[01010]

You people play games too fast . I think I was about halfway through DX2 at about 12 hours.

[Petrarch of the VBB]

I wanted to get it over with as soon as possible, it was such a travesty.

[Corhellion]

Half-life...*sigh*...the FPS of all FPS's...Name another game that has 3 different versions of (roughly) the same story...Half-life had Blue-Shift (which wasn't that bad..but...WAAAAAAAY too short) and Opposing Force, which...IMO was BETTER than the original, and the High Definitions pack that came with Blue Shift was an added bonus.

To me, there are three types of people in the world, the people who love HL, the people who love Halo (which is pretty close to Half-life if you think about it...Aliens attack...the good guys attack back...the story infolds before you...you kill more guys...it's the same ****ing thing over and over again!) and those people who don't like Half-life...and those people can GTFO of the thread this isn't a debate thread between the FS2 fans and the FPS fans...it's a thread about Half-life 2...you don't like it...don't post...simple as that

As for me...HL2 all the way man!

[Styxx]

Originally posted by ZylonBane
The mental malfunction of people who think Half-Life sucks is exactly that they're comparing it to first-person RPGs like System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Daggerfall, etc. Get this through your heads, people--

HALF-LIFE IS A FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER. It is of the same genre as Doom, Duke Nukem, and Quake. If you're looking for an engrossing story and memorable characters, you're playing the wrong kind of game. Half-Life is all about the linear, scripted, explosion-filled, hail-of-bullets roller-coaster ride.

The fact of the matter is that Half-Life popularized elements of FPS gameplay that are now considered standard. It did away with floating spinning powerups and replaced them with realistically-placed equipment. It had NPCs who could actually help you out (even if they never did buy you that beer). It got rid of EXIT doors, in favor of levels that flowed continuously one into the other. It had combat AI better than any that had been seen before. It told its story entirely in-game, through conversations and events, rather than through immersion-breaking cutscenes or briefings. It supported mod-makers to an unprecedented degree.

But of course, none of this will mean anything to you if you basically don't like FPSs.

Bollocks. You're basically saying that it's awesome because it's a little bit less crappy than the other games in the genre. None of the features you listed were first introduced by Half-Life - sure, some of them were neat, but nothing about it felt groundbreaking (I actually played it a bit when it first came out on a friend's computer, and didn't get past the first hour of gameplay because I couldn't stand the boredom). And if you remove the RPG elements from System Shock 2, for example, it'll still be several orders of magnitude better then Half-Life on all aspects. Hell, Duke Nukem 3D had almost as much of a story as Half-Life, with a much better ending at that.



I'll agree on the mod support, though, but that's beside the point - my rant is about everyone who went all ape**** about Half-Life having the most awesome story ever and being the most realistic game up to that point.

Originally posted by ZylonBane
I wonder how many gamers got to the end and never realized that Gordon was essentially the bad guy of the story? After all, Black Mesa invaded Xen, abducted their citizens, and performed medical experiments on them. Once Gordon enters Xen (which I admit mostly sucked) he's the invader-- slaughtering everyone he meets and eventually assassinating their leader.

I look forward to discovering how the humans and Xenities became allies by the time of HL2.

They just about rubbed that in your face by the end, pasted on a piece of rough sandpaper. You gotta be pretty thick to ignore it. Still it was one of the two or three moments in the game where there's an actual storyline, and it was incredibly shallow.

But hey, to each his own. I saw some Half-Life 2 movies and they had a cool weapon that grabbed stuff from the ground and threw it around, maybe I'll give it a try just because of that.

[01010]

The gravity gun excites me in a way that has me worried.

The idea of repeatedly slamming enemies into the wall and then firing their dead body at another enemy quickly follwed by a filing cabinet and a few crates for good measure is positively spooge worthy.

[ZylonBane]

Originally posted by Styxx
Bollocks. You're basically saying that it's awesome because it's a little bit less crappy than the other games in the genre.

Y'know, if you'd just admitted up front, "I don't like a game that's in a genre that I don't like", it would have saved a lot of confusion.

