[CubaLibre]

[remote]

I think I'll pay more attention to the LPN forums than I have, so maybe I'll come to like him, too! I came away from that thread with the impression that he is to the LPN forums what James is to the IC/SB crowd -- i.e. the Shouty, easily riled (though often well-spoken!) one. I did agree with his Xenogears-related insights, at least! I used to consider that to be my favorite videogame O.A.T. as well, up until as recent as three or four years ago, when my interests in videogame narrative and its possibilities shifted a bit (I guess I've become more fascinated with the western influence to which he's so diametrically opposed) -- so anyone who still loves that one despite yet not in denial of its flaws (and without crossing into embarrassing fanboy territory) is endeared to me. The name that I continue to use as my internet alias comes from it (though I like to leave it open to other interpretations), after all.

Hey, why isn't he registered over here, anyway?
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[Aaron]

[CubaLibre]

[CubaLibre]

[Aaron]

[remote]

[negativedge]

antitype did you read the part where I loled at megas and he went insane and then I loled again?

[Mr. Mechanical]

[another coma]

I know I messed around with Meryl/Emma/Eva whenever I had the chance.
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[remote]

Those are interesting ideas, Mr. Mech. I could see that working in certain situations; for example, say you're running through City 17 with your team of rebels and you press the 'interact' key -- Freeman lets out a cheer or an "Alright, everybody, now's our chance!" or something like that, and they respond in kind with boosted morale. It could be interesting. Then again, like I said before I'd worry that it would come off as too canned and it would do more to bring you out of the experience (you might end up thinking, "What the hell, I wouldn't do/say that in this situation," or something). I do believe that Valve's decision to make Freeman a silent protagonist was very deliberate: they want you to feel like it's all happening around you, and you're there, as much as possible -- and making Freeman anything more than the role that you play would take away from your experience and shatter the immersion. I think that's really important. "Point Insertion" might say something about that.

[another coma]

O_0
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[remote]

Do you always make funny faces when someone makes a joke? Or did such a suggestion make you feel uncomfortable?
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[Aaron]

[extrabastardformula]

were you unable to empathize when you watch The Brother From Another Planet? I'm just asking because it's one of my favortie films. As is Werewolf Song, though that is a bit further than BFAP.
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[internisus]

Despite my strong feelings of praise for Half-Life 2, Aaron makes a very good objection when it comes to the notion of narrative interactivity with NPCs. It is an important flaw that the game does not allow for any kind of participation in the emotional content offered by characters like Alyx. Some kind of role-playing action is required here for the next step in design.

Regardless of that issue, I want to comment on the Children of Men issue. I just rented and finished watching the movie. To tell you the truth, it is hard for me to write this post, as I am slightly drunk and very upset. Movies have that effect on me, and Children of Men is a very good movie. I wept a great deal when the troops called for that cease fire. So, as I say, I am very upset after having just finished it. But it makes me think, the list of dystopian adventures that immediately rise to the top of my head is pretty short, and essentially constitutes The Pianist, Children of Men, and Half-Life 2. HL2 stands out as the work most distant from that genre's core, and I'm going to explain why right now.

Before I watched Children of Men tonight, I watched another movie I rented called Casino Royale. It led me to think about another trend I am recognizing in my young adult life. Badass-ness has taken a more sophisticated and subtle form than, say, Rambo, Die Hard, and the like. Somehow, in my mind, there is a definite line drawn in the history of art depicting badass characters, and it starts at the title screen of Metal Gear Solid 3. Some of you might understand that; some may not, I imagine. It is likely that my perspective on this matter is limited. I have enjoyed many films depicting badasses in my youth, but somehow my understanding of a badass changed when, very stoned, I first loaded MGS3 on my PS2 and spent half an hour watching the title screen. It wasn't even until later that I realized I could interact with that screen. That's not the point.

The young Big Boss as depicted in that slow motion montage of CQC events and the various trials of the game's plot (and my eventually superb performance) created something fundamentally new and different from what I had thought was a badass before. Watching Casino Royale tonight had me reflecting upon that. A real badass is subjected to terrible physical and emotional trials over the course of his coming-of-age saga, yet carries on exuding enormous strength of will as well as of body, cunning, intellect, attitude, etc. It's the will that does the trick. It seems to me as a young adult now that this essential matter is wrapped up in the will of the author, the deus ex machina that I know as a grown appreciator of media is the force driving that badass character's iron will. I am trying to say that, while my perspective has matured, I think something has stylistically changed. Characters such as those played by Samuel L. Jackson are not badass. They just yell a lot. Real badasses endure. You can see them becoming legends in front of you. I think I'm going to throw Batman Begins in with Casino Royale and MGS3. It is important to note that these are all origin stories.

