[The Troops]

Half-Life 2 is a miracle of a game. It should probably be a pack-in with Windows. Like Solitaire. You get a new computer, and Half-Life 2 automatically comes on it. In effect, that's almost the case, considering how many ATI cards came with vouchers for it, and how many OEM software bundles it was part of. In all, over six million people have played Half-Life 2, and I can't imagine any of six BILLION not wholly enjoying it. Not since Super Mario Bros. has there been a game that is so welcoming, so sure of itself that it could be understood and respected by people who do not play videogames.

The word "videogame" has a certain stigma attached to it, of course, so that kind of stands in its way. Important industry individuals are conspiring to replace that word with something like "interactive entertainment experience," which is treating the symptom, not the disease. "Movie" and "play" aren't words that should be taken seriously, if you think about them. They earned that respect. If there's one game that's going to empower the word "videogame" and get us all walking in parades, it's this one.

As 2006 comes to a close, there is much talk of getting grandmas to swing tennis rackets and other such nonsense. A wave of paranoia is sweeping the industry, as though it has just been told that the royalty it has been intermarrying for generations is starting to get a little diseasey, mutating into hideous monstrosities with Tony Montana licenses. Fresh blood is needed, and so tiny little vampire bat-like games are released from the Xbox Live ArCave, flying down chimneys, sinking their teeth into your sister who was dumb enough to confuse that 360 controller on the coffee table for an iPod, and BAM, now she's One Of Us. That's the plan, anyway.

These games are bright and colorful, short, and about as involved as that "football" game the kids used to play at the lunch table in middle school where they'd fold a piece of paper into a rigid triangle, and "kick" it with their index finger through a classmate's Cheeto-powdered uprights. Those kids were just wasting time while their Sprites and Lunchables digested into a toxic glob, and these new videogames for "the casual market" serve the same purpose, really. Does a man waiting in a five-person line at the bank really need to distract himself with a rousing game of Bejeweled on his cell phone? Is this what's going to create a new generation of players? Three-minute gem-swapping sessions for ADHD sufferers?

In the eighties, the industry neared collapse (I'm told), and videogames, after having some buzz for a couple of years in the afterglow of Pac-Man, once again became uncool. It wasn't some short little arcade game that got people excited again. It was Super Mario Bros.

I would describe Super Mario Bros. as a miracle. It was the most advanced game ever made at the time, and on its shoulders rested the responsibility of gently teaching people who had never played a videogame, guiding their trembling virgin hands toward its girly bits, which throbbed warmly with interrogative punctuation. These were people whose thumbs had never caressed the red little buttons or D-pad on the NES controller. It executed this task so perfectly, much like the original Macintosh did for a people who had never seen a mouse before, that one can scarcely imagine the world that would exist had it not succeeded.

Consider how Super Mario Bros. begins. The player is facing right, and so he walks right. A Goomba is immediately seen walking in the opposite direction, suggesting he is the enemy. The player dies after making contact with him. On his second try, he uses the A button to jump, either over or onto the enemy. The next thing he sees are flashing Question Blocks surrounded by ordinary bricks. Using the jumping skill he must have learned to have proceeded, he bonks the blocks, which are arranged in a way that attracts his attention to the center one. A mushroom emerges. It first moves away from him, but hits a wall and changes its direction, teaching the player about enemy and item behavior. Now it is moving toward him in a way that makes it almost impossible for him to avoid. He sees the affects of his picking it up. He attempts to break a brick now and does so. After jumping over the first pipe, he becomes stuck between two of them. The rightmost one is taller, and cannot be jumped over normally. This is where he learns to run with the B button, using momentum to jump higher and clear the second pipe.

This is the tutorial to Super Mario Bros. That's not to say it ends there. The game introduces new concepts throughout, with the same consideration and understanding of player psychology. The first "cutscene" in the game, for example, shows the transition from above ground to underground. While this could be notable for showing the cohesiveness of the world, impressive then in the same way people went nuts over GTA3's loadtimeless city, it also introduces the player to the key concept of using pipes.

