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Here for a (Half) Lifetime?
June 1st 2006, 22:28 CEST by deadlock Upon its release in 1998 (eight years ago!), Half Life attained near-legendary status in the gaming community. Its contemporary setting, unique (at the time) approach to plot development, audioscape and enormous scale quickly established it as one of the cornerstones of the First-person Perspective Shooter. Memorable locations, some very original baddies (the tentacle thingie) and an ill-conceived platformer section ensured that the game was a flawed masterpiece. Half Life was an evolutionary step forward for the genre, rather than a revolutionary one - but it was a pretty big step. It took elements that we had already seen in other games - portals to nightmarish worlds, the ubiquitous secret labs and military facilities, futuristic weapons and a geek-turned-hero protagonist - and made them seem new somehow, providing us with a level of detail and immerson that we hadn't really experienced before. Half Life had such a huge impact on the FPS-genre that it became a reference point for pretty much every FPS that followed it as well as every review. I and many others have often found ourselves playing a game post-HL and bemoaning the fact that it played as though Half Life had never happened. Very often, even those games that did take on board some of the things that HL brought to the table gave us the impression that they were either ticking off points on a feature list or, worse, completely missing the point. Half Life 2, like its predecessor, was evolutionary rather than revolutionary, again taking elements that were already familiar from other games and making them seem better or more integral - physics being the most notable. But the sense of reinvention wasn't as strong with the new game. It was another flawed masterpiece, but this time the flaws (lacklustre AI, some showstopping bugs) were less forgivable. But the epic scale was intact and was, in fact, greatly expanded on. The battlefield was no longer confined to a remote facility but had become global. So, the question I'm asking is this: will Half Life 2, in years to come, be regarded with the same reverance as the original title or has the FPS genre become too diluted for a class-A title to have any impact any more? And is Half Life 2: Episode One just a daft name or is it any good? |
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Topic: Here for a (Half) Lifetime?
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A "you" was technically meant to be in there somewhere. Ergo is right, as he always is except the times when his opinion is different than mine.--Mr. Nutty
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I already have a 360 in my home. Put down the imaginary knife before you pretend to hurt yourself.
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Why? So you can play Uno on it? Ergo is right, as he always is except the times when his opinion is different than mine.--Mr. Nutty
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Don't ask me, I didn't buy it. Put down the imaginary knife before you pretend to hurt yourself.
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Personal opinions here, trying not to be an obvious troll like Nutty. Best team FPS ever was Quake 3 Arena - Rocket Arena 3. Best 1v1 ever was Quake 3 Arena, and I'm biased towards Blood Run. Best FFA was Unreal Tournament with all the service packs and whatnot. Best FPS single player was Deus Ex, but since that's so RPG-like, I'll grudgingly give a tie to Half-Life. Doing things 'right' a.k.a. game and interaction standards from a single watershed game don't really happen, IMO. Games are too disposable. They're meant to be played for a year or so, then discarded for a sequel, so most gamers don't really interact with them enough to see that polish. You see it with operating systems, but that's because they're used day-in and day-out and have jobs attached. Sure, you could put all those wonderful polished bits in, but right now well-established FPS tropes are being trotted out to a console mass market that's never seen them before. So, mediocre games like Halo are seen as the 'best game ever' by slack-jawed morons that wouldn't last five seconds in any Quake pick-up game. Who cares about putting in neat 'polish' bits that add 25% to your development time in order to please 5% of your customers? Fuck that... do the least you can, ship it, leave room for the sequels to grow into. |
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OK, the middle of the last paragraph was a troll. |
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Blood Run... oh man, I can't remember when I last fired up Q3A. Definitely not this year. I'll have to remedy this at once. "Similarly, your reloading and weapon management is substandard and betrays a lack of tactics." - G-Man
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Given the context of the last sentence, it can only be construed as a single query. OK, you're right, but the problem lies with the metonymic use of the title rather than the conjunction itself. |
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TOO MANY BIG WORDS. |
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And I still can't play my Ep1. MOTHERFUCKER! |
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I still cannot buy anything on Steam. Valve refuses to accept my credit card, telling me to contact VISA. Visa tells me everything is a-ok on their end and that Valves systems are fucked and have problems with international credit cards and to contact valve directly for a manual authorization. Except, valve has no contact information anywhere. No support email that I could find, no phone numbers (not even a long distance number), nada. From what I gather, the only way to contact valve is to go to their tech support website and fill out a support ticket, and pray you get a response sometime within the next millenium. |
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SEX at the theatre. Kilt Wearing Pixel Pushing Monkey Boy
DVD Collection Blend Creations After a long hard day of being a big male geek, it's nice to get to be a pretty, pretty princess for a little while. -- Hugin |
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I'm not trolling you dumb fucker! When I consider how much fun I've had playing any FPS in the past, Xbox Halo 1 multiplayer LANs top the list. Therefore, Halo 1 multiplayer is the best FPS ever. Period. YHBT. YHL. HAND
