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No, keep the voice commentary.
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Apr 21, 2022 15:22
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| # ? May 8, 2024 14:10 |
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The voice commentary is fine.
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Apr 21, 2022 15:25
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Most people don't like listening to their own voice. I wouldn't worry about it. Personally, I like the voice commentary and wouldn't change it.
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Apr 21, 2022 15:28
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Okie-doke. I guess if no one else has problems with it, then full speed ahead. Good thing I asked first. Incidentally, I've got recording done on the next update. Should be dropping on Saturday.
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Apr 21, 2022 15:44
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Yes, please keep the voice commentary. Your voice is fine, and I haven't really noticed any of the "distracting" vocal hesitations that you mention. And to be perfectly frank, I would find subtitles more distracting.
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Apr 21, 2022 15:57
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tbh i would stop watching if you went subtitled because i've been listening to the vids while doing chores. commentary is good and fine. i basically use VLPs as podcasts haha
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Apr 21, 2022 16:17
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I forgot about that vortigaunt though he is pretty easy to forget. On the other hand I definitely haven't ever forgotten about that dam jump. I don't think I've ever made it through without the fan boat getting tripped up on the physics somehow.
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Apr 22, 2022 20:19
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'Umm's and the like are natural speech fillers that you use as you gather your thoughts. Anyone who can talk fluently without them for more than a minute and without having a full script prepared for them is an alien. Keep the speech.
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Apr 23, 2022 16:11
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 Oh boy, it's a breather chapter, and you know what that means. A lot of standing around and watching characters play out their community theater performance without any input on the player's part. HL2's story isn't too difficult to understand, but it is tremendously difficult to connect to. Gordon Freeman is unceremoniously dropped into a world that's gone through 20 years of suffering and hardship and is basically a silent observer, spoken at but never spoken with. We don't know what he's thinking about any of this, whether he's angry, or sad, or confused, any of it. As a result, I see Gordon less as a character and more as a camera and a pair of arms who gets pointed at whatever needs killing. I was joking with some friends of mine that in terms of personality and expression, characters like the Doom 3 Guy and other such shooter protagonists are actually better off than Gordon. Despite being mute as well, Doom 3 Guy is given moments where he gives withering gazes to enemies, squares off right before boss battles, gets momentarily unnerved by really huge enemies, etc etc. Doom 3 is not a fantastic game by any stretch of the imagination, but when it comes to making the player character part of the world around them instead of just someone riding a theme park ride, I feel like it has Half-Life 2 beat. Gordon Freeman just being the player works fine when the player's goals and Gordon's are in alignment. Half-Life 1, all you're concerned about is getting out of the facility alive, and the gameplay reflects that. But here in HL2, we have Gordon taking part in a resistance group and it's implied that he's being set up with Alyx, and it's like...what if the player isn't interested in the resistance? What if the player isn't interested in Alyx? That being said, I would say this game's chapters follow an exponential quality curve based on how much the gameplay overtakes the story, with the big climb occurring right when you get handed the Gravity Gun. Speaking of which, we get the Gravity Gun! I speak about it in semi-reverential tones in the video itself, but I cannot stress enough how much Half-Life 2 revolves around this thing. Capable of picking up most small to mid-sized props and then punting them a long distance, this device will be the focal point of basically every single puzzle and setpiece going forward. Inasmuch as HL2's regular weaponry is mostly just stale FPS fare, this weapon stands out for being both unique and a load of fun. Half-Life 2 is at its best when stuff is flying all over everywhere, and this weapon will let us do that on demand. A bit of clarification, by the way. There's an easter egg in this chapter that's an homage to a certain street magician and the photo I borrowed features a stunt that I claimed was just subtle misdirection. Which would be true in most cases, but that particular one actually happened as shown. I also touched on the voice work in this game, so let me just go into brief detail on the characters we've seen so far.   Barney Calhoun, ex-protagonist and Black Mesa security guard, along with the G-Man, mysterious person(?) in a suit, are voiced by Michael Shapiro, whose career has been mostly confined to just video game voice acting. Of note, he did the security guard and G-Man voice back in Half-Life 1 and its expansions as well, along with acting in a number of adventure games by Humongeous Entertainment like Spy Fox, Putt-Putt, and Pajama Sam. He's still active in the voice acting scene even to this day, performing a role in Horizon Forbidden West just this year.  