There’s an important distinction between little bits and bobs that won’t kill guys and heavier objects (barrels, radiators, cinderblocks) that will. The sawblades are just like their own hilarious thing.
Although them all feeling the same while being manipulated by the gravity gun is kind of like, the whole point of the gravity gun. It, you know… it removes their gravity. Everything weighs the same when it’s weightless.
It’s not like the heavier weapons you may carry like rocket launchers feel like they have any sort of inertia to them when you swing the mouse all over to aim at stupid alien hovercrafts
it’s not called the inertia gun, give us a little momentum and mass
Isn’t it a zero point energy field manipulator? 
They specifically show Alyx nearly break a rib using the gravity gun in its tutorial room. The HEV suit is what normalizes the recoil of all the weapons.
It sure is!!
We don’t go there any more.
OK so I drove that buggy all over ant lion hell and now I’m officially further than I was the previous time I attempted this game back in 2012. That buggy chapter definitely went on too long but I liked it a lot more than the boat chapter (even though the buggy’s gun felt like it was sharting every time I fired it). The bit where you climb across the underside of a bridge was pretty inspired. Between HL1 and this, it seems like these games are strongest when they make you clamber across anonymous infrastructure in imaginative ways. I hope I’m done with the buggy for good but I have a feeling I’m not.
I’ve got to say I really don’t like Gordan Freeman as a protagonist. Maybe they develop him more later, but right now to me he seems like just a stupid looking libertarian goatee guy who went to MIT and then into the military industrial complex, and now everybody in his life just glazes him all day every day. The essence of early aughts gamer wish fulfillment…
hes literally one of the reasons i dont want to play the game! every time i start im like UGH THIS GUY and my skin crawls thinking about playing as him hahaha. it was great when i found his dead ass body in stalker. you know what ill bug veronica about half life 2 mods where i can play as someone who doesnt repulse me
im still waiting for lambda fortress though
you’ll be back here saying that when i play for the first time 
I don’t even want to imagine how many XKCD comics Gordon Freeman has sent to other people.
Assuming HL1 and HL2 are present day (1998 / 2004) XKCD (2005) likely never came into existence.
Hes maybe a Dilbert guy though.
The half dozen or so people Ive met who work in DOD contractor tech / engineering jobs were frat boozer types and don’t really go in for “nerd culture” at all. Like I think Gordon and Barney would be pounding home brew IPAs trying to play corn-hole with the gravity gun.
hl1 takes place in 200x and hl2 takes place expressly 20 years later which is stated in the game among other reasons. half life 2 taking place now is kinda funny. perhaps we will be liberated from fascism in a period of weeks when a dude shows up from the past sometime in May. john titor hero arc
Breen 2028
i really love the vehicle segments… especially the dune buggy chapter(s). i love how much of it is stopping at little outposts and exploring and finding some unique bit of environmental story with your treasure cache. funny cuz i remember disliking them and thinking they went on too long on first playthrough too, they just really grew on me
ive never quite understood “tech demo” as a pejorative. i like quite a few games that get that leveled at it (Super Mario 64 is another favorite example)
the way NPCs pivot to stare at you is pretty unnerving/annoying though lol. i always remember when you first meet Alyx and she like walks backwards into Kleiner’s lab so she can keep unbroken eye contact with you
something i remember liking about the episodes is they center Alyx a lot more and make her the clear protagonist of the story, and Gordon isn’t glazed as much by everyone and is more there to support her. it’s why i like what we know of the proposed HL3 plot (which would have involved her striking a deal with the G-Man) and that she was the actual player character of the improbable decades later sequel (where she… uhh, spoilers)
You should play the alyx VR game if you liked where they were going with things story wise
That reminds me I need to try the no-vr mod of that eventually (when I can afford a graphics card).
I feel like Gordon Freeman is nobody’s idea of a wish-fulfillment stand-in except for two or three of the leads at Valve in the early 2000s. I got a STEM degree around when HL2 came out and worked at tech companies until recently, pretty much the ideal target audience, and never once did I overhear anybody say anything positive (or at all?) about Gordon Freeman. Half-Life 2 as a game: quite popular, Gordon Freeman: absolutely not.
Valve probably intended him to become an iconic silent protagonist like Master Chief, and totally failed.
