Half-Life 2

Nah, I bought the voucher itself off eBay for AUD$50. I'm still running the Radeon 9700 Pro that a certain friendly friend gave me a year ago. I wouldn't mind getting my hands on something a bit faster, but at this stage financially I just can't justify it.

sometime, in the next century, i'll be able to afford an upgrade.

But my mobo is bust atm.

Also the new Elder Scrolls game is looking amazing.

This is a good excuse for me post the link to THESE AMAZING VIDEO CLIPS again.

Haha yeah, they annoy the fuck out of me. Still, they definitely serve their purpose.

here it goes

fortunately, i can't afford this right now, otherwise i'd do something stupid like take tomorrow off work(like certain friends have done with other Big Gameday Releases e.g. GTA:VC)

just click this: http://img110.exs.cx/img110/4010/hl2_title.jpg

not that i actually know anybody who has it, but still, you never know...

No MP surprises as far as I can tell. HL2 looks single player only. CS:S is there. Might be something in HL:S, I guess, although it's still downloading.

My HL2 copy should have landed on my doorstep by now but I've got to go to sodding England for a couple of days and won't get to play until Thursday or Friday :-(

http://nf.wh3rd.net/files/hl2shots01.jpg

http://home.comcast.net/~barrak/hl2l.jpg
http://home.comcast.net/~barrak/hl2a.jpg
http://home.comcast.net/~barrak/hl2j.jpg

or dumb ragdoll fun

Aside from that though, I'm loving it. Those little flying circular saw things! Genius!

i'm holding back on this one for a while, I didn't like the first game and am unconvinced that i would enjoy this, impressed as i am by what i've seen. i recently had an irritating experience with STEAM as well.

The first couple of shots I posted were mine - taken on a Radeon 9700 Pro.

I've been playing more... I'm about 9 hours in I think, and I'd estimate more than halfway through. It just keeps getting better and better. I wouldn't hesitate to call this the best game ever.

NEED CPU GUNK

still the handicap kinda makes those dark tunnels super scary.

i thought Deus Ex had won my heart over HL1, but HL2 puts it in its place.

Those canal chases are super fun. Sooooo glad I had the good fortune of blindly choosing to have this week off work.

http://www.sleeve-notes.com/ilm/hl2a.jpg

NEEED
NOT JUST WANT
NEED!

He kept saying "it was the bug, a bug fell on me" half the night. It was amusing.

I am now stuck in zombietown/ravenholm and that crazy priest keeps shouting at me to get to the church, but i am stuck in a walled up area with zombies and bugs and no more bullets... :(

only gravity gun :)

some more nice pictures:

http://www.sleeve-notes.com/ilm/hl2d.jpg

http://www.sleeve-notes.com/ilm/hl2c.jpg

http://www.sleeve-notes.com/ilm/hl2e.jpg

http://www.sleeve-notes.com/ilm/hl2f.jpg

This game isn't just going to change games, it's going to change the way films are made. This is incredible. It makes me want to get a FragBox

"In Half-Life, you take on the role of Gordon Freeman, an innocent scientist who gets caught in the middle of a government experiment that goes tragically wrong, flooding the Black Mesa Research Facility with aliens and monsters. Fortunately, the government sends in the Marines. Unfortunately, they want to wipe out everything, including you.

Deep in the bowels of the Black Mesa Research Labs, a decommisioned missile base, a top secret project is underway. Information about the project is strictly on a "need-to-know" basis, and as a low level research associate you (Gordon Freeman) "need to know" very little. Each morning you ride the train to work from the employee dorms, you put on your environmental protection suit, you enter the test chamber, and you run stress tests on whatever odd devices have been delivered from some other nameless part of the Black Mesa compound.

But this morning is different. This morning, your test lab is suddenly the most important place on Earth-because something is going seriously wrong. Maybe it's sabotage-maybe it's an accident. Whatever the reason, reality is getting all bent out of shape. One minute you're doing your job, pressing buttons. The next thing you know, you're staring into an alien world. Something huge with too many arms is taking a bite out of your partner's face. An explosion of unearthly light....then darkness.

