Is this imperative if you have a headset? I never got into Half Life 2 or its sequels but I like Portal/2.
frankly very little essential about it imo (it’s not a patch on Baba or Outer Wilds from last year in terms of Look What Videogame Can Do) and even as a VR game I don’t know that I find it as revelatory as Sprint Vector or RE7 but it is just very good and propulsive and has nice physicality and it’s nice that Valve made another Half Life that’s pretty much on par with their other work
it’s rather mainstream-feeling and well-rounded for a game that’s not necessarily too broadly accessible to folks but I think that’s why you don’t see a lot of big budget VR titles
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Lots of very very good interface design leaps here if you care about that. It’s an order of magnitude less fiddly and it enables them to make a long game that’s not fatiguing like other expensive VR prospects.
It retains Valve’s unique ability to make storyboard games like Another World into an action game; still, no one does foreshadowing and irony and pacing like Valve does, even as everyone stole their presentation style. I find it much more engaging than Portal 2 and I think they need an action palette to build the dread, tension, and release they build levels out of.
The YouTube clip Dracko posted the other day of the window crawling, zombie behind a shutter, and the singer of the zombie coming out of the bathroom – that’s an examplar of the level design they remain extremely good at.
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I just got the SMG which I think means I’m right about halfway through (playing rather slowly, probably only like 30-40 minutes a few days a week)
still enjoying it a great deal, still have it slightly below my top tier of VR stuff, probably closer to even with something like astro bot that’s just relentlessly well designed and fun (and like astro bot, rather long and gamey) but doesn’t blow me away conceptually.
I feel like there’s less auto-aim in this than in most VR games and it totally works (emptying a clip into a headcrab should never be trivial) but it’s an interesting choice!
Yes I would like to play this, somehow, before long
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yeah geez I can basically only play this on weekends, I just don’t have the presence of mind on a workday with everything else
for me it’s standing, if I spent most of my workday with my desk fully elevated I realize I’m not into squats at 10pm
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I love this game so much it’s so good
the jeff chapter is little wonky tho
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I hard disagree with this because I think part of the point was to make you feel like you’re all thumbs and relearn the way you interface with the game to overcome this specific situation, except Jeff essentially turns this into learning stickshift on hill…but I have no idea if you’re talking about this aspect of it or something else like a headcrab fucking up your plan or being expected to catch a bottle when you open a locker. I just thought anything that didn’t feel “fair” was like, either hysterical or great entertainment in its own right, so it worked for me.
I loved it overall there were just a few scenes where I felt like there were hitbox issues or something, specifically the scene where you’re stuck in the elevator with him and you have to push a button right by him and getting to a position where you were close enough to push the button but not close enough to be killed by him, like I was definitely close enough to “reach” the button multiple times but it just wasn’t working and if I got any closer he’d just vom on me, and this happened consistently enough to where I just figured that wasn’t the intended solution and I got stuck there for way longer than I should have
might have to do more with specific jank to the way my sensors are set up or something, idk.
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okay I finished it and that was thoroughly enjoyable, I loved it, but I really really don’t know what to make of the ending. like… idk if I love it or hate it. I feel like it kind of sucks lol?
finally just did the jeff sequence myself, absolute masterpiece, probably elevates the whole thing to essential
glad they can still be that scaryfunny
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also I definitely had this problem a couple times too and what kept me from being stuck on it for longer or second guessing myself was basically trusting that it was such a funny setup that I couldn’t imagine the developers hadn’t intended it that way
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the last hour of this ran like absolute shit for me which was kind of a shame, idk if it was an untimely driver update or if being below minimum CPU spec on a third party headset finally caught up to me but it was fine until then at least
loved the ending, it’s not often you see people who know how to delight in revisionism like that, like they realized they wrote themselves into a corner they never wanted to be in
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Yeah, the more I think about the ending, the more I like it.
I had to talk my partner down after she played it and assumed Alyx died in the ending because of the “vital signs critical” audio. She never played the episodes so I think it will prove more than a bit confusing for someone without context.
after watching through i chewed a bit over whether it felt like a cop-out ending but it is ultimately quite closely aligned with what was suggested in marc laidlaw’s rough outline of the intended conclusion of ep 3
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A new era is begun, hopefully.
Just thinking about how there’s two eras of Half-Life now. 1998-2007 and 2020-???
Getting all misty over video games.
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You’re not alone. I want Valve to be good again so badly.
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MVGA
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Multiplayer??
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