This sort of hand-holding has become known as the Miyamoto philosophy. In days when games had no text, it was transparently built into to the design of the game. Now that Miyamoto has become a legendary celebrity to be trotted out at E3, the concept is bloated and self-aware, and takes the form of a marine telling you that he's configuring the diagnostics of your cybernetic neck, and would you please look at these cones, and would you like to keep this inverted, and please push this button, and I'm deactivating your shields now, tell me if you feel anything. Miyamoto himself is now a security mom of a videogame designer, and his Zelda games now have giant Peanut M&M button layouts taking up half the screen so that you don't get confused, and every time you open a chest with rupees in it, a page of unskippable text types out to tell you what they're used for.

Half-Life 2 is a game that is immediately gratifying and respectful of the player's intelligence. In a world where it takes months of driving school and tests to finally strap yourself into a car with airbags, OnStar, AAA, and an emergency brake on the passenger side for the instructor to use, Half-Life 2 is the dad who just takes you to the mall parking lot at 1am. After a minute-long awakening from psychedelic stasis, you are given control, and it is never taken away for the rest of the game.

It begins on a train. There are trains everywhere in Half-Life 2, their rails veining the land. They are symbols of strict control, predetermination, exercised by the designers in real life, and by your blue-suited puppetmaster in the context of the game. At all times it feels as though there is free will, though there never truly is. If you are to go forward, you shall do so on their terms, along the invisible rails they have crafted for you. There are big red wire-bound cargo trains, sleek razor trains, and there's even a figurative underground railroad through which citizens escape their oppressors. The train you wake up in is a passenger train that is just pulling into City 17. The first thing you see upon opening your eyes are two friendly men who say they didn't see you get on.

As you exit, you immediately encounter a chirping, flying one-eyed cantalope of a robot who flashes its light at you, turning your screen white for two seconds. If you're playing this in the dark with no other light source, it can hurt. You long to smash that thing, but you have no weapon.

Seconds after this, if you look up, you will see the dystopian ruler on the monitor, and he invites you to your new home. His looping announcements are long and numerous, and you come to anticipate them. These speeches, nearly Shakespearean in their rifeness with metaphor, are acted with such nuance, such effortless ebbing, flowing mastery of his own material, it's as though he's turning poetry into a personal conversation with you, The Citizen. If you don't want to bow down to him, you at least want to buy one of his audiobooks.

Second- or third-time players already know what he has to say, and can simply ignore them if they like. They are built into the fabric of the game, invisible, weightless elbow pads that aren't itchy obstacles to the kinds of speedruns today's kids are into. Boys will be boys, after all, and if they'd rather hear dudes being shot than reproductive reassurances, more power to them.

In the train station, civilians in the same blue prison outfits as those on the train wait on benches, as nervous and wary of their unfamiliar surroundings as you are. If you approach them, they'll share with you the empathy they've rationed amongst themselves. One man tells you not to drink the water. A woman whose fingers are desperately woven into a chainlink fence waits for her husband who was taken away, and who, you conclude, is probably dead. They are the first people you meet in a dangerous world. They are the best characters in the game.

Keeping order in the station are the metrocops. You can approach them as you did the citizens, and for that they'll swat you with their stun batons. No actual health is subtracted, because there's no health display to subtract it from, but the attack looks vicious, and if you have a big enough monitor and some good enough weed, you might flinch. The game assumes the player doesn't know that videogame health is represented with numbers or bars, and before introducing them to the concept, it conveys danger in ways that are immediately understood.

The game soon puts you in a situation where, hiding from this police force in the safety of a closet, you have no choice but to stack crates to climb out a window, and so you are forced to learn this ability. Out the window you fall two stories onto a crate, fragmenting it into a splintery mess, and you are taught that you have weight, and that objects can be destroyed with force. Right next to the broken box are empty wine bottles. If you pick them up with the same button used to move the crates, you find they shatter if they are dropped, from almost any height. This teaches the player that different objects break at expected levels of stress.

At this point the player is enamored with the physical behavior of objects, much like a four-year-old playing Super Mario Bros. during the Reagan Presidency might rattle with excitement over the realistic depiction of momentum and gravity when Mario jumps. He wants to pick up and throw more things, but he is out of objects. Continuing on, the next thing he sees is a metrocop, who throws a soda can on the floor and tells the player to pick it up and put it in the trashcan next to him. Remembering his implied pain, and armed with the first thing that could be considered a weapon, he tosses it at the guard. Hilarity ensues.