Disaster. Sirens wailing. People screaming. And everywhere you turn, people are dying--being eaten. Monsters are everywhere. Monsters--there's no better word for them. You head fro the surface, to get the hell away from ground zero, but the usual routes are unpassable--damaged by the disaster, infested with headcrabs and houndeyes and increasingly larger and hungrier creatures. Madness is the order of the day. You enlist the help of traumatized scientists and trigger-happy guards to get through high security zones, sneaking and fighting your way through riuned missle silos and Cold War cafeterias, through darkened air ducts and subterranean railways where you must ride a missle transport sled straight into the jaws of slavering nightmare. When you finally come in sight of the surface, you realize the aliens aren't your only enemies--for now the government forces have arrived with heavy-weapons goons, squadrons of ruthless containment troops, and stealthy assassin gals. Their orders seem to be that when it comes to Black Mesa labs, nothing must get out alive....and especially not you, the guy who made it all go bad. So much for the cavalry.

When your own species turns against you, where do you turn? You've uprooted a bunch of nasty government secrets. You've found a portal to another world, and an alien light comes shining through. Can it get any worse over there? Some things you just have to see for yourself.

In Half-Life, you play Gordon Freeman. A native of Seattle, Washington, Gordon Freeman showed high interest and aptitude in the areas of quantum physics and relativity at an extremely young age. His earliest heroes were Einstein, Hawking and Feynman.

While a visiting student at the University of Innsbruck in the late 1990's, Gordon Freeman observed a series of seminal teleportation experiments conducted by the Institute for Experimental Physics (see Bowemeester, Pan, Mattle, Eibl, Weinfurter, Zeilinger, "Experimental Quantum Teleportation," Nature, 11 December 1997) (see also http://www.sciam.com/explorations/122297teleport). Practical applications for teleportation became his obsession. In 1999, Freeman received his doctorate from M.I.T. with a thesis paper entitled: "Observation of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Entanglement on Supraquantum Structures By Induction through Nonlinear Transuranic Crystal of Extremely Long Wavelength (ELW) Pulse from Mode-Locked Source Array."

Disappointed with the slow pace and poor funding of academic research, and with tenure a distant dream, Gordon cast about for a job in private industry. As fortune would have it, his mentor at M.I.T., Professor Alex Kleiner, had taken charge of a research project being conducted at a decommissioned missile base in Black Mesa, New Mexico. Kleiner was looking for a few bright associates, and Gordon was his first choice. Considering the source and amount of funds available to the Black Mesa Labs, Gordon suspected that he would be involved in some sort of weapons research; but in the hopes that practical civilian applications would arise (in areas of quantum computing and astrophysics), he accepted Kleiner's offer. Apart from a butane-powered tennis ball cannon he constructed at age 6, Gordon had never handled a weapon of any sort-or needed to... until now."

for the ending see this walkthroough:

http://www.planethalflife.com/half-life/guide/walkthrough/

"The player again picks up the crowbar of research scientist Gordon Freeman, who finds himself on an alien-infested Earth being picked to the bone, its resources depleted, its populace dwindling. Freeman is thrust into the unenviable role of rescuing the world from the wrong he unleashed back at Black Mesa. And a lot of people -- people he cares about -- are counting on him."

SMASH THAT SHIT

Grand Theft Auto really fucks with your game ethics.

lol...I threw it at them. Then felt bad.

(thanks for the synopsis!)

HERE IS A PICTURE OF ME DRUNK IN PHILADELPHIA A YEAR AND A HALF AGO!

http://www.trigonalmayhem.com/durnk.jpg

That source engine facial modelling is REALLY good, innit?

maybe it's a directx problem?

more half life graf:

http://www.sleeve-notes.com/ilm/hl2h.jpg

http://www.sleeve-notes.com/ilm/hl2i.jpg

dead zombie (right)
dead headcrab (corner left)

Let's rock this fucker.

