that thing gave me the best jumpscares
I can just picture somebody trying to fulfill ‘make it scary’ at 2 in the morning by just giving up and flipping the animation speed to 300%, it works so well // or, a designer absolutely abusing art assets in service of a specific mood, and winning
Heh, you’re right. It’s been a while.
Remember HL Uplink? That was probably better than any chapter in the base game.
Yeah it was like a greatest hits compilation of most of the different setpieces in the main game, but compacted way down into a short experience.
the further i get in HL1 the more i actually sort of hate this. There have been multiple times in Surface Tension where i just burst into a shower of drumsticks and livers and had no clue why
Hoo boy, people shit on xen but i totally forgot how much the game wears out its welcome by the time you even get there. Surface Tension was half as long in my mind and everything between it and Xen was collapsed into a shorter sequence of events, but you actually do a bunch of backtracking and looping around destroyed buildings and water pumps and stuff while fighting too many aliens that take too many hits to kill. It’s not really very fun! Xen is at least cool looking enough that i can enjoy noclipping through it
noclip and godmode are the only way i ever kill the last boss too. fuck that guy
Xen is way too long but I love that there’s a weird alien meat-packing facility in it
The sharp damage falloff with distance on explosions just ends up making them feel random and capricious - it’s hard for a player to understand where they were in space next to an explosive, so it’s hard to put together the consequences, especially when they can be as obnoxious as ‘reload your save’. Better to make the noise volume and flash intensity falloff realistic, but even then, I usually prefer longer (non-exponential) volume falloffs for things like explosions, because they have gameplay consequences.
My final thought on HL1 going into 2 is that the tram ride at the beginning of 1 is a perfect metaphor for the rest of the game: about 25% too long! Wah-wahhh
meanwhile, “Point Insertion” is about as long as the ride and Gordon’s trip to the tesst chamberrr put together, and i know everyone and their mother has blabbed about how it’s a masterclass in video game scene-setting and world building, but, uhhhh… it is that! When i replay HL1 i think “wow Black Mesa sure is deep down there. Like, really really deep. Reeeeaaally deeeeep ok i’m gonna go take a piss” whereas for basically the whole first 20 minutes of HL2 i’m like aww shit, here we go again. i love this game, i always forget how much until i’m up in it
Somehow this is the first time i realized that the cops are flipping out and busting down doors right when you get there not because FREEMAN’S HERE — that’s not until the teleporter accident — but simply because your presence meant there was a miscount.
And it’s amazing how much i hated the vehicle levels my first time vs how much ass i think they kick now. Like “Highway 17” might be flat out my favorite level?
Broco mentioned this upthread but yeah the quiet, forlorn coast stuff is probably the strongest in the game
I’d be really really happy if Valve ported Half-Life 2 to an engine that could load one zone in advance and ditch the room-by-room nature of the coast and underpromise of the car.
When I first played it through it just repeated the last half-second of the audio buffer for the entire minute-plus of every load screen ever few minutes, which may have made me more anxious about their load structure than others.
Oh yeah I made this:
I love the tram ride in HL1 for the same reason I loved picking up garbage in No More Heroes. Games should strive for boring the player more often? I dunno.
ehhh. If you’re going to purposefully induce boredom in me with your video game you had better do it extremely tactically
i thought the tram ride was cool exactly once. and even then, at about the 2nd load screen i was like “OK, i get it already”
I don’t think the tram ride is boring at all. it establishes atmosphere, there’s some neat foreshadowing about the kinds of environments and hazards you’re going to be facing, and there are plenty of entertaining things to see on the way. :marge simpson voice: I just think it’s neat
The tram ride was also a major graphics showcase.
Sure i agree with all that, i just think it goes on too long.
there’s some cool shit but there’s also like 2 separate parts where the tram stops to let some shipping crates pass lol
Also a scripting showcase.
“Whoaaah look at this we have NPCs walking around and talking. It’s like an animotronics show in your FPS!”
yeah it’s like uhhhhh immersive
(you’re definitely right, like by today’s standards it’s bloated and self-indulgent but I still love it because it’s still 1998 in a cold dark corner of my heart)
i’ll drag HL2 for a lot of stuff but the sound design is A+++