Soon the player gets the HEV suit, and sees his hands for the first time, wrapped in tight, rubbery gloves, and, at the same time, a health indicator appears on the screen where there wasn't one before. The player is instructed to use a nearby charging station to increase this his suit's armor, the implication being that it will decrease under harm. And thus the concept of numerical health and damage is communicated to the player while he is still not exposed to any danger. He finds a crowbar, and the only way forward has been boarded off, teaching him to destroy things in ways other than tossing them. And then, the first target the player sees is that hovering one-eyed cantalope. It flashes him. The crowbar is swung, and it is the first in a series of small victories.

What follows is a three-hour chase sequence, any scene of which is iconic enough to be referenced in Family Guy. A mad dash through a train yard. A helicopter whose solar-charging ammo leaves precious time to rush between hiding spots. A swim through a canal while fuel barrels float on the surface above you, ready to explode from the gunfire of your enemies. From a blue spire on the horizon pour hundreds of little black dots who will surely spell retinal doom for you. It is so tall that it disappears into the clouds, like a girder holding up the heavens. There is no question that it is your final destination.

The first time the player is forced to kill another human being, he does it in defense of a woman. The crowbar pecks away at his gas mask, and he falls to the floor. A death tone sounds, and a British woman on dispatch who was been ripped from the film adaptation of 1984 stoically cackles the location of the crime through radio fuzz. Beside the downed soldier is the woman's male friend, a victim of police brutality. He is dead. She is upset. "They'll be looking for you now," she says. "You better get going." She has the same voice and face as the woman who was waiting for her husband at the train station. The player takes the officer's gun and runs.

The original Half-Life was populated with expendable videogame items under the guise of characters. It had nameless security guards who would provide backup and nameless scientists who would heal you and open certain doors. They all had the same voice samples, repeated with the frequency of a Street Fighter "Hadouken," to note the toggling of their functions. Some of the scientists were black and their generic lines were pitch-shifted. The designers of that game understood the limits of their game engine and the power of 1998's computers, and never tried to convey emotion with them. They often ran in front of machine guns to their humorous doom, like your own personal mine detectors. You could kill them yourself, if you felt like it, and they'd inexplicably reappear later.

You can't kill any of your friends in Half-Life 2. The old scientists and security guards have graduated into real characters with real names, real personalities, families, and development arcs. In their place are another set of nameless, static people. The citizens. This time, though, they feel more like those ordinary people you see riding the T in Boston than elements of a videogame; it's not that they don't have stories, feelings, favorite colors, but there's just never any time to ask them. At any rate, they're a lot more likable than the superstars, who are always so concerned with fulfilling their canned roles and telling you something IMPORTANT in lines that have been smoothed over and polished so many times by the editors for the sake of EFFICIENT STORYTELLING that they've lost all meaning. They show up right on cue for a story event, promise they won't leave you again, but something DRAMATIC always ends up happening, and in a few minutes you're on your own. There's an inkling that if you ever got to know them offstage, if you ever actually sat down and had that beer that the security guard says he owes you, you'd find out they're real assholes. Phonies. Videogame characters.

The citizens, though, are there for you. They represent the love that everyone who played Half-Life had for the game, and channel the hope and trust that swirled within every Half-Life fan during the six-year wait for the sequel. Now that your character, Doctor Gordon Freeman, has returned, they are overjoyed upon meeting you, a living legend who won over 50 Game of the Year awards. It is almost like the use of Katamari Damacy's fans in the sequel to that game, but less overt, coming off as more of a big hug than an in-joke.

The most interesting thing about the citizens is that much of what they do is determined in code. If you are running low on health or ammo, they will go out of their way to share with you. They'll remind you with grave concern to reload your weapon when you've forgotten. If they get in your way, they blushingly apologize, and move. They'll watch your six and warn you of threats. Sometimes they'll come upon more powerful weapons and get excited. Very rarely they'll have a random two- or three-line conversation that sums up what everyone is thinking; the kind of thing you might passingly say to a stranger at a bar in Queens on 9/11/01 as both of you watch CNN through the cigarette smoke. Standing around, huddled in the middle of a street in the demolished downtown, streetlights twisted like paperclips, Eastern European tenements barely erect like chocolate bunnies with big toothy bites on their legs, no one quite has a plan. Everyone's a little edgy. Eye contact is mostly avoided, with you, and with one another. The effect is so subtle, so natural, so accidental that it could only be the product of weeks of work. If you spend a while admiring the smoky tangled architectural wrecks, and look back to the small crowd, a girl might elbow through it and ask, "You waitin' for someone?"

