Being in high school, I’ve found that a shit ton of teenagers don’t care much for story in video games. HL2 was the first of the series I’ve played and that got me hooked. I don’t actually think HL2 is overrated, but underrated in the viewpoints of teenagers.
I’ve asked my friends who don’t like HL2 what’s wrong with it and they said the gameplay was too slow and the puzzles were confusing. I thought of how much puzzles are being introduced in other mainstream games like CoD or Battlefield and I understood why they didn’t like it.
HL2 is unique in the sense that it doesn’t require “action-film” elements to make it enjoyable. I’ve also yet to have a conversation about the mysteries of half-life with anyone at my school because almost no one has played it.
The boss fights still make the experience great for me. Whether it is the puzzle driven bossess with the three tentacles and the first gargantuan, or the tactical boss fights like the Helicopter, Gonarch and the Nihilinth, they are the kinds of encounters I expect in a Half-Life game. Even Opposing Force’s two additional boss fights are included in my expectations. In a way, most of the boss fights are an homage to Quake’s (i.e. Cthon and Shub-Niggurath), in that both games require using the environment to defeat the boss. The Baphomet from Doom II I think helped instill the unique boss fight approach in Quake and Half-Life. I’m not aware any other games which have done the same.
Haven’t I read this strange rant before? Gordon’s not a slacker. He was late, but not does not make him an absolute slacker. He’s a recent MIT graduate who is forced into a situation he had no preparation for. So what if he can’t improvise advanced machinery or weaponry on the spot? At least knows how to jump and use his surrroundings, unlike so many other amateur gamers who cannot play the Freeman.
I agree whole heartedly. Whatever quibbles I might have with some writing choices, HL2 really is not as overrated as others think. While not as awesomely acrobatic as the first, HL2 still employs a lot of gameplay elements which other players still need to get used to and master. The composition of the game is quite complex and an enormous undertaking. A lot of the ambitious material may have been cut out (as it was with the first HL), but it still holds as an ambitious experience which few have tried to master. I’m just surprised that game designers who complained about HL2’s story haven’t tried to develop a well-written game which relies heavily on scripted sequences as well. Valvle themselves explained that doing a full game with no cutscenes and lots of scripted sequences is a harder feat than it appears. It’s the scripted sequences and interactivity of HL2 which still make it an HL game for me.
I seem to remember a someone saying something like “Late again Mr. Freeman” or something like that. Also, only heavy LSD and Cannabis use in college could have prepared Gordon’s mind to handle the invasion of trans dimensional aliens and not freak out like most other scientists in the BMRF
Blast Pit, Power Up, and Surface Tension all revolve around defeating a powerful foe that is hindering/preventing progress. With whole chapters dedicated to figuring out how to defeat at least 2 bosses, and half of a chapter where you are chased by one, HL certainly has a big focus on them, and does a better job at conveying how threatening they are then most games, since in HL1 they typically have a process to be defeated that doesn’t involve unloading your entire arsenal on them.
That’s what I meant, I just wasn’t able to get across as eloquently. I’ve killed far too many bosses that are just really big (or even normal sized!) NPCs with lots of health and damage output, Red Faction being an example of this.
Well… Gonarch was like that. But yeah it wasn’t in one chamber and there were those healing pools and mini-headcrabs.
The Nihilanth was in one big chamber with controllers, although, you got teleported to many other chambers to figure out some puzzle or climb the environment. Also you had to work out to break the yellow rocks and shoot it’s brain[?] when the head flaps were open.
Either way, you had to shoot it and give explosives a lot in Half Life 1.
In Half Life 2 there were not so many of these boss fights. There were those mini-boss fights like the combine helicopters (hunter choppers?) in water hazard. And the final breen ‘boss’ fight with two combine gunships, but this wasn’t by unloading your entire arsenal against them. You had to use your gravity gun (super) only in this level and it was more of an epic ending than a really hard boss fight, after you killed all of the combine and worked out how to destroy breen’s teleporter thingy.
I think they chose to do this because I read somewhere that they think people do not like retro boss fights where you just shoot a big monster.
The reason I omitted mentioning Xen is because it wasn’t exactly as fleshed out as the rest of the game. That wasn’t just limited to the leve design and jumping puzzles, but the boss fights too.
And HL2’s bosses were basically the striders and gunships earlier on. You don’t exactly have to do much on these guys but unload all your rockets, and there were more instances of those where you unload on them then the bosses in Xen.
I was probably thinking more of EP1 treating the strider as a boss, but my point was more of that there was more stuff like that in HL2, as opposed to HL1 which only had 2 bosses at the end like that, and even with the Nihilanth you still had to destroy the crystals first.
The hunter chopper wasn’t quite a regular boss either, because you basically spend several chapters running from it, which is quite similar to the apache boss in HL1, and I wouldn’t exactly call the Hunter-Chopper a mini boss fight.
I wonder once we would be able to kill an advisor, just how simple it would be. I’ve always felt them to be an ominous, mysterious, murdering piece of shit and if we could kill one, how could we?
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.