The reason why I am talking about this in a thread about Half-Life 2 is this: HL2 is separate from dystopian adventures fundamentally because its protagonist is not only armed but extremely dangerous throughout that adventure. It's just not dark. You, as Gordon, act too much like a modern-day badass to match the mise en scene of the game's beginnings through-and-through. The game lacks a certain literacy of content -- and by literacy, I refer to a sort of quality that is hard to define. This was evident when I asked that open question at the beginning of the MMO thread. It doesn't mean that this content needs to involve words of any kind, nor be familiar with the language of related works to come before it. It is hard to find and describe what this quality is. I think that, in taking Half-Life 2 as an example of something that comes close or at least thrusts in an approximate direction, it would do great justice to the considerable artistic potential of our medium to seek a better understanding. My instinct tells me that comparison to Silent Hill 2, considering the strength but, perhaps, concurrent comparitive immaturity of HL2's internal language, would be helpful.

I spent some time earlier this evening angrily browsing through various videogame related periodicals at my local Barnes & Nobles, and these are my general thoughts at the moment regarding Half-Life 2 and the state of videogames. What I think is most important to note, however, is that, when being strongly moved by a film and sort of subconsciously asking myself what other works I have appreciated in its very specific "genre" which I may or may not have invented, a videogame, of all things, is on the short list. I am proud of Half-Life 2 for that, if nothing else.

[Rucio]

Um, I just like playing with the gravity gun. And the story and stuff too.

I do think the game gives me an illusion of freedom, because I constantly feel as if I'm improvising a route rather than following invisible train tracks.
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"Say, that's a nice fez!"
"Thank you very much. Why do you like it?"
"It's better than a sharp stick in the eye."

[CubaLibre]

That was a great post, internisus.

I'm still not exactly sure about this interacting with Alyx thing. Can you imagine a Half-Life 2 where Gordon talked and have it be anything but cheaper and emptier than silence? That's one way I approach criticism: as an opportunity cost analysis. It's nice to wish for some sort of interaction, but what form would it take? Would it really be any better than what's there now?

Frankly, given my interpretation (that the game does this to you on purpose in order to make you feel lonely, isolated, and forced to take action with no other choice), making Freeman talk or even interact in any ways other than the ones they give you (shooting things, clicking on people) wouldn't just change the game, but fundamentally alter its nature and theme. Freeman developing into a character of his own is for after City 17. The whole point is that he is not his own man, but is redeemable because he succeeds where no one else can - he asserts his identity by being as powerful as possible within the hard limits that have been set for him. The Half-Life franchise could, if managed properly, present a mature thematic context head and shoulders above any other FPS: a "coming of age"; a self-discovery.

Is Valve developer enough to do it? I dunno; I'm not exactly confident, as it were. But if they can't, no one can, at least not yet.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Aaron]

Have you played SMT: Nocturne? There's an avatar with an established appearance, but first of all, he has no real name. Thus is created as a shell. People speak to him, but it never feels appropriate for him to respond in return because there is an emotional isolation due to the circumstances of the game. Yet he is allowed to interact at key points, and make choices which effect the outcome of the experience. He is a clear part of the world he's in, an axis on which everything turns like Gordon Freeman, but he has no identity that you don't give him. He does not act really unless the player chooses to. While the direction of the game is essentially linear, there is an investment in the proceedings that drives the player to see it through to the end.

While HL2 flatters the player without caring about them at all.

[internisus]

I finished Episode 1 tonight. As I played, I found myself thinking about my inability to interact with other characters and came to the conclusion that, although I as Gordon cannot speak, I am nonetheless characterized by the NPCs that address me and by my reputation and revolutionary role, implicit in public broadcasts and radio chatter throughout Half-Life and Half-Life 2. It seems to me that this is a legitimate and well-developed technique for characterization. Could Valve have chosen to give the player freedom of expression? Sure. And that sort of thing is very attractive to me. I've often speculated on the role of such a narrative form of interactivity is important for future videogames. However, the non-interactive method they chose to use here is nicely fleshed out and a perfectly valid technique. I have a relationship with Alyx because of the way she talks to me. I am a badass because of the respect given to me by parties such as HL's marines and HL2's Breen broadcasts and acknowledgment by revolutionary citizens. I disagree with the sentiment that Gordon is a blank slate because all of this second-hand characterization is elaborately constructed and a consistent part of the first-person perspective that is so fundamental to the games' narrative design.

