My favorite part of Half-Life 2 is that every time you show up at a resistance base the Combine rolls in with Striders and gunships like you’re just a lodestone for misfortune
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Besides FEAR, the mid 00s had Far Cry, Riddick, Tribes: Vengeance, SWAT 4, Raven Shield and that ambitious but janky Boiling Point Road To Hell.
More like the golden age compared to the last ten years.
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last ten years FPS’s discovered movement again, glorious fast technical movement everyone seemed to abandon after Starsiege Tribes and PC shooters withered in the move to console and the simplicity of Call of Duty
Quake 3 is the goddamn best 3d platformer ever made
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glad I wasn’t the one to go ‘actually the early-mid 00s were better for shooters than the early 10s’ even though that’d be the cliche thing for me to say
I basically abandoned the genre with the rise of military propaganda shooters and its only stuff like neu-wolf and nu-doom thats revived it for me.
the 00s also had STALKER, Serious Sam, Jedi Knight 2, early TF2, UT2k4, Tribes 2, and Zeno Clash
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Preach
The best things about Half-Life 2 are:
- I don’t ever have to play it again
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They’re removing the login requirement for the re-releases. Also I’m downloading Doom 3 on my Switch because I am dumb and really curious to see how it looks and runs. Maybe I will finish it this time.
i think about duct tape mod a lot
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Idk about that wrt movement. Outside of Titanfall and Doom, what else is there?
Oh and obligatory read:
RIP
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After that first playthrough I don’t think anyone continues HL1 after you reach Xen, so HL2 has that going for it. Barrel physics in HL2 consist of clicking on the red thing and waiting for a chain reaction.
Idk for me the hype for Episode 3/HL3 came out of a desire to resolve the HL2 story and the potential of the gameplay improving on the already excellent EP2. HL games innovated and popularized a lot of things but at the end of the day they were just good FPSes.
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Xen is good
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Destiny, Call of Duty, Wolfenstein… we even got a Tribes revival for a period there. The energy was mostly concentrated from 2013-2016, but it’s still echoing and doing good things.
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Anything good that exists in Destiny is negated by the god awful ammount of grinding. It’s discouraging to see so many people seemingly enjoying such badly designed, pointless waste of time games.
Very often I think it’s more useful to discuss aspects and movements and celebrate them for what they are without the context of the whole; certainly a lot of appreciation for ‘bad’ games is a celebration of pieces and aspects and attitude.
I was really good at multiplayer for soldier of fortune 2 and red faction 1 for some reason
When I played this I was just walking about the jungle enjoying the sites, then I was attacked by a FLYING JAGUAR and I turned the game off and uninstalled it
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For me, what’s aged best about HL2 is the commitment for about a third of the game to a very particular coastal and canal setting. Speedboating through industrial infrastructure, searching rusted-out boats in the sunset, clambering on the metal beams under a bridge in the fog.
A lot of the other scenes that were more initially impressive, like robots striding through a blasted city or sublime alien architecture, have been done to death and “better” by 2019. But those quiet scenes on the coast remain distinctly HL2.
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when i first played hl2 i kind of thought the airboat/buggy sequences dragged on too long but now i appreciate their loneliness and how they accentuate the scale of gordons journey
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there’s also something about “am I really dragging this physics object with me for several unmarked hours of game time? what would happen if I left it? better not find out” that’s very quintessentially half life