[Evil Tim]

Originally Posted by MT2008

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.

I guess I like having choices; I preferred it in Crysis where you could throw stuff around if you wanted to, but there was always enough ammo that you didn't have to do it. And a lot of the game's "physics puzzles" were so unnatural they just yanked me right out of the game: why am I suddenly balancing cinderblocks on one end of a seesaw or looking for barrels that float to put into a weird underwater cage under a big beam that's hinged at one end? For that matter, what is the latter thing even for?

It was kinda the same with the Combine: the game was so eager to show off the ragdoll body physics that you're told the Combine is this big threat to the world but then you see a bunch of pratfalling clowns who stand on ridiculously rickety wooden structures or hump exploding barrels. It made it hard for me to believe the same evil, powerful enemy that destroyed Ravenholm and built Nova Prospekt were hiring the idiots I was fighting.

Originally Posted by MT2008

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.

Well, the big battle under the bridge was a helicopter / rocket launcher / infinite ammo crate boss, which I've never been able to summon up the slightest fondness for in any game that does it. The problem I had with the Strider / Gunship battles was they were all basically the same and came down to finding the infinite rocket crate in the current area. Antlions, gah. By the time I'd done the crossing the sand section I was sick of the sight of the damn things, one of the things that really prickled me about Episode 2 was the idea I'd ever want to see the little bastards again.

Originally Posted by MT2008

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).

I'd actually say I prefer Half-Life to it's own sequel, but it is in some ways a victim of the passage of time. The original game is structured like a disaster movie and was one of the games that established the "ghost train" school of level design where a level is a series of tightly scripted and meticulously designed battles and setpieces rather than a maze where the primary goal is to figure out where the exit is and how to open it (Max Payne 2 had an excellent joke about this where one level was a funhouse which was structured exactly like any of the other levels, and later they just stick enemy encounters in the main rooms). Fine back in the day when it wasn't all that common, but these days it's hard to find an FPS with levels that aren't designed that way, and HL's flashy setpieces aren't quite as flashy as they used to be after almost thirteen years of bigger and more impressive whiz-bang shooters. Plus, of course, there's the extensive use of jumping puzzles and that classic old-FPS issue where using a ladder is almost as likely to kill you as anything combat-related.

It still does it for me, though. Partly because Gordon never feels useless like I found he did in Half-Life 2; I got the feeling there that you might as well be playing as Alyx for all the difference Gordon's entire existence made to the story. Partly because the ongoing disaster at Black Mesa serves as a driving force; you're always moving forward in game due to the constantly worsening situation and out of game due to the "how much worse can it get?" curiousity that's behind any big-budget event movie. In Half-Life 2, there were a lot of segments where there was no real sense of urgency; indeed, in the driving levels there were such large expanses of nothingness between contact with the plot that at least once I had to think fairly hard to recall where I was actually trying to go or what getting there was supposed to achieve. The plot even acknowledges this lack of pace by having to skip into the future after Nova Prospekt to get to a point where something is actually happening.

The pacing of Half-Life also means you never wonder why Gordon doesn't just sit down and ask someone to explain what's happening: apart from anything else, he was in the best position to know (being right in the test chamber) and still doesn't, so it's unsurprising everyone else is as confused as you and trying to find a way out. In Half-Life 2 there were several points where the only reason the "mystery" of what's going on in the world even exists is because Gordon refuses to interrogate people about what's happening, even when he'd clearly want to know as with the Vortigaunts. I'm pretty sure if you dropped a GI from 1944 into the middle of the cold war he'd want to know why we were suddenly friends with the Germans the first time there was a chance to ask, yet Gordon just sits there passively while people yammer about a teleporter instead of providing him with any useful amout of information about what happened while he was gone.

Maybe I'm a minority of one, but HL2 never grabbed me like the first one did and always managed to make me feel like it was preening itself and demanding I notice how bloody amazing it was rather than trying to entertain me; I don't like, for example, being made to stack boxes just to show me that in Havok / Source I can stack boxes without them sliding off each other. And I don't think I've ever been angrier at a game than when I saw that garden gnome in Episode 2's long, unskippable Alyx / Eli conversation, as if to say "oh, well if you must play a game while we're making art I suppose we can give you a toy to play with."