still the best apple eating simulator
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My understanding is that the body modeling in RE7 is descended from Amnesiaâs impact on horror games â realizing that body presence and physicality (touching walls, doors, objects) enhanced your ability to inhabit a character hiding from a monster. RE7, Alien: Isolation, and to an extent PT are big-budget interpretations of this idea.
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PT feels like the oppositeâthe lack of reflection on the protagonistâs face and the glitching of the camera before the crash feel like the game wants to move right past the avatar and scare you directly.
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Yeah, I think it loses the body presence but takes from it the helplessness of a normal person without weapons.
I think PTâs great insight is to make your verb look â block out your peripheral vision, stop moving, make yourself vulnerable â of your own volition. Itâs irresistibly awful to hit that button when you think you hear the ghost behind you.
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its such a shame that hl2dm is such a weird footnote for a lot of people because i spent hundreds of hours playing it on foreign language servers running shitty eastern european collage custom maps. some dude named GRY2006PL bhopping around in low gravity instakills you with the crossbow from across the map and suddenly youre barraged by the ut2k4 announcer yelling HEADSHOT and somebody starts using a server plugin to play russian hard bass at 200db. like inhabiting some kind of slavic cyberhell
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i keep reading this thread as fet-life its killing me
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i have great memories of listening to âhalf-life 2 radioâ which was just some european trance internet station you could connect to via the MOTD and doing co-op puzzle maps in hl2dm while 4 russian children screamed at me for not doing anything right
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The most personal and disappointing legacy of HL2 for me is the long slow realization, after it felt like a miracle on release and then Episode 2 made it even better, that its incredible quality was basically an accident and Valve actually has no idea how to make games just like everybody else
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listening to hl2 radio while playing on an RP server running hometown1999 and having the entire thing be on scouts honor because there were no formalized mechanics for roleplaying in hl2dm
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The wildest thing about HL2 is how much of its development has been leaked. To the point where multiple groups of people are making games based off the original concepts, and you can look through years of beta files of old maps and pinpoint changes. Like Ravenholm having the same basic layout since 2002. Despite Valveâs secrecy itâs one of the most fully dissected games out there.
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Oh god booj is talking about HL2 again. I still remember the rants and that forum sig.
HL2 is a bucket of problems that somehow makes a compelling whole. The strongest point for me was just seeing what was around the bend and getting ready to do some blasting. I like the blasting itself, especially tricky distance shots but the periods in between stand out more. The sneaking about, crawling through industrial zones, sliding down though bug tunnels.
Its got a lot of driving which can be fun but was never exciting. It feels like what someone who has only ever driven a sensible car sensibly expects. It drives the same on sand, grass, dirt, pavement. Its never a danger in itself like a buggy / sand rail should be. Its just always sort of under-powered and even with the boost on it just kinda gets loud. The suspension doesnât really move. The airboat segments with the jumps and such are a lot better but water just acts like packed earth, the boat never digs in to corners or bucks on waves, you never get sprayed when landing off a jump. The muscle car is more of the same. Either machine, without changing how it drives, would have felt so much wilder / heavier / more fun if they just added suspension compression so it bucks and dives and leans over in the corners.
It has a very consistent and particular look/feel but I wouldnât call it pretty or ugly. It gets across what its getting across, nothing is really awkward. Ill look up sprites or models for a game I like and Id never bother doing that with HL2. Though I know Im going on about the buggy a lot but it has the most confusing design. Where is this V8 I keep hearing?
The normal object sound design is not great. The chair sliding sound that sounds like someone blowing through a straw sucks and seems to create the impression that the furniture is like balsa wood or something, it kills me. The balsa feeling persists with the gravity gun which seems to launch everything the same amount.
I really wish the g-gun was cooler. It was fun in the lets-fuck-around kind of way and its brilliant in ravenholm. I really just need one segment where Im stuck defending a bathroom with nothing but the g-gun and a long line of toilets.
I cant really break it down but the game seems to keep a consistent groove. What ever it is, it hooks me.
