Half Life thread - Discussions about Valve's FPS magnum opus(es) and any related content (spin offs, expansions and etc)

[Conan]

Funny how Valve fanboys still, to the point of absolute derangement, obsess over this dead franchise that hasn't been great ever since the very first installment and its DLCs. HL2 with its episodes was a bad sequel and HLA has been so irrelevant outside the short window of hype directly after its release due to being a VR game it's not even funny.

i just thought they were fun video games

 

[Taki Supremacy]

Spoiler: playthrough 2 Ravenholm

-Stepping into Ravenholm, I am in love, the music and atmosphere is perfect

-Shit is so brutal here they hanged half a dude

-This is fucking awesome, I love the environmental story telling of the saw blade through this guy into the wall, its telling the player "yeah you can do this"

=Killing head crab zombies with saw blades is the coolest shit ever, pure dopamine hits bro

-I heard a guy talk for a moment almost biblical type stuff but I love this spinning blade machine, I wish I could set these up around my work area so people would leave me alone.

-Appears above impalement hellfire pile, says he's keeping an eye on you, refuses to elaborate, leaves. What a chad.

-It took a stupid amount of time for me to realize im supposed to put out the impalement hellfire and go into the building

-Bro now there's nigger head crabs? And they are poisonous?

-I hope this isn't some fake out situation where Father Grigori seems helpful but is just really crazy and turns against you

-I'm actually a little amazed at the gore and fucked up imagery in this map, I never really heard people talk about how fucked up Ravenholm is

-Ok so the howls I heard earlier weren't wolves, I mean wolves of a sort maybe, but not wolves, that reveal genuinely creeped me out. There's even a full moon in the background that was fucking kino. I think I saw a body of them earlier but thought it was just a burnt up dude. Is this what the nigger head crabs do? Are these.... nigger heads?

- These niggerheads aren't so tough now that I've finally got a shotgun *DOOM music begins playing*

-Ok they needed to make the switches and levers stand out a lot more. I've run around this area for like 20 minutes trying to figure out how to move this platform. I finally looked up video on what to do. A 13 year old, 250K view video has the most viewed part being where he runs over and activates that lever. So I don't feel too bad about not seeing it and running past it probably 30 times lmao. I kept thinking I could move the platform with the gravity gun and wasn't standing in the right spot or something. I remember as a teenager this happened all the time in games back then, getting stuck at door trying to figure out how to open it, running around for 30 minutes, only to finally realize the switch was right next to the door it just blended in with the environment.

-"I'll send the cart in a moment, brother, guard yourself well!" while howls begin in the background. Oh fuck.

-Ok never mind that was easy. There were only six enemies and they attack one at a time.

-Graveyard section was great, classic zombie movie vibes. Father Grigori is great with a shotgun lmao. Hopefully he comes back at some point.

-In the mines now, fuck these nigger head crabs everywhere.

-Got through that pretty quickly, I was worried this would be some hour long transition level like some parts in Black Mesa.

-Oh cool, friendlies are killing the head crab zombies with blue laser sights. Maybe the resistance got an upgrade.

-Nope, not friendlies. It was the Combine that got an upgrade.

-After fighting head crab zombies and niggerheads it took me a little but to get used too enemies that shoot back lmao

-Fought through those Combine troops and linked up with the resistance fighters, time to go dune buggying, hopefully these "ant lions" aren't too bad.

 

[MAAAD]

@Taki Supremacy Enjoy the cucked, unfun Tau Cannon on your buggy while it lasts, because that's literally the biggest weapons variety you'll be getting in this game lol. It's unbelievable just how poorly this game aged and how little replayability it offers.

 

[Star Classic]

@MAAAD is drunk once again

 

[thhrang]

@MAAAD is drunk once again

Him:

 

[Jotch]

I played HL and HL2 for the first time during covid. I thought HL was interesting and fun at parts but at others felt like a chore. HL2 and all episodes were really fun the whole way through and it felt like playing a brand new modern game.

I thought Black Mesa was very fun and I was very impressed by the soundtrack and the fact that Xen went from 30m to a second half of the game.
I also thought that Episode 2 had the best music, and Episode 1 felt short and rushed but otherwise interesting.

 

[Star Classic]

I also thought that Episode 2 had the best music, and Episode 1 felt short and rushed but otherwise interesting.

Episode 2 is arguably the best in the series, but also the most bittersweet out of nature by being the 2nd part on a non-existing trilogy.

This might be controversial but I think Episode 1 is better than base Half-Life 2, it's just that it was too short to make a difference to people, oh and the pretty bad finale too. But a short development cycle and cutting a good chunk of your maps will do that.

 

[AnOminous]

This might be controversial but I think Episode 1 is better than base Half-Life 2, it's just that it was too short to make a difference to people, oh and the pretty bad finale too.

I thought the Citadel was pretty impressive.

 

[Jotch]

Episode 2 is arguably the best in the series, but also the most bittersweet out of nature by being the 2nd part on a non-existing trilogy.

This might be controversial but I think Episode 1 is better than base Half-Life 2, it's just that it was too short to make a difference to people, oh and the pretty bad finale too. But a short development cycle and cutting a good chunk of your maps will do that.

Third episode was released in December.

 

[Star Classic]

Third episode was released in December.

>it's real

what the, did we all just collectively forget a game?

 

[MAAAD]

Him:
View attachment 8407612

Believe it or not, I enjoyed the game actually. You'd still be retarded to not recognise that it's the Source engine doing all the heavy lifting for the game and not the actual game content.