Another thought that occurred to me is that the title screens of Half-Life 2 and Episode 1, by portraying with carefully considered composition chapter-by-chapter stationary vistas complete with sound and movement, help to emphasize the games' focus on setting. For my buck, Episode 1 was worth it just for the moment when I emerged from underground to see the stormy citadel behind City 17's ruins, striders walking about, Combine corpses on the ground, and Dr. Kleiner broadcasting in Breen's wake.

[Cossix]

Now that I've finished it, I think I really like that the game is kind of symmetrical, the whole citadel scene being a lot like the chase/escape at the beginning in reverse. Now to play/get Episode 1...

[negativedge]

I watched Children of Men the other night, and was reminded of Half Life 2 the entire time. Then I rememberd internisus mentioned something about the movie in this thread.

Now, I didn't think it was an amazing movie or anything, but it was most certainly shot well, and the way it was shot reminded me of Half Life2. Like, how things were just...happening around Clive Owen's character. Not just random things either, but interesting things that divert your attention. The setting of the film was very real, and I think I can say the same about Half Life. I don't know, they both seemed to have the same feel about them, outside of the dysitopian thing, even.

[remote]

[Dracko]

Maybe the original entry should be posted on The Action Button as a review?
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[CubaLibre]

It's too long I imagine. Not that it couldn't be cut down, although it'd be a shame to see.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[internisus]

I replayed this game over the past few days, and I have some new thoughts.

The most interesting thing about it, I think, is the way in which the railroading design sweeps you up into the resistance. Yes, your reputation from the Black Mesa incident opens all of those early doors for you, but what's so neat is that you wind up in league with these characters because the Combine flag you and come after you; for the first half of the game, as you're on the run and your evasion of their forces becomes more and more intense, there's a sense that your relationship to the resistance is implicitly building due to, I suppose, Newton's 2nd law.

The reason why this is interesting is more apparent if you take the plot points in their abstract. Imagine that the Combine are not genocidal tyrants. Imagine that the ruling government and the resistance differ primarily on a political level. Also, let's axe the scene where Alyx rescues you and brings you to Kleiner's lab. So, the regime becomes interested in you and starts to pursue you and the first half of the game is a long, convoluted chase in which you are increasingly aided by these people who keep low profiles underground. You implicitly fall in with them and become, reciprocally, sympathetic to their cause.

It seems to me that HL2's adventure works pretty much like that. What is interesting here is that the potential this reveals of such an interactive adventure to manipulate the player's allegiances works because of the intimacy it allows. If the whole thing were a film, you might sit back and say, well, I can appreciate that the protagonist is forced into this position, but really I find myself more sympathetic to the governing regime than the resistance movement. But as a game, there would really be no way to feel that way. You hate the regime because they're after you, and you like the resistance because they're helping you. It's very personal.

During Highway 17, I took a break at one point and caught the end of Saving Private Ryan on HBO--starting with the preparations for the last stand battle where they defend the ruined village for its bridge. The slow build-up of intensity--in particular the long, squeaky, roaring crawl of the German forces as they rolled in with their tanks from the distance--related perfectly to what I had just gone through in HL2. Infiltrating the underside of the bridge and hearing the Combine war machine rumble overhead while the girders shake like toothpicks and squeal as though they might come apart is one of the best moments in the game. It comes shortly after you emerge from Ravenholm and at last stop running, hitting the road towards a full one-man assault on Nova Prospekt. You've had some successful skirmishes along the way at small Combine-held outposts, but this moment stops you fast and reminds you what you're up against. It's paralyzing. The terror of your escape from your cornered position in the field control room as you fall under the attack of troop reinforcements and, particularly, that gunship with its awful wailing is a great fulfillment of this prelude, as well.