Im still stuck on Battlefield 1942.

Starwars Battlefront multiplayer sucks balls.

Battlefield Vietnam is horrible for people that are colorblind; sucks balls.

Doom3 was about the most evil, greusome game Ive ever played. (Dont bother with lower-end vid card)

Although, I can't wait to play it on a beefier machine sometime next year...

This game has been great so far. The hoverboat segment was exhilarating and I just made it to Ravenholm. Im getting somewhat annoyed that there arent boxes of ammo for the smg just laying around so I have to actually place my shots carefully and use the gravity gun..

http://www.kingfishphoto.com/albums/Me/aaz.jpg http://shop.gameplay.co.uk/images/Products/RM027_box.jpg

(see also)

...All of the graphics in the game seem to be done at a low resolution. (IE GET CLOSE TO A WALL OR BOX, CAN YOU READ IT CLEARLY?? - NO) I am running HL2 on a top end machine, so I can complain since I built it for this title alone.

[...]

Conclusion, get this game if your looking for something to span the gap from Doom3 and Farcry to GTA : San Andreas / Halo 2. Doom3 and Farcry are MUCH more interesting, and had a 60 - 80% deeper immersion rate in my view. Half-Life 2 leaves me awe struck, and feeling like a child who didn't get what he wanted for Christmas... Looking to my father Valve and Gabe to follow John Carmack and suprise us all with the "real" thing him and his team have been doing for half a decade...

Conclusion, get this game if your looking for something to span the gap from Doom3 and Farcry to GTA : San Andreas / Halo 2. Doom3 and Farcry are MUCH more interesting, and had a 60 - 80% deeper immersion rate in my view. Half-Life 2 leaves me awe struck, and feeling like a child who didn't get what he wanted for Christmas... Looking to my father Valve and Gabe to follow John Carmack and suprise us all with the "real" thing him and his team have been doing for half a decade..."

JESUS MAN GET SOME EYES

Call it paranoia, but it's probably worth checking that this was not directed at me, yes?

Anyone finished it yet?

Got some monster pics to put up later.

http://www.sleeve-notes.com/ilm/hl2l.jpg

http://www.sleeve-notes.com/ilm/hl2m.jpg

Hahaha, no. It was directed at the moron author of that Amazon review.

Now that's immersion.

i'm back in the game tonight.

The game made me motion sick for the first hour i played it...Doom3 did the same. But im over it now and totally tranced into the story line.

Counter Strike Source still sucks though. And Steam updates during online play of any kind can be quite frustrating if you dont take it out of sysconfig/start.

Right, now, back to GTA...

Deathmatch with the gravity gun = wheeeeeeeeee!!!!

where the hell can i change graphic settings w/o actually being in the game?

hopefully this will run better on my pc when i get back home.

i'm gunna start hacking away with regcleaner to see if this improves things on my dad's machine

oh well. I'll try it again when i get home to my system, where i have another half-gig chunk of ram to throw in, an ATI card, and much more cofidence in my abilities to fix whatever's wrong, even if i have to start doing shit like changing timings, memory settings, etc.

i'm also disappointed that the Target by my folks house here in tennessee didn't have a copy of Vampire: Bloodlines, which i was gunna use a giftcard on.

also bought, installed, unlocked, played and finished it all in less than 18 hours time.

oops.

got it on christmas morning, beat it in 8-12 hours, and cried

oops.

And worth every damn minute.

http://www.globalhermit.com/half-life2/d1_town_020001.jpg
http://www.globalhermit.com/half-life2/d1_town_030000.jpg

excellent! now, jack up the AA to the max settings!

and then a slapfight broke out!

oops, that thumbnail should have gone with it

Somebody on the SA Forums decided to make an "improved" ending to the game.

the vitalic of video-games.

not a let-down, in any sense.