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Valve Software 520 Kirkland Way Ste 201 Kirkland, Washington 98033 Tel: 425 889 9642 Fax: 425 889 9642 I remember when people used to prank call their support line shortly after HL1 was released. |
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Uh, obviously the fax line is wrong. It is 425 827 4843. Extension 160 is Director of Marketing, Doug Lombardi's FYI (in case their customer support gives you any shit.) |
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Meh. Its cheaper for me to buy it in the store, anyway. $19.99CAD + 10% employee discount. |
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Shadarr had the best counter argument by far. You guys know I was just playing with all that jazz...I really do feel that HL2 is the best single player FPS ever released at this point. I'm happy for me...everyone's got their opinions on the matter and if we all agreed I'd worry. "me did a sneak attack to smack the demons off my back"
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Apparently, Valve hires nude models to come in and pose twice a week for six hours for its employees. I think 3DR had a policy like that too... |
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Apparently, Valve hires nude models to come in and pose twice a week for six hours for its employees. I think 3DR had a policy like that too.. Eh. We do that every other week. It's a great way for the artists to keep creative. Life drawing models have never been on the attractive side of humanity... Kilt Wearing Pixel Pushing Monkey Boy
DVD Collection Blend Creations After a long hard day of being a big male geek, it's nice to get to be a pretty, pretty princess for a little while. -- Hugin |
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Do you go in a storeroom and cry after the session is finished, Eric? "It's only make-believe until it becomes flim-flam."
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heh. |
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That is so dumb. No wonder games cost $60. Zep-- Matt Davis: If you had kids you'd learn to tune out the screaming baby and carry on watching TV as normal.
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schnee sounds like he never played multiplayer fps games before quake 3. |
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I'm halfway through Episode 1 now, and I have to say, the three chapters I've played through so far have been more fun than the entire game of Half-Life 2. Oddly enough, things feel much more "Half Lifey" in the expansion, or whatever new name will be invented for expansion-like-episodic-content, than Half Life 2 itself ever managed. Me oportet propter praeceptum te nocere...
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That's what I thought too bishop. |
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Speaking of episodic releases, if you like adventure games of yore at all, the second installment of Bone is much improved over the first effort. I'm looking foward to what TellTale does with Sam and Max. Me oportet propter praeceptum te nocere...
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Does it still play out line for line, scene for scene with no deviation whatsoever from the comic? |
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schnee sounds like he never played multiplayer fps games before quake 3. Sort of. I played a smattering of Quake 1 LAN at college. I always died so quickly, I never had enough fun to merit learning the game. I played a fair amount of Quake 2, but it just didn't 'click' with me. Quake 3 is when I started really learning the game, and I got fairly good for a scrub... i.e. lots of 13-year old kids would drop out and spec me while accusing me of cheating, but I got owned like a keyboarder on the better servers. I also joined a clan, started skinning, and hand-picked maps for our servers. So, I'm probably biased, but when I went back to Q1-2, they just weren't that fun. Q3A Promode was better than either of them. |
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Loved HL1, loved HL2, and am loving the first episode. Does the Sin episode use the same engine, because this episode feels better than the Sin episode did. Actually, the liberalism of the media - as a general thing - IS a major fallacy. What the media is, is a whore. -LP
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From what I've heard, SiN's Episode 1 uses an older build of the Source engine. This seems to be true because it has a lot of the sound stuttering issues that used to be a bigger problem in HL2 but were patched a while ago. YHBT. YHL. HAND
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Cute warning labels. This is a 100% Matter product: In the Unlikely Event That This Merchandise Should Contact Antimatter in Any Form, a Catastrophic Explosion Will Result. We need to keep our arms open, our head up, smiles big and our middle fingers raised.
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Eh. We do that every other week. It's a great way for the artists to keep creative. Life drawing models have never been on the attractive side of humanity... I dunno, this one is a bit of a butterface but I'd still hit it. |
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Cute warning labels. That reminds me of the internet back before Netscape, when it was only in university computer labs. |
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#36 by Ergo If you really want to shock us, tell us about a game that you actually DID like. Whaaa, I love games! Shadow of the Colossus was the prettiest and most immersive game I've played for ages. Need for Speed Most Wanted offers hilarious policechases and has very few sharp edges. Half-Life 2 offered exhilarating combat and a seamless frustration-free experience. Battlefield 2 (after much patching), seems capable of delivering goodly amounts of fun in flickering spurts. Half-Life 1, SP and DM, was spectacular experiences, and so on and so forth. Games are marvelous, don't you come here implying I'm just another hater mister. But you're a bitter man, so I'll assume it's just you who thinks I'm so Bob-like. I didn't personally like Quake 3 (or Q1 & Q2. Nor Doom 1, 2 and 3) at all. Well, I was actually pretty into Doom 1 back in the day before it starting being boring, which I think occured.. maybe at around Chapter 2 or 3. And D1 had its glorydays in multiplayer as well. You guys with your worshipping of Quake 3 are so weird. "the game will be based on famous battles which actually took place in ancient Japan. So here's this giant enemy crab."