The endgame, especially "Follow Freeman!", is by turns thrillingly cathartic and terribly desperate. It reminds me of that battle in Saving Private Ryan. The city is in ruins and it seems like you've got the upper hand, like the Combine are struggling to maintain their own turf, but then the striders start coming after you especially--I mean fucking running after you--and you frantically fight off some Elites ("Overwatch: Sector not secure") for position in a sheltering convenience store as those giants bear down on you. When you manage to escape underground, the floor explodes, trapping you in a pit of rubble as troops fire down from all around you. You have only a moment to rest when you make it out before emerging into the corner of a gutted building and Overwatch troops attack you from three or four perfect ambush positions above you. If you get out that hole, you have to keep an eye on the strider circling the building and firing through what used to be walls while fighting the Combine for position ("Contact: Freeman!") as you push around and up and up and up--the strider decimating the building again and again with its warp cannon--until you reach the top "floor" of the ruin. Everything around you is a smoldering disaster. You pick up some rockets and there is one length of wall about two meters with a damned window in it and two striders after you. A medic who made it up with you fires at Overwatch camped in a building across the way, and a gunship roars over you from out of nowhere.

And that's the last real battle. After that, you go down beneath the mobile walls that are advancing from the citadel, eating up the city, and you come across an enormous pit a mile deep surrounding the monolith like a moat whose size suits its towering fortress. And when you manage to get into its outer walls, you find out that the place doesn't have any real borders. There's no wall as such, just a vast series of enormous, complex pillars made of that blue and black steely material, and no relation between these pillars is discernible. The structure seems almost organic, as alive as the moving walls you've seen taking over City 17 and Nova Prospekt, even though the actual constructs are as cold and unnatural as could be. The impression you get from the technology and build of the citadel's interior will stay with you through HL3: Episode 2, bringing back that fear you experienced at the bridge as the Combine mobilize a massive war effort to pursue the evacuees into the forest.

I don't think I realized how superb the Overwatch Standard Issue pulse rifle is until this playthrough. It's reliably accurate at great distance, sounds and looks awesome, and the reloading mechanism is fucking cool.

One of my favorite things about HL2 is the sound content. The civil protection radio sounds--and the flat tones that follows their deaths--are excellent, and I love to listen carefully to their gravelly chatter. Then there's the dispatch: "Unit down at Jurisdiction Block 514; remaining units contain." But my absolute favorite is the Overwatch AI announcements, played by Ellen McLane.

Individual, you are now charged with socioendangerment level five; cease evasion immediately and receive your sentence.

Attention all ground protection teams: judgment waiver now in effect. Compliance with constitution discretionary.

Individual, you are convicted of multiple anti-civil violations; implicit citizenship revoked. Status: malignant.

I'm still head-over-heels about the organic nature of the Combine vehicular weapons. The dropship, gunship, and strider are all living things, but they're also clearly machines. I can't totally wrap my head around that oxymoron, but experiencing the way they behave and sound is so amazing. The striders are my favorite. They look like three-legged beetles out of a Dali painting and let out those calls that descend into heavily distorted synthesized bass. The character of that sound feels really well-matched to the aesthetic qualities of the warp cannon, as well. It's incredible to fight one from the third floor of a collapsing building while shielded scanners hover inside to spot your location. When you nail it with a rocket, it brings its head/carapace way down below the joints of its legs and fires up at you. That movement and the self-defending intelligence it make it seem so alive.

I did some thinking about Half-Life as a series. I've often reflected upon the fact that Gordon survives all of the action of the first game and then goes straight into the second without the experience of respite. The device of the Gman is really interesting because it perfectly acknowledges the player by ensuring that nothing can ever happen without him. It removes the hypothetical loss of would-be events that normally occurs between sequels. Also, the jump from HL to HL2 is a parallel one of the games' technology and fictional time. And then, obviously, for the story to continue in HL2's world, the Gman must be obstructed, and in this case, from HL2 to Ep. 1, there is no jump in fictional time and only a slight improvement of game technology that can be seen as corresponding to the gradual movement of the approximate 10 days in which HL2 occurs.

It seems like, if Gordon is ever put in stasis again and the setting of HL2 is left behind, Valve would have to once more develop a non-episodic "true" sequel over the course of six years. It's hard to imagine a jump forward from this setting though, isn't it? I probably explained all of this in a very convoluted fashion, but I'm just trying to say that the structure of the story interestingly mirrors the structure of development and of the players' experience of a multi-installment series unfolding.

I also really like how Freeman regularly encounters irradiated areas or has to restore fuel intake for a rocket silo or has to reestablish a temporary containment field for a destabilized dark energy reactor core.