Yeah. Everyone's too good at multiplayer, I always get my arse kicked, so it stopped being fun. And then there was the nintendo DS, and resident evil 4, and then that was that, really. Although perhaps we should start some ILX games, if anyone's up for a scrap.

I'm VERY excited about the upcoming expansion though.

I'm playing through on hard now.

tell me fun stuff to do.

I bought a hot new pc and finally got round to playing HL2 again, after leaving it on the shelf since my old system started crashing before Christmas.

I lost my save game and had to start from the beginning. That meant I got to do the fucking batshit crazy canal chase sequence all over again. Fucking amazing. In every way. That chimney stack falling is a proper VIDEO GAMING MOMENT.

Then I got to go to Ravensholm again. Possibly the most disturbingly fun level ever. Cutting those poor bastards in half with circular saw blades with a manic preacher watching and laughing. Fucking amazing.

Best game ever.

I can now play CS:Source with decent frame rates as well. I PWN FAGGITS!11!
(still hating those bastard flashbangs though)

If there's enough interest and someone has a server available I wouldn't mind getting a wee match up and running. I remember an attempt at getting an ILX CS1.6 game running at one point but time differences, apathy and a typical FAPper's level of organisation meant it came to nothing.

i usually play on [burstfire.net] UESC Monkey Brothel!
IP: 82.136.6.5:27015

i'm usually 'kitten gnomish' or 'kittyautomatix0r'

i tried to coax people into playing before, but the same problems occured.

I've sent that ip to my home email and I'll try to play over the weekend at some point.

I'm usually 'onimo'.

: (

I used to play it as a wee change from hours and hours of CS but it's never really gripped me.

I haven't read anything on DoD:Source so I've no idea how they've enhanced it.

I'm on the Citizen One level after running about the maze-like houses, but there was a cut scene dialogue that I missed and now I don't know what to do.
I'm back with the girl and two other soldiers, outside where there's a fountain with a control booth. The girl said 'cover me' but she doesn't seem to be doing anything. No other exits available. What to do?

does it look great?!

11.11: Protect Alyx?
- Easy enough. Kill resistance, find a way downstairs, and make your way to outside, and protect Alyx while she lowers the shields.

11.12: Easy for you to say. The Combine keep coming and my men are retards.
- Use the hoppers. Snipe. use cover fire. Do what you can to preserve your life and keep them far away from Alyx. IF you can do that, then when the shields fall, sprint to the generator and use the grav gun to push out the core. Then run into the opened gate and she should close it behind you and the surviving idiots.

11.13: Where do I go now?
- Go down the crevice and into the hole. Alyx won't follow you. She'll
become Princess Toadstool and the Combine will become the Koopas.

11.14: Where do I go now?
Follow the path and eventually you'll make it down a flight of broken
stairs. Make it to the door you'll find locked. Go inside the door
next to it, kill the black headcrab, and use the grav gun to remove
the wood that has it locked. Then go through and find a ladder to
climb. This should lead you to the WORST part of the stage.

11.15: Ok how do I get past this nightmare?
- Walk around the catwalk to the switch. Activate it. Kill all seeable
Combine. Wait for platform. Ride platform up. Walk along catwalk. Climb ladder up. Walk on pipes. Walk around to beams and walk on the beams that hoist the platform you just rode on. Walk across them and crouch to go all the way. Climb on the catwalk. Walk around to another ladder. Jump to middle catwalk between very top and where you came from. Walk it and fall at exit door. Beware of hoppers.

Hmm, this could be it but I have waited for about 15 minutes and still nothing is happening, nobody left to kill. She just stands there and does nothing.

Thanks tho.

yeah, it's looking like it isn't it.

Damn, and my restart point is *within* the bug zone.

there's a thread about this on ILG, but i'm posting here (again!) to try to rally some (l33t) troopz. anybody that fancies playing CS:Source with other ilx0rs, throw me an email to the address below or come post on the ILG thread and we'll sort stuff out. come join clan [ILX]... we have comedy ILX sprays and everything. kk thx bye.

Shit

Anyone know how far off the end I was?

