Half life 2 impressions

Well the game looks nice considering its age, i did play it closer to its time of release and remember thinking at that time it looked real. Now i've seen better graphics it still holds up pretty well. Thing is the city landscape seems wasted. The opening section of the game is exciting and interesting involving repression and conspiracies. The city seems fairly devoid of life but you do get some great NPCs reallly making you feel things have gone down the crapper.

Unfortunately, this game commits one of the biggest sins in gaming as far as i'm concerned. It goes from an intereating environment which i'll add you haven't even got a gun in to the freaking sewers. Another thing is this game is dark and there's a lot of water, also radiation. Now you don't really get much warning about any of this. My pet peeve in a game is being shoved in a dark claustrophobic tunnel filled with water and a torch which doesn't allow you to see much. Having got past the sewers after what seemed an eternity i thought yes fresh air. But turns out i'm effectively in some kind of waater drainage system fuyll of radioactive material (insert obligatory vehicle section). This is also a freaking long vehicle section. I'm' really trying to rush through yet i'm still on it.

The gun combat is good when there is a gunfight but the problem is this game is so obsessed with its physics engine, which is flawed i'd liked to add. I saw a seesaw, so i thought everything in this world has real weight etc. I put two breeze blocks on either end of a see saw. The second one i placed didn't seem to move the other one at all. I double checked the distance to make sure one wasn't too far from the centre thereby changing its force exerted. To say the least this basic element, not actually working really disappointed me.

All round I think this could have potential the question is will i have the patience to play that far into the game.

All round portal is looking sooooooooooooooooo much better.

Ok this game is weird, i got past the water level and it started to pick up again with the introduction of the gravity gun. This is a pretty cool gadget which basically equates to being able to pick up heavy objects from a distance and then throwing them very far. This works great with buzzz saw blades.

But wait what is this there are no puzzles involving this gun instead i'm dumped into a survival horror level fighting people with there heads up a chicken, well a plucked chicken.

Spoiler:

My patience is stqarting to wear thin i assumed this was going to be great as all i've heard is praise for this game, but i'm not seeing what the fuss is about yet hopefully when i get back to the city stuff will happen but i'm pretty sure i played like 6 hours and jack has happened.

If anyone has played this let me know if i should bother continuing.

should have played it back in 05 this game blew my mind. The Pc version had the best graphics over every game at the time until gears got released. And the constant shadow of the G man, horrors of ravenholm, and the swarms of antlions. Yes this game kicked ass.

does it get more interesting after the bit i'm on?

Yes. And there will be puzzles that you use the gravity gun for, it's just showing you that it can be used for combat as well.

By the way, what platform are you playing on? While it's a weak excuse for you not enjoying it, Valve games are really meant to be played on PC, Gabe Newell has said that he hates the PS3 and 360 ports of the Orange Box and wishes that they never happened.

It should get better once you see your first antlion. Ravenholm is either hit or miss, love or hate. And it sounds like you're the latter. I myself loved it. Survival horror wasn't so crowded back then and the triple headed poisen headcrab zombies terrified me along with the fast zombies. They reminded me of Alien in how they climbed walls.

I first went into Ravenholm tripping on mushrooms. Here I am fucked out of my mind surrounded by zombies with a gravity gun and with nothing left to use it with. So I run away like a little bitch until I get trapped into a single room/dead end. panicked, scared and not too sure what reality im in. I hear the moaning sounds of the zombies getting louder and louder as they get closer and closer to my position. I know I can't face them. I know a horrible freaky death awaits me. Then as if G man heard my prayers, I notice a conveniently placed air container laying right next to me so I pick it up. The second I turn back to face the door again, I see 3 zombies only inches away from my face. I scream in horror and blow that room up to shit. Killing myself and every zombie with me.

My greatest gaming experiance of all time. Though I did have some help from psychidelic drugs but still.

Who is G man? I have no idea who that is.

By the way i'm playing on PS3, i'm not quite sure why people would say the port was bad, unless he means control issues. The main thing is the highs and lows of the gameplay. I also think the fact in my head i keep comparing this to games like deus ex, as half life 2 is often praised as the best PC game ever. The whole escape scene a the beginning was amazing.

In terms of the zombie town i thought it was interesting at first but then with little to no indication of where to go, I just found running around with a buzz saw blade getting a bit old, for the dead end bit your talking about the zombies kept spawning and i kept killing them and then i didn't notice a lever somewhere so i ended up falling to my death a couple of times as i went into leap of faith mode >_>.

I'll give it another go so i see that thing you mentioned. I can see this game certainly has some good bits I just really want to start using the gun for puzzle and stuff. I mean if these guys made portal there must be some really cool shit coming up.

Superbuu3 wrote:

Who is G man? I have no idea who that is.

Nor does anyone else, he's the guy who talks to you at the very start of the game before you wake up on the train. He's been present since the very beginning of HL1 though, all that's known is that he's somehow a very important character.

The ports are generally considered inferior as they don't recieve updates, they weren't 'made' by Valve, have gameplay more suited to M&K controls and aren't moddable. Not that it's a bad game on consoles, it's just a lot better on PC.