Remarkably, none of this ever feels repetitive, and it is a testament to the quality of the programming. If you wish to see if there really is a man behind the curtain, you can load up a level in Garry's Mod and drop in these citizens. Then spawn different types of enemies. If you spawn a zombie, the nervous female in the group will announce it with dread. Spawn in some cops, and everyone will get riled up with "Civil Protection!" ("Cee Pees!") and a beatdown will simply commence without you doing anything. When they die, you shed a tear. Because they CAN die, unlike the main characters who writhe in ketchup. In the actual game, when you rescue them from their prisons or meet up with them in the streets, they are procedurally spawned, ensuring that there's never a duplicate amongst them, or that it never becomes a sausagefest. My favorites are Homeless Black Guy and Vaguely Asian Girl. They have nicknames for you, too. Usually "Doc." Slightly subservient, familiar. The Marty McFly to your Emmitt Brown. That is the voice of the game code itself speaking, so enraptured that it has the privilege to be playing with you. Quitting Half-Life 2 is kind of like when you were a little kid and you shut down your computer, heard the monitor exhale a sigh of static-electricitous relief, kissed it goodnight, and went to sleep soundly, knowing that it was resting, too. It has a soul.

This sort of Imaginary Friend A.I. has been sort of a holy grail for a while now. It's more commonly called "Emergent Storytelling," because the former would paint too accurate a picture of the people responsible for writing it. In interviews, fat men with huge beards and their sociable translators, clean-cut boys in Polo shirts, talk about TELLING YOUR OWN STORY, man, through the use of randomized game elements that conform to basic algorithmic rules in the code. This ensures that each moment you create for yourself is YOURS. Don't do what the DESIGNER wants you to do. Pave your own path! FREEDOM! Proponents purport that the most interesting stories in videogames are the ones that just sort of happen, like that time you were being chased by seven policecars in Grand Theft Auto, and they nudged you in a way that the physics launched you over a building and across a river, to safety, in an unbelievable stroke of luck. We've all had shit like that happen. I am reminded of being eleven, and trying to explain to my mom why we were laughing so hard, tears streaming down our cheeks, strewn on the carpet like contorted Source Engine ragdolls. I might as well have been telling her about how I finished my RIVETING game of Sudoku.

Entire games are now being designed around Emergent Storytelling. They're basically simulations of entire worlds. They're all kind of the same. One of them takes place in Chernobyl. It looks kind of like Half-Life 2. You explore a lot. You find stuff. There are other entities in the world, off doing their own thing. They might attack you, or they might not. Maybe they'll fight amongst themselves. Maybe they'll finish the game before you do. There are lots of complex things happening behind the scenes, just waiting to assemble in your presence and create a unique memory of arguable worth. There's this trend now that the computers are powerful enough that we don't need people to actually design games. We just design the systems, and the systems design the games. Like a Sudoku puzzle, all the solutions technically, mathematically fit correctly. But there's no soul. There's no dialog with the designer. There's no thought in the back of your head that someone wanted you to feel this way. No Miyamoto on your shoulder.

Half-Life 2 defines, for me, the extremely weird videogame relationship between design and technology. Most design choices in videogames are born of their limitations. Mario, for example, looks the way he does because a mustache gave contrast to his face and a hat made his head more visible, back when you could only throw a few samey-colored pixels on the screen and call it a person.

Most American developers began their work on the PC, which was a constant moving target. Every year or so, the cutting-edge would be redefined, and so there was no need to make tradeoffs. If it wasn't fast enough for you, go out and buy another machine. They weren't custom-coding to individual processors, but to bloated, high-level frameworks that did the interpreting. With the rise of the graphics processor and 3-D graphics, PC games became an arms race to make the most technologically impressive, most accurate depiction of reality, and shoehorn a game into it. Memory banks became large enough for massive, wide-open levels, and so free-roaming gameplay was born. GPUs became capable of colored lighting, and, for a while, games had floating crystals that emitted light everywhere. Then developers were able to make things shine and glisten in light, but instead of keeping this to wet floors and gooey blob monsters, it was put on everything, even human beings, which made them look like sweaty plastic action figures. The technology was there and it needed to be used. To look back on a lot of these games is embarrassing, now that "realistic" has been redefined seven times since.

