The eff? I was playing with a controller and they seemed to have this shit figured.
Clearly Valve does, the amount of times they force you to stand in a room and listen to people jibber-jabber before the next door will open.
Not normal by definition, since most people consider it to be a great game. However, I understand. It's a nice base for cool mods that fix the original game, but HL2 by itself has some really annoying aspects. The weapon selection, barring one or two weapons, is limp and forgettable. The definitely-not-cutscenes that make you sit in a room for minutes and listen to NPCs yammer on, the forced scenarios to make you look at a tech demo setpiece you can't really interact with that get brought up even in developer commentary as some sort of amazing thing. Story is fine-ish, just overstays its welcome way too much.
Like I said, HL1 I have a lot of nostalgia for, but it also really quickly became dated because it became a standard for FPSes. I think my breaking point was when Doom 3 came out and decided to be a Half-Life clone instead of a proper Doom game.
An imp getting stuck on a wall isn't emergent gameplay its a bug. You also can't act like the same thing cannot be said for HL1. take for instance a lot of the Surface Tension arenas, I could stay back and snipe with the crossbow or I could use snarks to lure out the soldiers and follow up with a MP5 grenade, etc. Xen even has a full-blown stealth section in Interlopers 2nd map!
And Doom doesn't? What???
Host_framerate 1. I can't agree though, the longest narrative sequence is the tram and Anomalous Materials and if you can't wait for 10 minutes I think that's on you and not the game. Outside of that your point is even more flimsy considering you can skip just about every other sequence where the NPCs talk to you.
I'll go half and half on that point. Especially on Hard.
I find I'm the opposite. The fact that every game HAD to be like Half-Life speaks more highly of it than not. Even if they did take most of the wrong lessons. HL1&2 are very great games but I will say that they both aged poorly. To me however that makes me like them even more because it means they succeeded in pushing gaming forward.
Valve's problem is they ran out of time.
Like I said, I've had play sessions of Doom where for whatever reason, radically different things happened that I had to deal with. It's not quite as predictable. Especially when you take into consideration things like monster infighting (which in HL only happens if its scripted to happen, but in Doom can arise just from random chance. I literally had one session where on E1M7 I got trapped between two sets of monsters, but they wound up hitting each other and fighting with each other and I just happened to be stuck in the middle. THAT shit is awesome, and since it was a one-time occurence its even more special. It would be kinda lame if it were guaranteed to happen).
I can understand this, but I'm speaking from the perspective of a player. I don't want every game to play the same, no matter how good the playstyle obstensibly is.
Well. It wasn't very functional at all. The closer you get to the surface, the closer you are to the present. Modern Aperture is very clearly not Cave Johnson's Aperture; the deep stuff is Cave's company.
Abandoned salt and coal mines in the American countryside. These places are very real and used for all kinds of things... even right now.
He doesn't, like most aperture robots he's indifferent/slightly friendly to them most of the time and is annoyed at them at worst. It's clear from dialogue in the Rat Man comic and the game itself that Aperture doesn't treat it's robots very well, some times even outright lying to them about some of their functions.
This is where Portal 2 strays too much from the more logical side of the HL universe tbh.
Upper Michigan, they rented out several(?) salt mines that go down really far. It's an OK explanation for the sheer scale of Aperture, which I will say was an issue even for Portal 1.
At the end of the Portal 1 when you get launched into the parking lot you get dragged back in by another robot. The Portal 2: Lab Rat comic goes into further detail. The fact you didn't know about it speaks lowly about Valve tbh. It should be in the game menu under extras. Fills in a lot of the blanks about the story.
It's not explicitly stated when it takes place, long enough that the Earth has recovered from the Combine Invasion. the development book for Portal 2 states its been 50,000 years. there's another theory that states its only 50 years because something-something Aperture should be eroded by then.
To add (and I may be wrong), depending on when you beat Portal 1, this scene may not have been in the game. I have a strong recollection of that ending scene being patched into Portal 1 when they knew Portal 2 was going to be a thing.
The first ending was just you standing in the parking lot outside of the facility entrance, with Glados being in pieces, and then it fades to black. When Portal 2 was in development a few years later they patched the first game to change a few things around. One was that the ending has you being kidnapped and thrown back into the facility yet again to set up for the sequel. And the other was adding in some radio units to each room, each containing some sort of code, that when solved would lead you to a Portal 2 website or advertisement.
Yeah it was part of the ARG that started in 2010 to tease portal 2, lots of videos cover it in detail. Its too bad that valve wont do anything like this again it seemed to be a fun event.
That slice of time had a lot of good ARGs going. Nice fad that never took off. Nabbed a ton of limited edition plastic and merch during those years.
The genre sort of took off in popularity thanks to halo 2 and 3's Ilovebees and Iris ARGs before it, but the potato ARG for portal 2 was definitely the end of an era. It even was tied into a few indie games.
The BioShock ARG was my favorite one. For such a large company, they really went all out and did something good.
in addition to the language barrier I assume it's pretty much impossible to cancel someone from a country sanctioned as hard as russia.
I really wish I was a fan at the time for that one.