Have you shot the generator core with the grav gun, or did the core not even become exposed?

Restart the ENTIRE game? Argh! Does the XBox version not give you the option of starting a new game at any level you've previously reached, like wot the PC does?

So I loaded it up again after work, just to give it one last blast. Low and behold it was still fucking up, Alyx just stood around not opening the gate blah blah and no soldiers were appearing for me to kill.

So I execute plan B...

I grabbed a shit load of furniture from the inside of the previous building, this included a couple of wardrobes, two tables, two boxes, and a filing cabinet. I gravity blast them to the back gate.
Then I carefully stack them so I can climb pretty high up (took me ages trying to get the tall items upright). I managed to jump the gate!!!

HAHAHA I am on the other side muvvafuckas! The graphics were a bit fucked at first, transparent bits and that, but as I dropped to the next checkpoint we were back in the game.

Again, HA!

So it looks like the bug has not come back to haunt me and I am now fending off Striders outside.

I intend to finish it over the weekend.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Xr3JXPJV7PE

PLenty of weird shit from the beta has made it out there, and more & more info from all the cut scenes & weapons of the game.

bah can't watch at work will have to wait

Orange Box comes out in October I see for PS3 as well, which includes Portal, HL2 Episode 2, Teamfortress2, and as a bonus HL2 and Episode 1

http://www.aperturescience.com

still very early in on half-life 2 (running through the canals in the city) but the controls on this are really frustrating me, it took me like 20 tries to do something that should have been really easy - run across some wood platforms. every time i tried to jump this little gap i would fall back into the canal and have to start over, meanwhile i'm getting shot over and over again. tell me the game is worth this crap. i guess so, since everyone loves it

are u playing on pc?

it's a truly awesome game

only came out 5 yrs ago huh

EP 3 NOW

NO JUSTICE NO PEACE

nah ps3. i got through half-life on ps2 so i must just be out of practice :/

nick, i took advantage of the super generous save system to save right before (and after of course) tough parts like that.

i fucking love this game on pc, but for all its' greatness i failed miserably to enjoy it on the ps3

FPS means buy me on PC or go to hell!

Bleh STALKER is better.

yeah i'm pretty sure it is generally accepted that HL2 for PS3 is one of the worst console adaptations ever. i bought Orange Box and immediately sold it.

what's so bad about it? i know there were bugs but they were all fixed...

i had no issues with the xbox version iirc

yeah same here - what did they do to you ps3 dudes?

valve hates PS3 and so the porting wasn't handled by them iirc

n/a - does the ps3 version have quick saves? If so, like Jordan says, just quick save before a part that is troubling you like that, and quick save right after you make the jump. Basically, everybody pretty much agrees, whatever system you're playing the games on, the platforming in the Half Life series is pretty awful most of the time, but there is very little of it, so yeah, keep going.

OK nevermind this game was awesome. Just beat it, loved the bizarro ending, the long tour through the citadel, the supercharged gravity gun, NO BOSSES, so much fun.

amazing game.

yup, great game

no - amazing game.

super

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/01/not-a-lie-valve-upda.html

Valve is up to something

From the comments on that bb link:

"In a nutshell:

-Portal gets surprise update yesterday afternoon
-People see new mystery achievement
-People play and see the radio in the beginning room now has a green light
-Carry it around and notice it makes strange broadcast interference noises in certain places
-Locate and place all 26 of these mystery radios for achievement
-Smart people yank wav files out of game content folders and run them through steganography programs
-Produces 26 weird cryptic image files in a numbered sequence
-Some dude runs the number string through an md5 hash translator and gets a landline number
-Internet traces it to Kirkland, WA (near Valve HQ)
-People find out its not a phone/fax line but a data line hosting a BBS and telnet it
-Use a clue from one of the files to figure out the BBS user/password login info
-End up with a bunch of weird ASCII artwork
-We're trying to figure out wtf it means"

Amazing.