You can still play Super Mario Bros. without cringing, though. It is foremost a videogame, and the technology followed what it wanted to be. Even though it was extremely technologically impressive, it had a reason to be. It was one of the first games to employ a smooth sidescrolling view of the action, as opposed to Pitfall's static screens; without this, the locomotive, rythmic feel of the game would have been impossible.

Half-Life 2 is as impressive and as encumbered with the limitations of its time, though, like SMB, it is smartly designed around its engine, instead of in spite of it. Everyone in the game either has short, inanimate hair, or keeps it tied in a bun, because making a polygonal "bowl" with a hair texture on it would look stupid, and the video cards capable of rendering individual strands of hair aren't ubiquitous enough.

Because the player is always free to move around, everything must exist within runtime. There is a character animation system that assembles independent functions like head-tracking, lip-syncing, scripted animation, and AI, in a way that could never look as good as hand-pruned animation, but provides the benefit of participation. A lot of information in the game is conveyed through looping broadcasts on monitors, and so instead of inefficiently throwing some compressed movie on a flat surface, a system was devised that essentially creates a viewport and transmits it in real time to to a television screen in the world, saving storage space and processing power. This technology then fed back into the game for use as security cameras showing what one might be up against in the next room.

The rendering engine itself picks its battles, choosing to best serve narrow, weaving, linear levels (though it has a few tricks up its sleeve for displaying full-size skylines from 1/16th models). It's a great fit for the world of Half-Life 2, a tight, congested place that the confused fugitive player fumbles through. It is with great care that its creators invisibly lead him down paths like a seeing-eye dog, and escape routes always seem just out of the way enough to be plausibly secret. One never quite gets a good look at where he's been, and where he's going, because it seems the only way to get anywhere in a city under martial law is through a detour. Sometimes through a clearing he can see big apartment buildings in the distance, or the omnipresent tower which houses Machiavelli.

The levels themselves are labored over down to the last tree. Nothing is left to chance. The enemy intelligence is barely beyond that of the Goomba in Super Mario Bros. As in that game, they are patternous creatures, and what is most important about them is their placement within the levels. In five years, when first-person shooter opponents are on-par with The Terminator, Half-Life 2 will still impress, because you are not fighting a computer; you are fighting the hand of the designer. The arrangement of healthpacks, ammo, and just the general layout of every square inch seems obsessed over, the product of hundreds of playtests. There are places that seem to chip away at your health, like the collapsed tunnel flooded with toxic waste. A slip here, a slip there, while trying to traverse ramps of fallen steam pipes and floating wire spools, your health dwindles down, and all the while you're teased and directed with a breadcrumb trail of life-ups (of course, when you get close, zombies will emerge from the sludge just in front of them). The game always seems to know when you've had a strenuous fight, and gives you a crateload of goodies that feel like a good rubdown. The doot-hiss of a medkit, the zap-crunch of a suit battery, it's all very game-like, and, through repetition, becomes familiar and loving. Each pickup has a big, crisp yellow icon that appears on the right side of the screen, and seeing them all stack up when you run over a pile of stuff is like coming downstairs on Christmas Day and being overwhelmed by all the presents.

Playing through, you get the sense that Half-Life 2 level creation could perhaps be a major at a university in the far future of Hedy Lamarr's dreams where art and science are not rigidly defined, and people sit in coffee shops segueing from conversations about great American poets into the floating point units on the Pentium 4; there's definitely a proper way to make a Half-Life 2 level, and this way can be taught, but it calls upon both hemispheres of one's brain. From a playability perspective, you have the various enemy types, each specific in their function; the ammo with which to kill them; all those wonderful props to break apart; exploding barrels – gotta have those; and the geography to which it'll all be placed, which must be realistic given its locale, and, for example, can't be too obviously sculpted like a happy face or a penis if seen from above. On the technical side, you have to fit within memory limits, not betray your triangle- and fill-rates, make sure the A.I. is given adequate pathing. From an overarching design perspective, everything must flow well from one map to the next; the player must constantly see something new every few minutes; each element of the game must be given its own careful introduction, and then be gradually blended into the grand scheme of available concepts. It's like balancing the duties of a writer, an editor, and who decides what's a front-page story.

