After playing through both of November 2004’s big FPS releases, Halflife 2 sure made me appreciate Halo 2 a lot more.
Gonna try not to post too much in here.
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Important playlist.
Do you want to learn more about Half-Life? To see the obscure? To witness the oddities? Then you’ve come to the right playlist!
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the best thing about half life (both un and deux) is the incredible mods made for them and with them
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I liked the original Half-Life. It used the traditional FPS design of putting you in a virtual environment to play in. It had story-telling elements on top of that. It had interesting enemy and weapon designs.
Half-Life 2 has a different design, a more divisive design. Half-Life 2 is more overtly designed like a theme park ride. The designers hand is guiding you a little more forcefully down a more obviously linear path. Some people love it, some people hate it. Put me in the hate it camp.
They’re both well-made games, but I only like one of them.
the first time i ever played half-life was in 2003/2004 when i finally got access to a windows (98SE) PC (my girlfriend upgraded her PC when she went to college and gave me her old Pentium III @450 MHz). it’s one of the few games i’ve ever truly binged. i played from early evening until well after the sun came up. i had made it all the way to the final boss and i was just a bit too tired to continue.
still haven’t beaten that final boss, nor have i returned to the game. i treasure that experience to this day. i’m fine with it being this crystallized, unwavering certainty.
i did actually beat half-life 2. it was fine. it was grand. the gunplay was fun.
but hl1 is the one that sticks with me due to it instilling in me a desperate need to see as much of the game as i could immediately, an effect only a few games have ever had on me
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Half-Life 1 is a bit dated but still mostly holds up
Half-Life 2 is a bit dated but still mostly holds up
those are my spicey opinions 
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they are both good games. the lack of physicality never bothered me. in fact to this day it still kind of bothers me when first person games give you a torso and legs and feet – it feels way more weird and unnatural! to me trying to go there creates a much greater uncanny valley because it’s so close yet so far. I don’t think I’ve played a single fps that seems to get it right, honestly I think not having feet or hands when interacting with props is a more graceful solution and it feels invisible to me! I’m probably in the minority here but this is how I have always felt!
that whole controversy notwithstanding I think what makes half life 2 cool is how it tries to not be an fps. most of its set pieces are more like little puzzles. some of it is kind of ham fisted and they are just trying to show off the physics engine but I feel like at least an attempt is made to show that gordon is not a super soldier, he just has good aim and is very clever and observant and survives more via his wits than sheer firepower. people forget how primitive action fps games were before half life 2 came out. it really did push the state of the art forward and I think it’s well made enough to still be entertaining and enjoyable (and at times even insightful and revelatory) today.
I honestly feel like the “shootery” sections have aged the worst… nova prospekt and retaking city 17 always kind of feel like slogs to me, interspersed occasionally with interesting set pieces.
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like I’m playing prey and when you look down when you’re walking and it kind of just looks your feet are gliding over the floor while moving in a way that kind of looks like walking. movement in fps games is not particularly true to actual human bodily movement, so trying to make it more physical creates a very large disconnect.
the only game that I feel got it remotely right was RE7, but your movement in that game is much more restricted and realistic compared to most first person shoot man games. and they put an enormous amount of attention to the details of movement and turning. like, just turning actually makes some bodily sounds, and it does this thing where as long as you don’t turn past the normal limits of neck rotation there is a delay until the rest of your body pivots in the direction you’re facing.
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I think I probably feel about half life 1 the way booj feels about 2, every time I’ve played it I’ve been super bored and not understood what I’m missing
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like I love quake and deus ex and hl2 and every time someone says half life is great I think back to my experience with it and am baffled
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I think the original half life has a lot of charm but honestly feels redundant next to its sequel. there are a few idiosyncratic things about its setting and narrative that I think are missing from part 2 but it’s still kind of hard to go back.
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Half-Life came out two years before Deus Ex.
Half-Life 2 came out four years after Deus Ex.
If anything I’d say Half-Life 2 was regressive.
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deus ex definitely tells a much more sophisticated story but uses much more primitive tools. it uses very simple scripting for its cutscenes. most of the story is told through text boxes being spit out of static talking heads. when there is on screen action it’s like watching quake bots. I mean I love it but half life 2 did incredibly novel and groundbreaking things with interactive storytelling (even if it just amounts to interactive cut scenes for the most part, that was still a huge step forward to be able to walk around in such a thing in real time)
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(I should clarify that in my mind those are not criticisms of deus ex at all, and I honestly think deus ex has aged better than either of the half life games and is overall a cooler game and blah blah blah)
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HL1 has a great selection of weapons, HL2s are weaker. Also:
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RE7 had to nail it because of VR, which maybe explains why VR games always have you as a floating invisible entity.
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I thought the VR aspect of RE7 was kind of grafted on after the fact? either way I wish more games would learn from that game.
yer killing me Toups. Don’t make me start talking about Halo 2. I don’t even really like Halo 2, but c’mon.
Yeah, just add to that a lot of people insisting you have to play it, so you do, and it just consistently makes you more and more angry at every individual moment. This is how I end up like I am about HL2.
HL1 has somewhat of a special place for me, but only for the MP that I would play at LAN parties in high school/early college. I barely touched the campaign ever.
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