we get this?
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[CubaLibre]

We did. That's like, all the same strider behavior from the released game.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Dracko]

I meant the physics.
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[HarveyQ]

the physics puzzles were annoying to me because they screamed PHYSICS PUZZLE every time i had to do one, and it became an annoying diversion when i just wanted to go fuck up some more combine.

the gravity gun was cool enough as a physics toy (and enough of a show-off, too). i didn't need to do boring crap like pile cinderblocks on a see-saw so i could climb a ledge that gordon "the invisible man" freeman couldn't just hoist himself onto with his power suit.
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ghosts appear and fade away

[CubaLibre]

[DJ]

[bloody heartland]

Valve talked a lot about emergent gameplay in the run up to release, as I recall, but the game itself is just a linear slog. It's the design that's missing. I fucking hate the level design in Half Life 2 at any time that isn't Ravenholm.

[DJ]

I really like it (there's honestly a lot of "hidden" detail in Half-Life 2 that's very easy to miss) BUT, yeah, a lot of the stuff Valve said was coming, didn't. If you poke through some of the leaked early levels, it was still linear but there were usually several ways you could go about navigating the space. Sort of like in Half-Life 1 when you have to get the rocket up and running to kill the giant tentacle monster, and that area acts as a hub to other places you can tackle in any order.

You can kinda see why they ditched that approach if you look at how incredibly fucked-up the development of that game was. A ton of stuff wound up getting radically altered, and a lot of the designs for the worldbuilding were a lot more ambitious. What you have now is that kind of stripped down.

Hell, the inside of the citadel used to look like this, the citadel itself like this.
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[Ronnoc]

[oh my god immaculate]

[oh my god immaculate]

so cod4:mw2:cod6 = awesome because it's a totally awesome on rails shooter (that only vaguely pretends to be anything else) but hl2 = awful because it's just a restrictively linear slog (that only vaguely pretends to be anything else)

gotcha

[CubaLibre]

But in MW2 the shooting is good autokrator. In HL2 the shooting is bad.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[oh my god immaculate]

they're both mediocre on that front as far as I can see but there's obviously no room for petty opinion in this wonder of a thread