Quote:
Originally Posted by Evil Tim
I dunno, it just seemed obsessed with its own gimmickry, none of which had anything to do with shooting things. The ammo counts were tiny because they wanted you to use the junk-hurling machine, there were stupid, out-of-place physics puzzles that made you feel like you were playing the physics system rather than playing with it (stop the helicopter chase! Time to push a washing machine into a hole!), endless scenes of nothing but unskippable on-the-nose exposition delivered by people standing still and staring at you disconcertingly (and sometimes even walking backwards just so you could see their facial animation) while you stood in a locked room full of nothing-to-do, the incredibly empty buggy and airboat levels, the stupid, tedious section where you had to use bits of hard-to-land-on junk to cross sand, the jumping puzzles, the strange sense the entire game was about everyone in it except you...
Hate to say it, but it did absolutely nothing for me; the only part I really enjoyed was Ravenholm. I liked the original Half-Life and Opposing Force, even if they haven't aged well, but of all the games I have played through (often multiple times for recording) I've only bothered to beat HL2 once and haven't ever stuck through either Episode or felt any compulsion to do so.
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Well, OK, at least here, you are making some arguments about the actual gameplay.
But I disagree with you that the physics was treated as a "gimmick". In Doom 3 (which came out earlier that year), the physics were a gimmick. In HL2, I thought that the physics really made the gameplay a lot more exciting. And so what if they kept ammo availability low so that players would be encouraged to use the Gravity Gun more often? Once I realized how much more fun it was to hurl saw blades at zombies with the Gravity than to just shoot them, I stopped caring that I couldn't find enough MP7 ammo.
A lot of your other complaints, while valid, seem fairly minor relative to the big picture. I don't see how you could have been so unmoved by some of the wonderful levels in the game, like the shootout on the suspension bridge, the various battles with the Striders, leading the Antlions, and the infiltration of the Combine tower. It all felt like an epic sci-fi movie, and for moments like that, I can forgive a few places where the game lags or gets buggy.
Also, not sure I'd say that the original Half-Life aged poorly. Obviously, it's dated compared to most contemporary shooters, but for the better part of 5 years, it was by far the best SP and online FPS experience available. Despite the various new FPS games that came out on PC between HL and HL2 (Quake 3, Unreal Tournament and Unreal 2, Deus Ex, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Far Cry, etc.), my copy of HL stayed on my hard drive even while my computer and OS got upgraded three times. Even now, I still have HL: Source on my current laptop, and I'm really looking forward to playing Black Mesa: Source (if it ever gets released).