No one knows who does what at Valve, the company responsible for this masterpiece. Their names are just listed in alphabetical order in the credits. At first this seemed a little odd to me, like they were trying to say they were too good for labels, and that everyone is an equal. But consider that they invented all that technology to power the art they wanted to make, and ideas fed ideas. It's probable that over the course of SIX YEARS, while sitting on a never-ending cash pile from HL1, everybody got a little good at everything. I mean, six years is a long time. That's almost as long as law school. But it's probably not long enough to fabricate an entire language and then use it to write War and Peace.

Super Mario Bros. could be read and interpreted, rolled out like a horizontal Hebrew scripture scroll. Like letters in a big, blocky alphabet, the bricks and pipes and coins and goombas and koopas and elevators and scales and mushrooms formed the language of Mario, waiting to be placed into something sensical. Or nonsensical, as the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 explored. If SMB1, with its kindness and caring, is like the New Testament, introducing its Messiah, SMB2 is like the Old Testament, where God is a fucking psychopath. The deity in question was Tezuka, the main programmer from the first game, who, at that point, probably WAS writing Mario levels like it was literature, and decided he had reached the postmodern era.

Half-Life 2 has its own SMB2 of sorts: "Episode One," the first in an expansion trilogy, perverts all the things you've taken for granted into something beautifully backwards. You begin with the most powerful weapon, and eventually find a crowbar at the end of the game. Weapons you once found incredibly useful are ammo-starved. There are entire levels where you can only see using your flashlight, which has a draining battery. Most interestingly though are its slight extensions to the Half-Life 2 language, and its fine leaps of videogame logic. In vanilla Half-Life 2, melon-sized energy orbs provide power to different circuits and can be shot from certain guns; so of course when Episode One needs to show the player a power-plant's core, it is represented simply by an enormous breathing ball of energy.

People don't like that Episode One retcons Half-Life 2's ending. I suppose that's fair.

Half-Life 2 was criticized for its "abrupt" end, which isn't fair at all. Halo 2, a game which shares its first three letters and a numeral with the object of this review, was released just a week or so before it. It ended with the protagonist saying he wanted to "finish the fight," immediately before the credits rolled. Critics felt compelled to level the same criticisms they had of that game at Half-Life 2, calling it "the middle chapter of a much larger story," which is a huge disservice to every speck of planning that has gone into it. Half-Life 2 is a game about one thing. If Denis Dyack was its director, he probably would come right out and say the theme is REBELLION. The player was dropped into that train in the beginning of the game with a single objective, one that becomes clear within minutes. The very second that objective is achieved, that's it. The man in the blue suit intervenes, and it is back into stasis for you. Freeman is anything but. Did this man know precisely what course you would pave through the world? If he's that all-knowing, all-powerful, transcending time and space, why did he send you at all? Sure, there are scraps of explanations you can pick up here and there when you talk to your scientist buddies. Stuff about string theory and parallel universes. If you play games in-character, then you'll move the mouse up and down to make Doctor Freeman nod at all the terminology he's supposed to know, but it's all so over your head. It could be retconned in any number of arcane ways that would be consistent with what we know about interdimensional travel: nothing.

The ending, of course, is much longer than that single second, though that's what people tend to focus on, because what a cool second it is. If the first four hours are spent building up the world, then the last four demolish it in the most spectacular way seen in a videogame. As you return to the heart of the city from journeys along the coast, you find lockdown has become warzone, and there is blood in the streets. You feel like you're riding a tsunami of revolt all the way to that blue spire. With each map it looms larger on the horizon, a countdown to a showdown. This game says goodbye to its world the way Metal Gear Solid 3 bows out its greatest characters, one by one, with payoff after payoff.

And then, it comes suddenly, and yet not suddenly at all.

[kthorjensen]

Frontpage this post immediately. Dear God, this site might be worthwhile after all.
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[Rucio]

That was a really good post. I'm actually re-playing HL2 right now, so to hear a fresh perspective on it makes me appreciate all of the things that seem really natural in the game world.

I hope ep2 comes out before christmas.
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"Say, that's a nice fez!"
"Thank you very much. Why do you like it?"
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[kerobaros]

tl;dr

No, no, I kid. Frontpage this sucker; you've made me want to play Half-Life 2, like, right now. Damn job.