So, about Ep. 2, I've read that we'll be learning new things (did we ever learn old things?) about the Gman, and I'm also predicting that Breen is now in a host body as one of those huge telepathic larva-like aliens (the actual Combine race?) that escaped the citadel in the capsules that fly out in all directions at the end of Ep. 1. Apparantly those mindbursting buggers were introduced to set up stuff in Ep. 2. Boss battle against Breen in that form, maybe?

I am making it my top priority to manage to get a state-of-the-art computer by the time Episode 2 comes out. Actually, I'd like to get it done like tomorrow so I can play STALKER, but I'm trying to be realistic.

Orange Box

[CubaLibre]

The pulse rifle is utterly necessary on Hard.

Great post internisus.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[internisus]

Thanks. I haven't ventured to try hard mode because I occasionally experience hang-ups (I don't really know what to call it) with this computer. I want to though! However, already on normal mode there are two parts of the game that always seem extremely difficult to me: defending the position in Nova Prospekt block D-8 with the 3 turrets and 4 entry points, and defending Alyx long enough for her to open up the power generator in Anticitizen One. I really like to play some of the hot spots along Highway 17 over and over, trying different strategies just for fun, so I don't think I suck or anything. Does everyone find two situations so difficult?



I just re-read The Troops's brilliant opening to this thread, and there's a notion I want to get down here. It might be too tangential, but I'm not sure it will come out well-developed enough (nope! it didn't! -ed.) to warrant a new thread. I can move it if anyone thinks I should, I suppose. Anyway.

One of the core ideas of that post is the relationship -- one might say tension -- between HL2's emergent narrative aspects and its designer's hand. It seems to me that you can conceive of this relationship spatially such that the designer's hand -- the railroad -- forms the outermost wall of the game and the emergent aspects occur in the more immediate realm of gameplay enclosed by that definitive boundary. The designer has carefully crafted the flow of the game and its scripted events, and the AI and physics allow for x degree of emergent gameplay within it.

I hope I've made it clear by now that I certainly appreciate what Valve has done here and that I have no qualms with this approach to game design. However, I find myself more interested in the prospect of videogames that employ the reverse. The idea of an open and emergent game structure whose interactive objects are imbued with content is far more exciting. It's also far more natural, and not just because it would seem organic -- it's more similar to the actual arrangement of matter in the universe, you know? But the idea here is that the sense of divine guidance or destiny that comes through in a lot of videogames because of Valve's style of approach would instead be focused into the individual contentual entities of this free game world. Instead of feeling the designer's hand at every turn, the player works with these gameplay objects that are imbued with subtle meaning, and the relationship between the meanings of many such objects is discovered slowly over the long course of the game -- perhaps even decided by the player.

Does this make sense? This is why I find games such as Fallout, STALKER, and Uplink appealing (off the top of my head). Unless I'm really tired, they represent the opposite design philosophy to the Half-Life games we've had so far. Earlier, some posts itt speculated upon the change in direction Valve will have to take now that Gordon is free; is a gradual shift in this direction what is meant? Indeed, are these the parameters for a kind of continuum of design philosophies? What am I talking about right now? Has anyone seen my glasses? Who are you people?

[internisus]

[rf]

[CubaLibre]

[Broco]

[The Troops]

[The New Ska]

The Troops, whoever you are, you've convinced me to break my Halo revelry. I will be buying The Orange Box.

[internisus]

[boojiboy7]

[wpham]

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last.fm

[internisus]

And, lo, this is what passes for an analysis of the literary significance of Half-Life 2.

This is the final straw on the back of my recent adventures-in-videogame-writing camel.

[Dracko]

It's The Escapist, what did you expect?
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[Six]

That certainly appears to be a high school English assignment that the guy submitted to the Escapist on a whim.

Also am I the only one who finds those block quotes with all the fonts and colours really annoying?


(also also they don't seem to have noticed that they reversed the lambda when they flipped that image of gordon but hey at least it's not stock photography amirite)

[Marshmallow]

that article features almost everything i hate about videogame journalism

citing metacritic as if it means something

accusing people who don't know about the game to have been living under a rock

etc

fuck this guy amirite!

oh man he even pulls that

WE ARE!!!

crap right at the end to try and make it all dramatic but it just comes off as embarrasing, just like when ever someone else does it god