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 :-(

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/