Bravo, Ush. Your thoughts on Red Steel are pretty much mine.
And there's nothing quite like a casino filled with demented rabbits, burly men in schoolgirl outfits, explosives, and a whole team of wanna-be Zyurangers. That was my favorite level as well.
Originally posted by Lana
Bunnies and explosives is a combo that can only really end up in hilarity, unless you're blowing up the rabbits.
I dunno, there's something about cute and fuzzy things getting asploded that makes me chuckle 😕
Anywho, nice work on the reviews Ush; haven't played RS yet, but I find myself agreeing with you more often than not on the KoToR stuff. I look forward to seeing more of your reviews.
Just a little busy with RP stuff right now to write reviews, but will pick up again soon.
Intending to do a load of Classic game reviews too, so you can get my feelings about things past. My loose definition of classic is anything from the last century
Currently on the 'to be reviewed' list!
Modern games:
Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (but I never review a game unless I have finished it, and I am taking this slowly)
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (for which I will be crucified)
Medieval 2: Total War
Neverwinter Nights II
Civilization IV
Half-Life II
Classic games
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (looking forward to me tearing this one apart, eh? well, tough, I loved it)
Wing Commander III
Rocket Ranger
Lords of Midnight
Alpha Centauri
Midwinter I/II
Blade Runner
HALF-LIFE 2
The legend that is Half-Life kinda snuck up on the outside- it’s actually quite difficult to remember the days before the sensation that it was.
These were days when, basically, the Quake franchise was the biggest FPS kid on the block. People were still desperately awaiting Doom III. Myself, I had always preferred Heretic to Doom (and in fact was one of the very, very few people in the UK to own a copy of Heretic on its first release; I filled in the form that came with the Shareware release and sent it off, which seemed to surprise the UK branch of id software/ Raven so much that they phoned me to check if I meant it. You will occasionally hear, when looking at FPS histories, that Heretic did not get a commercial release until after its sequel came out. These things lie; I am direct witness to the contrary), and so had followed the Heretic line through Hexen, Hexen II and the eventual Heretic II. People preferred guns to swords and sorcery, which I guess is fair enough, so Doom and Duke Nukem got all the credit, but Heretic was the first FPS to have the up and down look and an inventory system, Hexen was the first to have character classes, and each one was in some way much more innovative, certainly to my mind, than the mainstream FPS games. (Incidentally, my cds copy of that Heretic release is long lost, much to my unhappiness, but I still have the data, lovingly copied from computer to computer every time I changed PC. I recommend that you get a copy of the WADs of Heretic and Hexen and play through them using this software: http://www.doomsdayhq.com/).
So, being the lover of more canny FPSs, then surely I was greatly anticipating Half-Life’s release, yeah? Nah. Actually I had barely heard of it; it seemed to be just one of a crowd of new copycat FPS shooters that were coming. I was waiting for Sin- it had a great buzz and they released a great demo for it. My judgment could hardly have been worse in retrospect, because Sin only had the one great level- the first- and the rest was an unimaginative, and also incredibly buggy, mess. In a nice piece of irony, some ten years later the sequel to Sin has become available via Steam, the on-line delivery system basically made possible by Half-Life. Apparently it’s also quite good. But I digress. Eventually a friend got me to play Half-Life and it didn’t take long to get incredibly hooked. I may do a full review on HL some time, but to quickly summarise, what made it great was… well, many factions. Its integration of plot into gameplay without having to break into cutscenes, yet still maintaining their dramatic impact. Excellent characterisation. A decent plot (for an FPS, that is). Weapons that ‘felt’ right- an almost indefinable quality that is make or break for so many games (Goldeneye had great feeling weapons as well, though the very original great feeling weapon was Doom’s shotgun). Decent (for the time) AI and comments made by in-game characters. Decent level design (how can you live without that?), and a decent background setting to it all, all contained in chunks that loaded as you moved around, rather than independent levels, giving the whole experience much more continuity. And immaculate presentation, that carried through into the mini-game demos and the interweaving plots of the bonus material seen in Opposing Force and Blue Shift. Probably the most impressive thing is that it managed to be this bloody excellent despite having pretty much none of those extra features I had seemed to like in an FPS. In fact, at base, it was so much like Doom it was almost plagiarism. Just goes to show that approach is often more important than originality. As it is, Half-Life was original in lots of other ways, even if the core of it was the same thing FPS fans had been doing for years.
Of course, when you get such godlike success you are in for serious ‘second album’ syndrome. How can you make something so good again? One challenge is impossible- Half-Life 2 could never have the same impact. Why? Because this time it was so damn famous from the off. The original Half-Life muscled its way into being famous by being so damn good. You can never recreate that again. This is not a matter of hype, just the situation in which your game is released. So… I’ll leave that aside, and try and judge it by its own merits.