[stotelheim]

I didn't actually enjoy the combat in Half-Life 2 all that much, but dear god have you made me want to play through it again.

Did you like Alyx in episode 1 at all? To me, she seemed very fleshed-out and alive. I mean, for being a videogame character. There was just something about all the little touches they'd added to her that made her both likable and lovable.
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go away extralife

[GcDiaz]

Outstanding.

Been meaning to replay HL2, but I dread reliving the scary parts.
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Steam/PSN/Xbawks: GcDiaz

Let's bring sexy back!

[dmauro]

Littered with great observations.

(yes frontpage)

[Mikey]

Man, I was really hoping they'd release Portal for Xbox 360 without Half-life 2 and stuff with it (so it would be cheaper), but now I really feel like I should play it.

Guerilla marketing, itt? No, I kid.

Good comparison to SMB, especially in terms of how HL2 teaches its players how to play it. Part of me wants to say that there has to be an FPS that handled things as well in that department (just because the genre has been around for long enough) before HL2 but nothing is jumping out in my mind.

[Felix]

i actually just picked the game up again a couple days ago from highway 17, where i stopped a year earlier.

it's.. yeah. celebrate!

[The Troops]

[shrugtheironteacup]

I have to second stotelheim's less-than over-fondness for the actual combat in HL2. It seems more.. functional, than compelling, but the fantastic presentation makes up for it to me.

Outstanding article sir!

Though I could have sworn that I never had any problems going over that second pipe w/out running.
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[stotelheim]

[Levi]

In before front page

[professor_scissors]

I think Alyx is the first character in an FPS to hug the protagonist. Can this be confirmed?

[tacotaskforce]

[BotageL]

Seriously, whose gimmick account is this?
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[CubaLibre]

[remote]

I haven't really got the time (at the moment) to muster an adequate response to a post of this length and so rife with incisive and colorful observation, but god DAMN. I have to say, Troops, I salute you. That was an excellent read. Post of the year, maybe?
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[smartblue]

I've only played through about half of Half Life 2 on my old roommate's computer and once he moved out I lost my ability to play it. Once I get my new computer set up over the summer (hopefully), HL2 will be the very first game I throw on there. This topic has decided this.
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[Intentionally Wrong]

I think what the troops is getting at is that even though you retain control, your interactions with the major players in Half-Life 2 are clearly cutscenes. Your progression forward is halted, people talk at you and around you, some events happen, maybe you're commanded to fiddle with something, and then everybody leaves and the doors open. Alyx is noteworthy just because she's the only one who's really around outside of these plot-progression seminars. Your interaction with the civilians is far more fluid; since they don't need to provide exposition, you never find yourself in such a forced scenario.
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JSNLV is frequently and intentionally wrong.

[dmauro]

One of the best interactions with characters in half life 2 was when I was in that building that gets stormed by combine soldiers early on and I was looking through a hole in the floor zoomed in and just watching a woman solace this man who was having a hard time coping with their situation. every 20 or 30 seconds he would say something to express his grief, and she would just keep her arm around him or maybe utter some words of support.

[diplo]

good post! i'd finish half life 2, but steam hasn't been nice to me in the past, or recently. each time i return to my pc at home, there's some new horseshit forcing me to uninstall and reinstall everything to get it working again.
one day...

[smartblue]

Man I'm so tempted to go get the Xbox port to tide me over until I can play the PC one again.
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[dmauro]

I'm saving my second playthrough for the release on the 360 in the hopes that it will run smoother and load more quickly than it does on my pc. If I need a quick HL2 fix, I usually play through Lost Coast.

[Toups]

[CubaLibre]

[Toups]

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[Toups]

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[Toups]

[luvcraft]

[Mr. Mechanical]

That was a great read, Troops. Good show.

One of these days I'm going to finally beat Half-Life 2, probably after it comes out on 360 with all the other goodies.
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[aderack]

Someone insert some section headers into that, or something. I see a big block of unbroken, unpaginated text, and my brain shuts off.

[Toups]

For the love of God I will kill a man if it will convince Id/Microsoft/Activision to put Doom ][ (proper spelling) on XBLA.
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[meauxdal]

nice post dude

man i love that game.
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[Toups]

[Mikey]

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[tacotaskforce]

Actually rocket jumping orginated in DooM, and one of the levels was supposed to be completed using it.
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