None of the features you listed were first introduced by Half-Life
And I didn't say they were. I said they were popularized by Half-Life. A game doesn't have to invent something to do it extremely well.

And if you remove the RPG elements from System Shock 2, for example, it'll still be several orders of magnitude better then Half-Life
Now this... THIS is true bollocks. I'm a pretty big SS2 fan myself, but I will readily admit that Half-Life's combat walks all over SS2. This is unsurprising, since SS2 runs on an engine that was originally designed for the decidedly non-combat-oriented Thief games. By the way, did you know that SS2's training section and scripted sequences were directly inspired by HL?

my rant is about everyone who went all ape**** about Half-Life having the most awesome story ever and being the most realistic game up to that point.
No one but the most slobbering fanboys ever claimed that. If you happen to see any, please direct your rants toward them. That being said, remember that prior to HL it was exceedingly rare for a pure FPS to have any plot at all. Usually there was a premise ("Aliens have invaded! Kill them!") and that was it. HL at least threw a couple twists into the proceedings. Heck, it even divided the game up into "chapters". The ever-elusive G-Man stalking you through the entire game was a brilliant inclusion, as was the complete absence of combat in the first section of the game. What other FPS let you wander around, say hi to people, eavesdrop, suit up, report for work, and then experience things going to hell first-hand? In an era when most FPSs cast you as a wisecracking supersoldier, HL put you in the shoes of a scientist who just happens to be wearing a really kick-ass suit. And you're not nameless either-- you're Gordon Freeman, and eventually everyone knows who you are. And the pacing... the pacing was exquisite. Every enemy and every weapon was introduced in a memorable way. You don't just find your first rocket launcher laying in a hallway-- you find it tucked away in a cave just as a helicopter looms into view. The first (dangerous) headcrab beams into the room before your eyes. The first zombie is being desperately gunned down by your good buddy Barney. The first vortigaunt beats down a metal door to get at you. And so on.

In the end I suppose you can choose to reject any argument regarding Half-Life's quality, but you're still stuck with the fact that it won over 50 Game Of The Year awards. That's a few dozen more than hype alone can account for, don't you think?

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by ZylonBane

In the end I suppose you can choose to reject any argument regarding Half-Life's quality, but you're still stuck with the fact that it won over 50 Game Of The Year awards. That's a few dozen more than hype alone can account for, don't you think?

I presume that, by that metric, you'd accept that Call of Duty was far better than Half Life?

[ZylonBane]

Beats me. I've never played Call of Duty. But I would accept that it's probably an excellent game within its genre.

It would of course be ignorant to claim that more GOTY awards means Call of Duty is better than Half-Life, because the two games didn't come out in the same year. They were competing with different games for those awards, and there are probably more people handing out GOTYs now than there were then.

[Styxx]

Originally posted by ZylonBane
Y'know, if you'd just admitted up front, "I don't like a game that's in a genre that I don't like", it would have saved a lot of confusion.

None of the features you listed were first introduced by Half-Life
And I didn't say they were. I said they were popularized by Half-Life. A game doesn't have to invent something to do it extremely well.

And if you remove the RPG elements from System Shock 2, for example, it'll still be several orders of magnitude better then Half-Life
Now this... THIS is true bollocks. I'm a pretty big SS2 fan myself, but I will readily admit that Half-Life's combat walks all over SS2. This is unsurprising, since SS2 runs on an engine that was originally designed for the decidedly non-combat-oriented Thief games. By the way, did you know that SS2's training section and scripted sequences were directly inspired by HL?