Garyâs Mod was a curse a time hole. The hours I spent building things in it that Ill never get back⌠It scratches my itch to build and tinker but with basically no reward. Almost none of the things I built worked excellently, usually due to a physics anomaly. I got pretty far into building a Rube Goldberg maze machine and then realized I was likely the only one who would ever play with it.
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Did they not know or do they not know? I feel like they had it for a while and then they lost it. HL2 was still a tremendous success even if I donât like it. Portal and Portal 2 were great even though theyâre probably mostly developed by that team they bought. But hey, they bought the right team and they didnât mess up their work, so that counts for something. Same thing with Counter Strike. They had their finger on the pulse for a long time.
Then came Artifact. After a long, long time of nothing. Somewhere in there they lost all the good folks.
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In Portal, the voice acting, scriptwriting, clinical lighting, humming sound design was all from people preexisting at Valve, and you can see those elements as a progression of HL2. In particular, the fantastic dialogue was all in HL2, merely underplayed there.
Dr. Breenâs script and voiceacting doesnât get much attention, but itâs politically insightful about a particular subculture. Heâs a West Coast futurist, confident his knowledge of science and long-term historical perspective gives him the right to wield power. He mightâve been some kind of libertarian that was into cryogenic body freezing in the past. When the aliens take over and offer him a position, his political philosophy seamlessly transitions to an unprecedented variety of fascism.
The overheard radio chatter featuring all this incomprehensible Newspeak is also fantastic and no other game has done anything quite like it. Sample quotes:
- Contact, Target One.
- Target my radial: ninety seven degrees.
- Overwatch, Spear Seven, engaged in clean up.
- Target Ghost Two, go active intercept.
- Call contact suspect target one, grid twenty dash fifteen.
- Overwatch, we have non-tagged viromes, grid eight dash two.
- Overwatch confirms, helix vector tango is contained.
- Tracker Eight is holding at code sundown.
- Sector seven, outbreak, outbreak, outbreak! (I bet everyone remembers this one)
And from Overwatch Voice (the same actor as in Portal!):
- Individual, you are convicted of multi-anti-civil violations. Implicit citizenship revoked, status: malignant
- Attention all Ground Protection Teams: Autonomous judgment is now in effect. Sentencing is now discretionary. Code: amputate, zero, confirm.
- Individual: you are charged with Socio-endangerment, level 1. Protection Units: prosecution code: duty, sword, midnight.
- Priority Alert: Nova Prospekt exogen breach. Perimeter communication status zero. Internal stabilization teams deploy sterilizers in suspected infection blocks A5, A7, B2.
- divisive sociocidal counter-obeyance
- 10-103 disturbance by mentally unfit
- 50 percent reproduction credits
- Reward notice: Protection Team member: your family cohesion is preserved.
This script is so good right!?
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Lot to unpack in a quote like this. This is the only one hinting that they still retain a trace of genuine humanity. Theyâre fighting you not only to avoid an electric shock or to get an injection of morphine, but also to preserve whatâs left of their family.
We can infer the vast majority see their families torn apart, since this line is only heard when they kill you, a high value target. The aliens have understood human nature well enough to weave in human connection into their system of exploitation, at least a little bit.
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the sound of Overwatch cops flatlining is simultaneously one of the most satisfying and chilling VG SFX imo
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You can also see where Valveâs modeling and animation teams have been on another level since Half-Life 2 â almost nothing from that era holds up visually like Half-Life 2, and thatâs due to very considered but realistic palettes and material choices, while the character design is notable for its ability to convey character in flexible situations.
Browse through the source filmmaker community and itâs obvious how well the character faces are designed because they capture faces Iâve never seen in a game, even as theyâre pulled and stretched by rough hands.
look at this face! This is such a specific Boston Guy face and it just works so subtly and perfectly! And Scout is actually one of their lesser models. Look through this channel and youâll see the creator fall in love with Left 4 Dead 2âs Coach, one of the best-modeled faces Iâve ever seen. He can do anything, and look warm and Coach-like in any role:
can I gush about how good Coachâs teeth are? theyâre so good
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This one is pretty terrific
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yeah the facial acting in HL2 remains next-level shit. That intro with the G-man right up in your grille!
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