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Whenever I see people talk about Half-Life Opposing Force online it’s with glowing, glowing reverence. I’ve seen people call it one of the best FPS experiences ever. And I just don’t see this at all, in fact it’s about as good as Blue Shift, which is underrated.
But I wonder if the disproportionate praise is due to a kind of Boba Fett effect where you have this cool militarized armor suited protagonist without a personality on the box that certain FPS gamers in the 90s just had so much fun projecting onto…
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Also sounds like just the usual type of discourse around niche stuff, where its fans sing its praises while people who didn’t enjoy it see no reason to punch down
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well partially it’s because opfor was out within a year of half lifes release. blue shift came out in 2001 and people were already thinking about hl2. daikatana came out the year before and people thought it was dated because it was on the quake 2 engine. so even though they’re similar quality xpacs the bias of the time creates a gulf
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Neither of them are near as good as the base game, but we loved HL to death and just wanted More, immediately. It was like a wish had been granted
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also opfor does have some novel stuff compared to blue shift. theres the Race X aliens who are now mostly notable for giving sven coop more enemy variety, the goofy alien weapons like the barnacle grapple, spore launcher, and shock roach, CTF as a game mode in HLDM, and the DISPLACER CANNON. it’s basically a BFG but it’s a teleporter gun and you can self-teleport with it to secret areas which was pretty cool at the time before people figured out exactly how it worked!
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Also there’s a penguin weapon that works exactly like the snarks do in the CTF mode
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I mostly remember opfor as the first game I ever saw with ropes as actual physics objects instead of just static objects
You can kind of get a feel from this video (mute heavily suggested) lets play Half Life Opposing Force pt.1 I hate ropes! - YouTube
But what I remember is that the rope’s energy never decayed. Once you bumped into it and the very obvious segments started to bounce around it would never settle and just endlessly vibrate in space
It must have been one of the first times I actually thought about how you’d make a game do that. My conclusion was that it looked like shit and it wasn’t worth the effort lol
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The leaked duke nukem forever 2001 build has like the best rope physics out of any game of that era. All the problems that made opfor ropes so unreliable are gone. george broussard taking another unreal engine classic away from us with that 1
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I am going to think for a long time about how, in winter of 2022, the most positively received new videogame release was a Sonic game.
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this graphic from “New Zealand Story”. Environmental Storytelling at its finest
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A Plague Tale: Requiem is up for a bunch of game awards, every time I read the title I think it’s some fucking Dreamworks animated cartoon from the mid 00’s. so naturally I made a horrific simulcrum of what that might look like
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I guess this means we can forget about using the elevator.
Maybe not! Tom left a message. He wrote it on the floor in his own blood!
…in his blood? Way ta go, kid!
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Hanabi Fantast I only played briefly but I remember staring at it going “what is this?”
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after watched how x-com created by RetroAhoy
feel people are dumber than 40 years ago
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wait…only 138?