One thing that you certainly could not accuse Valve of is being too quick. It’s surprising to confront the fact that HL2 is actually quite old now, because they certainly took their damn time in making it, and that long period of time people spent waiting for it seemed pretty darn significant back during those years. Now it’s all gone and I’m pushing 30. Boo. Of course, the long delay only pushed the excitement about it to fever pitch. They stoked this by making much of two factors, not actually central to whether it was going to be an excellent FPS or not. The first thing they pushed heavily was the new physics system- in these days of (possibly pointless) Physics accelerators we take that kind of thing for granted now, but not long ago spending quite so much effort on physics was such an unusual thing that the otherwise totally crap FPS(ish) ‘Trespasser’ got kudos simply for its decent physics alone. The second thing that was pushed hard was the new on-line content delivery system, Steam.
Just to get this out the way, I hated Steam then and now. It caused complications and problems (especially when changing computers) and downloading big games like that, especially at the time, was a real nightmare for some- not to mention those without internet access (not THAT small an amount, doubly so for kids using computers where only their parent’s computers were hooked up) who found themselves unable to play even if they bought a shop copy. Just to aggravate more, Valve have ‘propagandised’ Steam horribly since its launch, taking every damn opportunity to talk about things they did which would nit have been possible without Steam, which is basically hogwash. I am sure it makes their life easier, but that’s not the point, we are the ones playing. The totality of my experience says to me that Steam is a barrier between me and decent gaming, not a tool of accessibility. But I won’t judge HL2 on it, I will simply note that Valve are asses for inflicting it on us.
So, finally, onto the game itself. You again play Gordon Freeman, one-time scientist from the shadow Black Mesa institute in the first game. Gordon got unwittingly caught up in the ‘Incident’ at Black Mesa. Luckily he was in a full hazard suit at the time, which meant he was protected from some of the weird effects, and he had been trained with a sort of ‘crisis contingency’, which meant he was pretty fit and tough and able to go around picking up guns and fighting back against aliens and marines and what-not. At the end of Half-Life, Gordon- with not much practical choice of the matter- accepted a deal to work with the mysterious G-Man, a suited government type with a strange voice who was spotted all over the place during the game, occasionally helping Gordon out. Gordon seemed to have driven off much of the alien invasion by this point, taking out their leader, but he was still none the wiser as to how the hell humanity got in contact with that alien world in the first place, what was MEANT to happen, and what the circumstances behind the accident were. Many more questions than answers- always good sequel ecology. Gordon is put ‘on hold’ awaiting future use. Black Mesa itself, as detailed in Opposing Force, is destroyed by nuclear weaponry in a self-destruct by the authorities.
Gordon is none the wiser when he comes to again, after a mysterious speech by the G-Man. Gordon finds himself on an incoming train to City 17. Half-Life itself was entirely routed in the modern day, albeit in a secret research facility. This world is totally unfamiliar to Gordon, and it soon becomes apparent that he is significantly (though not greatly) in the future from the time he remembers. The City has a highly oppressive look to it- Eastern European in style, drab, uncomfortable, and full of surveillance bots and big speeches from large vision screens. Plenty of George Orwell influences, and what-not, The early sight of one of the alien bad guy types from the first game apparently doing janitorial work adds to the mystery. Immigration control in the city seems rather strict and as a mysterious arrival you are soon pulled in- only to be rescued by someone working undercover in the military there- Gordon’s pal Barney. ‘Barney’ was the nickname for the blue suited security guards in Black Mesa who died in… great numbers. In Blue Shift, where you actually played one such guard, he was given the name ‘Barney’ officially. Almost uniquely, Barney escaped Black Mesa at the end of Blue Shift, which is how he comes to still be around to help Gordon in the sequel.
From here, Gordon learns a little more about his environment- there seems to have been a big war involving the Half-Life aliens and it has not gone too well. A collaborating Government seems to be ruling Humans with an iron fist on behalf of the aliens, led by the Administrator of the original Black Mesa complex (in Half-Life itself, it was rather assumed the mentioned Administrator was the G-Man, but this changes things). Creating Human/alien hybrids is part of this process, and they make up some nasty bad guys, Gordon gets involved with a resistance movement involving Barney, some of the aliens, some Black Mesa Scientists, and most significantly Alyx, daughter of one of those scientists who is Gordon’s major companion in the game. And so Gordon goes around doing all kinds of anti-bad guy stuff involving vehicles, a gravity gun (making use of the new physics stuff), leading squads of friends around, fights with big alien machines, and a final confrontation with the Administrator. And… that’s it, really!
