Zero Punctuation: Half-Life

[Hutzpah Chicken]

I remember when the Marines first showed up. I walked over to see if I could get a squad, then they started shooting at me, thus I killed them all with the mysterious dual shot from the single barrel shotgun. I love Half-Life.

 

[dnazeri]

Yeah, I still think the Half-Life series is mediocre at best and boring at worst lol.

Sorry, Yahtzee ;D

I never played the first, but I couldn't finish HL2. The puzzles frustrated the hell out of me. It seems like you need intimate knowledge of the source engine and Valve's brand of logic to be able to solve them. I spent hours stacking boxes next to a ladder with the bottom section locked up by a grate, but was unable to get them to stack evenly or climb the boxes. The room was literally filled with boxes, so I assumed that's what the game wanted me to do. When I finally did climb the boxes I found I couldn't stick to the ladder, no matter how hard I tried. Turns out I just had to shoot the lock and climb the ladder. Not to mention that bit where you have to launch your hovercraft over the awkward ramp to get to the dam controls. It took me 100 tries to finally get up there, and when I did finally open the gates I jumped back down without the hovercraft and had no way of getting over the wall which I had just opened and which was too high for Gordon Freeman to jump over. So I had to do the whole thing over again.

tl;dr: I'm going to maintain the illusion that I am not stupid by insisting that Half Life 2's level design was shit.

 

[ScrabbitRabbit]

It feels unfair to review HL/HL2 today.

The games didn't age very well and plenty of game have outdone what HL/HL2 did. Story telling, universe, graphics, game play, voice acting ect have all been outdone. Of course that doesn't mean HL/HL2 is bad it just means that it's, well, old.

The HL series to me is one of those series that just aged really really bad.

Half-Life is a strange one, it's become divisive in this respect. I can *kind of* see how it appears aged to some people but, well, I played the whole series for the first time this year and they quickly became my favourite shooters, ever. I haven't yet played anything else that gets my heart racing like the final section of Episode 2 where you're protecting the base.

In fact, I really cannot think of anything that's come out since, regardless of genre, that I've enjoyed as much and, as I said, I played them all for the first time this year.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

You want another good old game, Yatzee?

Vampire the Masquerade bloodlines (with the latest fan patch, or else the game is literally un-finishable).

It's got great stealth gameplay, great setting, great immersion, and it's just generally been blowing my freaking mind ever since I started playing it a week ago.

 

[Britisheagle]

Thanks to that text at the end I actually said Croshaw out loud. Damn you lack of sleep!

Good review and I agree that some features feel dated now. I have been playing older games recently and it makes me wonder how much would be changed in the name of casual gaming if they re released them.

 

[Mogless]

This review felt like classic Yahtzee. I really enjoyed it.

 

[Strain42]

He should do another Fake Review a la Duke Nukem Forever for Half Life 3, but go the opposite route and talk about how horrible it is.

 

[Gremlin-Stenning]

I bought this game just yesterday on PS2 for 2 quid and can't wait to give it a bash I love retro games
I don't think you can quite beat them.

 

[Sofus]

Everyone likes Half-Life... those who claim that they don't, simply suffer side effects from having enjoyed it so much that they must now live in denial or their brains will short circuit.

P.S. Gordon isn't Jesus...... Gabe Newell is

 

[purf]

I don't think I could stand playing the original now.
But then, as of this writing, Black Mesa arrives in 1 day, 3 hours and 20 minutes

 

[Mahoshonen]

As an aspiring CPA candidate, the idea that G-man works for accounting amuses me to no end