Reminiscent of NIN's year zero campaign, natch.

here's the weird ascii artwork:
http://img63.imageshack.us/img63/9306/portalasciilarge2.png

steelwraith replied to comment from Anonyman • #6 • 18:49 on Mon, Mar. 1 • Reply
Yea, glad there aren't hundreds of thousands dead in the last few weeks.. millions more that die every year from starvation and preventable diseases.. you just spend that time looking for easter eggs in a game that mean f*ck all..

steelwraith keeping it real

I'm wondering how the first people twigged onto the fact that images were maybe hidden in there, and if a Valve employee perhaps made a surrepticious(sp) reference to it somewhere that someone decided to follow...

this is great!

http://www.mullsports.com/images/blinking-cursor.gif

tho i guess i'm a little disapptd that this (afa anyone ks) means portal 2 and not HL3

It won't be HL3. They're going to release HL2:Ep3 before that happens

eh i'll believe that when i see it too.

tho i guess i'm a little disapptd that this (afa anyone ks) means portal 2 and not HL3

hmm, it could be either. A meeting of the two perhaps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Azqhjkbta4

(also interestingly linked to all this note 2:06 mins, and what he says)

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20091026094538/half-life/en/images/e/e2/Wallace_Breen_breencast_bust.jpg

Please bow you heads for a moment of silent reverence over the passing of Dr. Wallace Breen.

Ok am total gaming amateur with a Mac, but Steam is selling a complete set of Valve's games for £17 in OSX in a sale today. That's good and I should buy it right?

They discount their own games all the time and it might not be the lowest price ever, but it's still a good deal.

Just succumb to hard core nerdery and DL dota and tf2. It's free!

Portal 1 & 2 are worth playing, tho the scope of each game is wildly different.

both are incredible though, especially portal 2

Not sure how else I would phrase this, but it wouldn't make women of colour sound like an endangered species:

Valve’s follow-up to its beloved sci-fi shooter may feature a rare woman of colour as hero and is expected to be exclusive to its HTC Vive headset
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/nov/19/new-half-life-sequel-vr-exclusive-htc-vive-headset

The headline was also changed to clarify that the Half-Life sequel will not likely be exclusive to just high-end VR headsets. Yahoo!

It's a bad headline, but technically true - in the grim future of Half-Life 2 the human race is an endangered species that has been unable to reproduce for several years, so Alyx really is rare. She is a rare pepe.

I loved the original game back in 1998. It had limited replayability, and I remember that the last expansion pack was so dull it made the original game and Opposing Force look worse than they were. It really belongs in a completely different universe to the sequel. The tone is completely different. It's definitely pre-9/11 - everybody is an asshole in a world of assholes and the government is evil, that kind of thing. The sequel is tonally post-9/11.

For a variety of reasons I didn't play the second game until 2012, years after it had been "a thing" - years after Garry's Mod had been a thing, years after internet jokes about picking up that can etc. I thought it had aged really well. The environments were spartan and the levels were all designed to make you run around in circles, so that they would look bigger, but the graphic style, the sound design, voice acting, world-building etc held up. It had an overall sense of hopelessness that's rare in video games. It made Eastern European architecture hip.

At the time it must have seemed linear and simplistic, but that was before the Call of Duty cover shooters that came later. It's hard to believe it was released only four years after Daikatana (with "Superfly Johnson") and three years after Red Faction, with its disappointing physics and scripted animations. I vaguely remember contemporary reviews moaning about all the see-saw puzzles, but the game only had a couple, and they're near the beginning. The propellor buggy level is far too long. The storyline feels as if it has a huge chunk missing from the middle.

Of the three big FPS games from that year - Doom 3 and Far Cry were the others - it has aged much more gracefully.

i don't remember the whole game very well at this point but the ravenholm level is one of the all time most memorable video game sequences

also i think this is maybe the only single player FPS campaign i've ever completed, not usually my genre

was fairly young when i played that level and it was legitimately terrifying to me xp

when the fast zombies show up when you're stuck on that elevator...

