soz for cursing the thread
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NEW EYAURA
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Oh yeah I played Episode 1 for the first time last week.
It was okayish, wasnât a huge fan of it really. Iâm much more of a âHalf-Life is a neat place to wander around and markedly less neat when it comes to combatâ person and this felt too combat centric for my taste.
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Sounds like Ep2 will be the one for you then.
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Did you try episode 1 with just the gravity gun? It was the original intent before they wussed out and itâs really fun that way
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The main issue with Episode 1 is that thereâs almost no new artwork or enemies so itâs lacking that sense of surprise and discovery thatâs essential to Half-Life IMO. The Gravity-Gun-only conduct does improve the experience, but not enough to be worth replaying if you didnât enjoy it much in the first place
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Alyx is very very good to anyone on the fence who hasnât played it yet â the recent DLC announcement plus seeing it being played at the meetup reminded me just how impressed I was playing it in the first month of the pandemic right before I briefly stopped forming long-term memories. definitely deserves to be Half-Life 3
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And it improbably makes major design advances in VR after years where Valve was clearly lagging behind others with the interface tools it created. Itâs even more impressive under the circumstances of a game studio gutted of the most ambitious game developers.
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I havenât played it because from all the trailers Iâve seen the world is âHL2 again but a bit more cartoonyâ which sounds like a slightly worse version of the Episode 1 problem.
If Alyx had the boat marooned in a glowing underground ice cave from the HL3 concept art I wouldâve bought a VR rig and played it. Sounds like it doesnât so I might never get around to it.
yeah, I think thatâs basically true, but it hardly detracts from the experience
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Donât play it to experience more unfulfilled Half-Life stories, play it to see the most clear-eyed restatement of what âsetpiece shooterâ can and should do after a decade and a half of diminishing returns. It runs on novelty, pacing, and basic gun feel, so itâs a clear inheritor of Half-Life. In other words, it finally met the criterion for a third game: âwhen we can do something newâ.
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if anything it feels less cartoony than half life 2/ep1/ep2, in a way that I donât love. but on its own terms I think it looks great.
it doesnât recapture the vibe and atmosphere that makes those games special, but it does have a very great vibe and atmosphere.
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I used the other guns when it would have been a bother not to, so basically most of the back half of the game I used guns. I am legit bad at typical FPS shooting so trying some sort of âhard modeâ, even a more interesting one, would have almost certainly gone very poorly. Like as-is it took me a bit over 5 hours to complete it where for most it is seemingly around 3 and change.
TBF I often sat back and just let Alyx do all the shooting.
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That Aphex Twin sound file is bananas.
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