Replaying Half Life 2

[Mai72]

Since I only have an Intel 4400 card in my laptop I decided to stick to a few old games that I have in my Steam library. I decided to replay Half Life 2 since the last time I played it was on the Xbox 360.

The source engine is showing its age. It has been 9 years since Valve released Half Life 2. The weapons are still underpowered, and not being able to peak around corners still bothers me. I think it's ridiculous that you don't see Gordon's hards when he's riding in his buggy and little boat. The way he climbs ladders is still silly, and smashing crates to find ammo gets old fast.

With that said I'm still enjoying the game. The Half Life 2 world is interesting. The action pieces in the game still bring a lot of tense moments. You become attached to the characters in the game. It makes you want to push on to find out what happens next. The gravity gun kicks ass, and the physics engine is still awesome.

Played 4 hours straight last night. I was up till 3 am. I haven't gamed that late in a long while.

 

[videogames101]

one of the premier single player PC experiences to be sure

 

[Spungo]

I've never understood the appeal of HL2
Here's a brief summary of everything that happens:
-you show up a train
-there's no back story
-the city is run by the TSA because...... reasons
-the guard from your old job works for the TSA
-cut scenes
-more cut scenes
-half of the game is driving
-the other half of the game is unskippable cut scenes

Not a single thing in the game is memorable. The game has no replay value.
It feels like the game was made just to demonstrate what the game engine is capable of doing so it could be licensed to other developers. id Software did the same thing with Rage, and it was a disaster as well. How can we show what the id Tech 5 engine is capable of doing? Let's make a really terrible game that includes stuff just for the sake of including it. Let's add race parts to the game. Let's make the player drive from location to location even though this makes the game extremely boring. Let's include tons of unskippable crap. Let's include some kind of quest system but make the quests really boring and pointless.

This seems to be pretty standard with modern games. Let's add stealth to our game! Why? I don't know. Just do it so we can appeal to that market. Who cares if the stealth system is broken. Let's add vehicles! And we need a cover mechanic with chest high walls. And let's add a leveling system to the game. And quests. And it'll be cinematic. We need to make the game dynamic and proactive. It needs gritty realism. We need to focus on the multiplayer component of this game even though it's a horror game and being alone is what makes it a horror game. We should also make the game relate to current events and include some kind of binary moral choice system where you're either the second coming of Jesus or you're the second coming of Hitler. And let's add quick time events so we can say it has those.

 

[Zenoth]

Nice, it's a very good game, in my opinion, but Episode Two is the true masterpiece.

Problem is... well yeah, needs a sequel but... yeah. Anyway, side note for Half-Life 2 (and the episodes), there's a bunch of nice mods out there to increase the textures resolution and quality as well (literally changing them from default to something completely new that still fits the setting, most of the time). There's mods also I believe to get better (and/or different) character models.

The age of the game and its engine do very little to diminish the game's overall quality. I say overall, because there's a few monotonous parts here and there, but generally speaking it's a great game, one of the best single-player story-driven FPS games out there (it's in my own top 10 I'd say).

 

[darkewaffle]

I think HL2 is definitely one of the best games I've ever played. The gameplay is solid (albeit unremarkable) even if the guns don't 'feel' nor sound very good, but otherwise I think it's extremely well done. Episode 1 is OK (although I'm pretty sure that's the one that has the achievement to beat it only using 1 bullet which was fun) and Episode 2 has is very good, the ending battle to it I thought was outstanding in execution and tone. Continuously looking forward to HL3 whenever it arrives.

 

[Rezident]

Still one of the best games ever but the original half-life was even better when it came out. HL2 is great though, what i really loved was the pacing, not many games and seemingly no games back then could do the pacing that well, the build-up, the excellent use of sounds and music from the quiet moments all the way up to the set pieces. Still the best I've seen it done. There was a moment in, i think it was episode 2, underground with the antlions, where there are different numbers of red lights to show you how many are approaching. That is a masterful demonstration of pacing in a game, when the music kicks in, it is simply brilliant.