The environments were spartan and the levels were all designed to make you run around in circles, so that they would look bigger, but the graphic style, the sound design, voice acting, world-building etc held up.

otm

it progresses v well in the second half. game as a whole is kind of a v polished sampler-- vehicle level, resident evil level, level where everything is about turrets-- but after ravenholm i'd say it slowly builds in hectic mania, tires you out w climactic urban warfare setpiece (complete w squad control interface you are likely to ignore) that itself points "forward" to the major CoDs, then moves to deliberately surreal denouement where you are hurling entire platoons of soldiers around with the gravity gun to solve simple environment puzzles. still not as formally neat as the first game's ascending-the-dungeon structure, and as for the level design yeah if you were raised on gorgeous 90s labyrinths it was obviously just a ride. great ride tho.

calling alyx "a landmark in video game representation, a woman of colour with a leading role when other major games were dominated by male protagonists" is a little ott considering that-- despite being a silent and unseen protagonist!-- u play a white mit grad revered and idolized by the entire population of earth whom she can barely look at without blushing.

The imagery in Kill Switch feels kin to Half-Life 2. Not a great movie, but some cool visuals.

IGN mentions this game will follow Alyx in between Half-Life and Half-Life 2. So more a prequel, if correct.

I don't think it's ott - representation largely sucked (though there were definitely exceptions).

But the exceptions, that I can think of, are say Jade in Beyond Good and Evil - not AAA games.

beyond good and evil was ubisoft, very much a AAA though that term meant a lot less back then before the scope of big budget games blew up

yeah beyond good and evil performed like a cult game but idk if it was supposed to.

when half-life 2 came out players of crpgs had been accustomed for over a decade to choosing their avatars, no matter how slim the portrait pickings tended to be for poc (or for dwarf women of any kind). multiplayer fps players at the turn of the millennium could choose from fighter-game-style walls of faces in quake 3 or unreal tournament, and face bots drawn from the same pool. yr prob right that the avatars of lone-badass single-player fps campaigns were disproportionately (and frustratingly, seeing as there was often no actual need for them to be anything at all) white guys, tho as you say even there there were exceptions (joanna dark, samus aran) and options (deus ex). representation indeed largely sucked and i remember "superfly johnson" well, but imo it didn't suck quite so bad that alyx making moon eyes out of the screen at you while waiting to be told what pressure plate to stand on was a landmark.

i forget if you were a white guy in yr fleeting glimpses of yourself in system shock 2. possibly the character models were so bad it was impossible to tell.

vampire the masquerade: bloodlines came out the same day as half-life 2 (i just discovered) and is much more worth replaying, from this perspective and others.

I can still remember playing the original Half-Life for the first time, in 1998, and it clicked immediately that Valve had tried to make the main character a stand-in for every twenty-something graduate who had just started working for a big company. You're late for work, all the other characters are older than you, everyone is mean all the time, the place is full of security guards and inspirational posters. I had the impression that the initial part of the game was supposed to be a twenty-one-year-old graduate's first experience of wearing an ID badge and having to wear a suit and go to work.

I think there's some flavour text to the effect that Freeman was a keen "bucket list / hiking in Greenland" kind of person, somewhat akin to Hooper's character in Jaws, e.g. naive but competent, which explains why he's a crack shot with modern infantry weapons and can run and jump like Daley Thompson. It's not unknown for medical registrars and the like to go hiking during the rare times they have leave. It would have made a lot more sense if Freeman had been a geologist rather than a physicist. It's a running gag in the second game that the only science he does is press a button.

From what I remember of the second game you don't interact with Alyx all that much. She rescues you early on, but then you're split up. She reappears half-way through the assault on the prison and is then kidnapped again. It's not until the first and second episodes that you spend significant time with her, and in the second game she's critically injured during the first half. She is used as a damsel in distress; the posters show her in a subservient position, standing behind Gordon Freeman; she is the only character who has an emotion breakdown, but then again she's the only character who displays any kind of extreme emotion. The gender politics of Half-Life 2 are still old-fashioned, but they're miles ahead of most other games. In retrospect the second game is akin to Bumblebee, the film, in the sense that it obviously takes place in an exaggerated fantasy world - Alyx would be a supermodel in real life - but within the context of that fantasy world it aspires to a level of verisimilitude.