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I never got that into Quake multiplayer at all. For me, multiplayer gaming was all about XvT online over the MSN Gaming Zone, or Warcraft 2 on Kali. I do remember some good times hacking people up with a lightsaber in Dark Forces 2. |
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And speaking of XvT, I just want to say that I was absolutely unstoppable in a Y-Wing during a 4 player dogfight. Sheilds double front, ION cannons blasting away, and set a collision course straight for another player. If he didn't move out of the way I'd smash into him, probably destroying him, and leaving me battered. If he did move out of the way, I'd keep hammering him with ion cannons and disable him, picking him off at my leisure. Good times. |
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Why hasn't anyone tried making a null topic yet? I am disappointed. Ideally, this is a job for the null poster. |
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Because the null thing is old hat. |
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I loved jk1. I also put my fair share of time into D1. There's only a handful of people here who are shooters only, gaggle. I even still play starcraft from time to time, although my days as the illustrious naero-K are long over. |
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Half-Life 2 seemed like less of a revolution than Half-Life 1. I mean, we were playing that for months, talking about it for years. I must've been through the first lab complex a million times. It started to feel like home. One thing I noticed when playing around with Hammer the other day, is that HL2 is a lot less diverse in setting than HL1 was. All the default textures are so typically HL2 that it's hard to make a map that doesn't look like HL2. HL1 had an office setting, various lab settings and other places with textures applicable in a wide range of situations. HL2's textures are pretty much only good if you're trying to make a post-apocalyptic urban map. After I learned of my [Dutch] heritage the rate at which I pushed passerbys off of bridges shot up significantly.
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Speaking of silly sequel names, look at Dark Forces: Dark Forces Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight (Dark Forces 3:) Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast (Dark Forces 4:) (Jedi Knight 3:) (Jedi Outcast 2:) Jedi Academy After I learned of my [Dutch] heritage the rate at which I pushed passerbys off of bridges shot up significantly.
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And don't forget Dark Forces 5: Jedi Knight 4: Jedi Outcast 3: Jedi Academy 2: Jedi Gone Wild. So long as it uses the gravity gun for push, pull, and possibly grip, I shall be happy. |
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G-Man (#61): Apparently, Valve hires nude models to come in and pose twice a week for six hours for its employees. I think 3DR had a policy like that too... Yeah, but aren't most of the in-game characters male? |
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Gunpoint: In fairness though, it's not like those games were actually named that way - it was more of a lineage thing. Like - in keeping with the LucasFilm thing - Indiana Jones 2 wasn't called Indiana Jones 2: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Crapfeed.
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MP FPS is all about the QW. Also, now would probably be a good time to try HL2. Cold silence has a tendency to atrophy any
Sense of compassion Between supposed lovers |
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HL2 was as good an FPS experience as I've ever had. It won't be remembered in the same way HL was, because it's the second installment in a franchise that began with one of the most groundbreaking games of all time. |
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Does it still play out line for line, scene for scene with no deviation whatsoever from the comic? Is that a problem? Besides, if they deviate then Bone fanbois will lay siege to their offices. Jesus Christ, that is unbelievably retarded! - lwf
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I'm halfway through Episode 1 now, and I have to say, the three chapters I've played through so far have been more fun than the entire game of Half-Life 2. I know this will probably sound bad, but - does it have new weapons? New monsters? Any graphical improvements (apart from HDR)? Or is it just a map pack with a story? Also, Episode One exposes Alyx's combat skills and knowledge of City 17. Battle side-by-side with her through Valve's first episodic game, a four-to-six hour adventure of greater density and detail than non-episodic releases. [valve] has me a little worried as it sounds a bit too much like a nonstop shoot-a-thon. Are there parts of exploration still there, or is it Contract JACK with a buddy? "Similarly, your reloading and weapon management is substandard and betrays a lack of tactics." - G-Man
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Anaqer: From what I've read (I haven't had a chance to play it yet) there are new baddies in the form of Zombie combines who suicide rush you with grenades. I think the stalkers that were hinted at in the previous outing are in this one as well, but I could be wrong. There's apparently a more straightforward plot as well, albeit one that leaves yet more questions; these questions can or will be answered in the next episode. Crapfeed.
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Heh, look at me commenting on something I don't really know about! Next I'll be telling people how to raise their kids! Crapfeed.
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