Actual gameplay, especially in comparison to HL1, is shit. Half the guns in the game pack no punch and are unsatisfying to use. All the fun sci-fi weapons are gone, with the old arsenal getting nerfed into the ground due to muh realism and muh gravity gun. There are now cancerous infinite ammo crates scattered throughout the game which I'm not even sure how to comment on since it's such a lazy, brainrotted thing to add into an FPS. After you get the RPG (which you'll never find ammo for outside of boss battles btw), all the boss fights in the game will turn into a repetitive quest to reach the infinite rocket ammo crate while under heavy machine gun fire. You will find yourself constantly low on ammo for the few guns that are actually fun to use, always having to either switch to unsatisfying weapons or improvise with the gravgun because their le smart supply crate system which they've jerked themselves off about so much in their dev commentary never actually gives you ammo for the guns you use most often. Additionally, you now have stamina, with both sprint AND flashlight depending on it, which makes combat much less energetic and completely ruins pacing in dark areas. Enemy variety is just as miserable as the weapon variety - it's just good humans, bad humans with heavy vehicles and some miscellaneous technology here and there like mines and turrets, zombies and antlions sometimes. Xenians and all their unique animal behaviours? All starved to death or something, sorry not sorry and here's an occasional non-combatant vort NPC for your trouble.

Story is just as mediocre as well. ALL of the characters are complete retcons, some completely nonsensical (Judith) and others just random (Alyx). You've met neither of these people before. Barney is canonically that guard you get to see for whole 5 seconds at the very beginning of HL1, but realistically he's just every guard you've ever met (and possibly killed) during the course of that game. Same with Kleiner, who's just all of the glasses scientists at once. Eli is even worse since while he's canonically the guy that lets you out of test chamber rooms right after the resonance cascade, again, he's just every single black scientist you meet during HL1 except he doesn't even look like the original model at all. Other characters literally didn't exist in any way or capacity, yet act like they've known you for years ev&oe you've JUST met. Everyone is constantly either talking like you aren't around at all or making bizzare pauses, as if Freeman the silent self-insert was actually having a real back-and-forth with them. Unskippable story segments in general are very long and hurt the overall replayability of the game a lot since you stop giving a fuck about their dialogue after a second/third playthrough already. Every single rebel bum in the game somehow knows who you are and what you did in HL1 even though not a singe retconned character was around long enough to know or bear witness to it (Kleiner and Eli have most likely already evacuated Black Mesa by that point because Barney already canonically does in Blue Shift). Furthermore, the game makes it look like every member of Black Mesa staff not only survived all the events preceeding HL2 by some miracle but was also able to regroup around the general area of City 17 despite supposedly being constantly relocated around the globe by Combine, which is just wow isn't that so amazingly convenient! In HL1, your end goal was to escape enter another dimension in order to kill the head of a contained, on-going alien invasion; in HL2, your end goal becomes toppling the regime of an alien inter-galactic empire that completely enslaved the entire human race in 7 hours and kept a strong occupational government for the next consecutive decades - an absurdly unbelievable and suicidally optimistic plot that somehow works because both you and Alyx have impenetrable plot armor. Oh, and Valve themselves also have no idea who Gman is and what he wants which really shows by how they keep retconning both him as a character (HL1 -> HL2) and his intentions (HL2Ep2 -> HLA) - they will never reveal who he is or what he wants even partially because why bother writing actual endings to your mediocre stories when you can just end them on cliffhangers every single time LOOOOOOOOOOL.

Episodes can't really be called DLCs because they're nothing but just more HL2 content. They add no new weapons and only several new enemies, their plot is just a direct continuation of where HL2 ended and like I said it's just more HL2 gameplay because Valve cut way too much content from HL2 over the course of its development and wanted to actually finish at least some of those old ideas (antlion caves, for example).

Anyway I've wasted enough time typing all of this shit out. tl;dr: the game has very little to show for it other than its physics engine shenanigans and also good mapping I guess.

 

[Star Classic]

snip

T.

 

[Taki Supremacy]

Xen went from 30m to a second half of the game

That's really interesting. I'll have to play vanilla Half-Life at some point. I really loved when you first arrived to Black Mesa's Xen. There's that vista of a fucking galaxy and the music that fades in and gets loud, I got cold chills and just stood there for a few minutes. So fucking kino.

Edit: The track that plays is called "Transcendent".

 

[Star Classic]

I really loved when you first arrived to Black Mesa's Xen. There's that vista of a fucking galaxy and the music that fades in and gets loud, I got cold chills and just stood there for a few minutes. So fucking kino.

It was also one of those you had to be there moments, by that point it'd been like 7 years since Black Mesa initially came out as a mod (2012), not to mention that was already 3 years ahead from when it was supposed to release. (2009) This was also before the devs prettied up the game, so basically we'd gone from 2011 graphics to modern day, which you can imagine the shock we all were in then.

Plus HLA getting announced a couple months later? Probably the best time to be a HL fan since the 2000's

 

[MAAAD]

Kek, all the negative stickers yet nothing substantive to disprove what I said. Cope, the third game is never coming out.

 

[Gregg Turkington]

Kek, all the negative stickers yet nothing substantive to disprove what I said. Cope, the third game is never coming out.

How can we disprove your personal opinion??

 

[thhrang]

This is the same user who bragged on the Kiwi Farms about paying to touch a hooker's tits btw.

 

[Brubby Two]

This is the same user who bragged on the Kiwi Farms about paying to touch a hooker's tits btw.

Name a more iconic duo than Slavs and Half-Life

 

[thhrang]

Name a more iconic duo than Slavs and Half-Life

Slavs and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.?

 

[crowabunga]

At this point it's a trivial rapture, it doesn't need to be predictable or even plausible for me to enjoy watching people try predicting it.