my rant is about everyone who went all ape**** about Half-Life having the most awesome story ever and being the most realistic game up to that point.
No one but the most slobbering fanboys ever claimed that. If you happen to see any, please direct your rants toward them. That being said, remember that prior to HL it was exceedingly rare for a pure FPS to have any plot at all. Usually there was a premise ("Aliens have invaded! Kill them!") and that was it. HL at least threw a couple twists into the proceedings. Heck, it even divided the game up into "chapters". The ever-elusive G-Man stalking you through the entire game was a brilliant inclusion, as was the complete absence of combat in the first section of the game. What other FPS let you wander around, say hi to people, eavesdrop, suit up, report for work, and then experience things going to hell first-hand? In an era when most FPSs cast you as a wisecracking supersoldier, HL put you in the shoes of a scientist who just happens to be wearing a really kick-ass suit. And you're not nameless either-- you're Gordon Freeman, and eventually everyone knows who you are. And the pacing... the pacing was exquisite. Every enemy and every weapon was introduced in a memorable way. You don't just find your first rocket launcher laying in a hallway-- you find it tucked away in a cave just as a helicopter looms into view. The first (dangerous) headcrab beams into the room before your eyes. The first zombie is being desperately gunned down by your good buddy Barney. The first vortigaunt beats down a metal door to get at you. And so on.

In the end I suppose you can choose to reject any argument regarding Half-Life's quality, but you're still stuck with the fact that it won over 50 Game Of The Year awards. That's a few dozen more than hype alone can account for, don't you think?

I admit that FPSs are not the first genre I think of when I want to buy a game, but there's several of them that I enjoyed thoroughly, but Half-Life wasn't one of those.

About the System Shock 2 thing, maybe the combat engine wasn't as good as the one on Half-Life, but I didn't have any problems with it. You can configure the controls to be just about the same, and it behaves on a very similar manner so for me it's more or less a non-issue. Now, the story, ambience and overall immersion on Shock 2 are superb, and that's what made the game for me. Half Life was, at its best spots, so-so. It just didn't make me believe on what was happening, while on Shock 2, at some spots, I ran for the first table I found and hid under it hoping that the zombies would go away.

For the "plot being rare before Half-Life" thing, yeah, you can argue that. But it wasn't unheard of, and they could have done a much better job at it on Half-Life than they did. It just feels like they decided a plot would be a good thing, spent ten minutes talking about it, wrote what they had down, and then never raised the issue again.

And yes, I can't deny that it won a truckload of awards. And I can't say that all of them were due to hype, but a good amount of them probably was.

I'll go see if I can find some real fanboys to pester now.

[ZylonBane]

Originally posted by Styxx
It just feels like they decided a plot would be a good thing, spent ten minutes talking about it, wrote what they had down, and then never raised the issue again.

On the contrary, Valve had a dedicated writer on staff during the production of Half-Life.

It sounds like you're one of those people who doesn't think HL has much plot because it's all experienced instead of told (ie, spoonfed). When you take into account everything that Gordon sees, hears, and does over the course of the game, I'd say there's at least as much plot as your typical Hollywood action movie. Which, considering HL's design goal, is just about right.

[Ransom]

Er... id had a writer on staff during the production of Doom 3. Doom 3's story was almost nonexistant (And as you mentioned on another board, a lot of the development stuff, i.e. audio logs were inspired/ripped from SS2 anyway). However: I enjoyed Doom 3's story, however basic it was. But I did not enjoy Half-Life's story.

[IPAndrews]

Funny how when a new "best ever" FPS/FPRPG/FPwhatever appears people start talking about System Shock 2. There's a good reason for that. If there's anyone left out there who hasn't played the game - take the hint

[ZylonBane]

Especially with the high-res texture and high-poly model replacements that are available. The graphics hold up pretty well even today, and of course the gameplay is as awesome as ever.

[Petrarch of the VBB]

SS2 co-op is always fun, but my connection seems to hate it, causing much ****ings-up.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by IPAndrews
Funny how when a new "best ever" FPS/FPRPG/FPwhatever appears people start talking about System Shock 2. There's a good reason for that. If there's anyone left out there who hasn't played the game - take the hint

It's just a shame there's nowhere you can buy the bloody thing from.......(and before anyone mentions it, the HoTU link doesn't work for me)

[Killfrenzy]

I'd happily play through SS2 again..........but it refuses to work under WinXP.........

[Ransom]

Hmm. See if this helps: http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=60930

[ZylonBane]

Originally posted by aldo_14
It's just a shame there's nowhere you can buy the bloody thing from.......

There are almost always a few copies going on eBay.

[aldo_14]

I don't trust eBay, though.  If it isn;t in the shops, I don't buy it.

[ZylonBane]

Oh, you're one of those people.