I also have the impression that the writers thought about making Alyx fall in love with Gordon Freeman, but decided against it, because realistically she has led a traumatic life and spends most of the games trapped in a nightmare world of death and brutality, and it would be slightly creepy, because you're a kind of surrogate father figure. The designers strike me as perfectionists, and with a voiceless hero and a consistent first-person perspective the deeper characterisation required of a romantic engagement would have been impossible implement.

On a tangent, a few years back there was a terrible, infamously bad "Cinematic Mod" for the second game that ruined the graphic design and turned all the characters into reality television contestants, e.g:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/fakefactory-cinematic-mod/images/cm11-comparison105

The designer even went to the trouble of modelling Alyx's cervix, presumably so that her shorts would have realistic camel toe. It stood out as being particularly awful because the developer was simultaneously very busy, totally misguided, and utterly un-self-aware. That's a toxic combination of attributes that underpins most of the awful things on the internet. It disturbed me, because there really are people for whom films and computer games are just a succession of pretty pictures and explosions.

I had the impression that the initial part of the game was supposed to be a twenty-one-year-old graduate's first experience of wearing an ID badge and having to wear a suit and go to work.

def. was amusing to show thru this lens what is also the very same Shooter Plot established by doom/quake, viz. big science has opened zombie portals-- the refined fantasy here being not "u are a space marine" but "u are not a space marine but if the need arose u could be"

the famous train ride opening i love more abstractly because you are descending thru what you will have to ascend later; that's nice.

I was considering buying the Index controllers to use with my Vive earlier this week, but had decided to wait and see if there would be Black Friday sales on them. Then, the news leaked that they would be doing HLVR, and I realized that if I wanted to scoop them up, I needed to do it before the official announcement. There's no doubt in my mind all the hardware will be sold out--so I made the purchase.

Stoked it's free with any Index hardware!!

Gordon's quite a bit short of a space marine, I'd say - the genre is more horror-with-action-trappings than Doom's action-with-horror-trappings - there's several levels in the first game where you're mostly running from an unfightable monster, and the swarm of zombies while you're waiting for the poorly lit elevator in the second one is amazing.

fair point; there's also several levels in the first game where you're running and hiding from the u.s. military, whom duke nukem or doomguy could probably take on head-to-head. the game gets a lot of atmosphere out of these "this is too big for you" situations, which themselves are part of the one-bad-day-of-work vibe, and yeah the pace is usually closer to the slow creep of survival horror than to the doom/quake hurtle (tho worth noting it is not as slow as system shock 2, much of which shares w the first section of half-life an enemy bestiary divided into "shuffling zombies" and "things that jump at your face" and in which you are literally a space marine). but that's what makes it a process of becoming: at the end you go to another planet and shoot a lovecraft thing. admittedly the end is widely reviled.

the second game and its "episodes" def feature lots of explicit horror setpieces, but part of what i meant about its being a "grab-bag" was that quite a bit of it is also heavily armed broad-daylight combat against armies, and its penultimate segment is a mini-call-of-duty. maybe he's just a regular marine.

Half-Life Alyx trailer looks BEATUIFUL. Article says same length as Half-Life 2.

So stoked, can't spell.

free on steam for another day, as part of the 20th anniversary

(i went to buy it, already had it, haven't played it since 2010 apparently (although i've sure i replayed them all in the gap before this current job, which was 2017))

((oh, was reading that wrong, it says 2018))

Google keeps feeding me "Half-Life 3 is happening!" stories. I am holding my breath.

If it does arrive, wonder if it will include anything from Laidlaw's previous ideas. https://www.denofgeek.com/games/half-life-3-story-spoilers/