Even Half-Life, a plotted game, is only an FPS and there’s not much to say about what happens. 90% of it is shooting stuff, and I can only expand on that so much. In fact, it looks like I might spend more time in context here than I do in actual critical appraisal!
Well, let’s try and get to the heart of things. The shooting is great. Just as fun as ever. The weapons are… well, definitely good enough, they didn’t wow me, but they had a solid feel. The AI is reasonable, the battle sequences exciting. The storyline- such as it is, because they made a deliberate decision to be sparse about things like plot- is still well integrated and they still have a touch for decent game moments, one notable one I remember being the point where you think you see the G-Man beneath you in the darkness, and it turns out to be a tv screen. Hard to describe, good to play through.
The operative word there was ‘still’. I think this is an issue we cannot ignore. Everything we see here is all stuff from the first game, updated and improved. Great! But that’s still a slight limitation of vision. You see, although it was in almost imperceptible ways, Half-Life was an entirely new approach to FPS gaming, which is why it was as good as it was. HL2 is all that but better. Good sequel stuff. But in context, just not the leap Half-Life was. I don’t think that’s an unfair comment. Games can be sequels, still thematically tied, and still be major advances. Ocarina of Time? Mario 64? Even FFVII was a commendable shift, because even if you prefer VI, that game had taken the old approach as far as it could go. It’s all there in gaming history. I am not saying HL2 should have been that kind of thing or tried to be so different, not at all- you can ruin yourself trying to do that- but, ultimately, we have to accept that this is a development of a startling phenomenon rather than a whole new startling phenomenon. Therefore, it can never hit as high, objectively speaking.
There are those who disagree with me. A recent letter to PC gamer UK commented on how the gravity gun felt like a gimmick rather than anything major. PC Gamer retorted that they thought it was part of a revolutionary new approach. I cannot even vaguely imagine what they mean… I have to agree with the letter writer. It’s a neat feature, a fun thing, but it’s not changing the fundamentals of the game at all. Those are still the same ones Half-Life had, which are in turn the same ones Doom had. ‘Gimmick’ does not have to be a bad word. Gimmicks can be great! But you shouldn’t make more of them than they are. Half-Life’s advances weren’t gimmicks, they were far more fundamental changes to the approach to FPS gaming.
Ultimately, despite it being a game with the extra polish and quality you would expect from decent programmers trying to improve their old product, I should also mention I did not enjoy HL2 as much as the original. The plot and setting did not grab me as much. City 17 is a well realised setting, inside a rather developed world which they deliberately give very little about away. Actually, I have mixed feelings about that. HL was played in a setting you could relate too, exploring a mystery yourself much as Gordon was. In HL2 the setting is entirely alien and the lack of context, ironically, alienates you as a player rather than intriguing you. They also fill the game full of tricks that are somewhat ahead of what the gaming medium can do. The rusted swings and playgrounds are part of a hint that there are no children around., But there is no payoff- if you are ever told there are no children around, you don’t think “OMG< I am such an idiot for not noticing that, what with all the clues… how can there be a city with no children?” Instead you think “Well… yeah. It’s a computer game. Of course there were no children. A real city would be full of thousands of people around each corner but computers aren’t powerful enough to show that yet.” Only when computers create much more realistic urban environments can tricks like that work.
Beyond that, The City simply does not grab me as a setting like Black Mesa did. Black Mesa was great, with all its locations and subtlties and different parts and experiments and environments., In fact, the alien world at the end of HL was much less interesting than Black Mesa itself. The same complex had its bits explored three times, in the main game and the extras, and it was rather tragic that they blew it up. The City is not as engaging. Ultimately… it’s just a city. A city with a strange environment, but it simply does not quite have that great touch Black Mesa did.
Also, the context of Freeman’s silence is rather silly this time around. No-one knew what the hell was going on anyway in the original, and Gordon’s taciturn nature was fair enough. But this time you have nothing BUT questions and him staying silent beggars belief. When you meet Barney, it should be “Barney! Help! What’s going on? Where am I? What is all this? Last thing I remember I was fighting the head alien attacking Black Mesa, and now I am here… I don’t know anything about this world! Aaaahhhhhhhhh!” But no… he just takes it in his stride. Frustrating.
At the end of HL2 there is a touch of sadness. It looks like Gordon will never have a free life again, merely being someone else’s pawn. It’s a nice story touch away from the common triumphalism at the end of games. But I was a little sad myself as well, because although I had just played a very good game, part of me wanted it to do more than that, and I guess it was never really trying to do what I wanted.
Cardinal Sins: In-game cutscenes are hard to skip. Generally though, like the original, this was a very accessible and sinless game. Must be why it was better than Sin…
Rating: 8/10
Summary: An excellent FPS. But that’s ‘all’ it is. It won’t change your view of gaming.