Dr. Isaac Kleiner, ex-Black Mesa scientist, is voiced by Harry S. Robins, who's known for...just voicing scientist characters in the Half-Life series. Otherwise he's voiced a single character in Dota 2 and the narrator in Plague Inc: Evolved. Not much else to say about his career, really.  Alyx Vance, daughter of two ex-Black Mesa scientists, is voiced by Merle Dandridge, who's performed in dozens of TV and theater shows, including the part of Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar, and is also well-known for playing the role of Marlene in The Last of Us and Kate Collins in Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, a role that earned an award from the British Academy Games Awards. A Screen Actors Guild and Grammy nominee and star of shows like Greenleaf and The Flight Attendant, Dandridge has had a long and very successful career in television, and is currently set to take part in a TV adaptation of The Last of Us, scheduled for 2023.  Dr. Wallace Breen, ex-Black Mesa administrator and current administrator of the entire planet Earth, was voiced by Robert Culp, a man whose television (and sometimes film) career stretches all the way back to 1953, featuring roles in Columbo, Shaft, The Outer Limits, Matlock, Gargoyles, Everybody Loves Raymond, and a co-starring role in The Greatest American Hero as Bill Maxwell, which he would reprise for a Robot Chicken skit shortly before his death in 2010. The Half-Life 2 series would actually be one of his last roles, bringing an end to an almost six-decade career.  The Vortigaunts, as I've stated multiple times, are absolutely vital to the story, and they are voiced by Louis Gossett Jr.; Academy Award winner, theater, TV, and film actor, writer, producer, director...this guy's done just everything you could possibly think of when it comes to screen entertainment, beginning back in 1958. It's hard to find a year where he wasn't in at least two or three films or TV shows, sometimes as many as 7 or 8 in a single year. Even now, his IMDB listing shows his involvement in ten different productions currently in development, including a modern adaptation of The Color Purple.  Dr. Eli Vance, ex-Black Mesa scientist (are you sensing a pattern yet?) was voiced by Robert Guillaume, another prolific television long-runner and Emmy Award winner and Golden Globe Nominee for his role as the title character of the show Benson. In addition to his TV roles, he was also well-known for his voice acting performance of Rafiki from the Lion King, a role which he would reprise for the sequels as well as its appearance as a world in Kingdom Hearts 2. Guillaume unfortunately died in 2017, having acted in films and shows from 1969 to 2013. Like Robert Culp (though he had a few roles afterwards), Half-Life 2 would be one of the last productions he acted in.  Dr. Judith Mossman, not ex-Black Mesa but wishes she was, is voiced by Michelle Forbes, Emmy Award nominee, Saturn Award winner, and primarily TV actress whose roles appear to be in the sci-fi and thriller space generally, such as Star Trek: The Next Generation, 24, and Homicide: Life on the Street. Some other productions she's acted in since Half-Life 2 include Battlestar Galactica, Powers, True Blood, The Killing (which she earned her Saturn for), Durham County, Chicago Fire and most recently, New Amsterdam. Another prolific actor, she's been in TV roles basically nonstop since 1987, often with overlap between. And finally, this one may come as a surprise, but the Combine Overwatch mission control also has a significant voice credit. It's none other than Ellen McLain, who you might know as the voice of GlaDOS from the Portal games, but who also voiced the Team Fortress 2 announcer and...apparently the AI voice for the main character's robot in Pacific Rim? Learn something new every day.
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Apr 24, 2022 01:39
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Blastinus posted:
I remember when this trailer came out and people went all "Isn't that GLaDOS"? It was toned a bit down in the final product but Guillermo del Toro was a fan of Ellen McLains work as the character.
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Apr 24, 2022 02:08
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We don't go to Ravenholm, it is a silly place.
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Apr 24, 2022 06:39
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Blastinus posted:But here in HL2, we have Gordon taking part in a resistance group and it's implied that he's being set up with Alyx, and it's like...what if the player isn't interested in the resistance? What if the player isn't interested in Alyx? I think it's worth remembering that Half-Life was always kind of aimed at the dudebro audience. The billing premise of Half-Life 1 was that you were the star of your own sci-fi action flick, and Half-Life 2 continues in that vein. I mean, why wouldn't you want to bang the chick designed to be attractive? What are you, gay? Or a straight woman? Or just don't find her appealing? Or take narrative issue with her being shoved into the arms of a character who's not a character? I think the old guard Half-Life games, though they aren't the most immediately obvious games of this sort, fall pretty hard into the 90s/early 00s game culture where it's assumed that everyone playing is an aggressively horny straight dude.
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Apr 24, 2022 12:54
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this is one of the parts of half life 2 that aged the worst. 15 minutes of what amounts to a non-interactive cutscene? Completely unskippable? I understand what they were going for, cinematically at least, you know the whole player always in control, essentially an unbroken take throughout the whole story etc. It unfortunately forced them into adopting fairly inelegant solutions to get their exposition through it maybe could have worked with some interactivity but they also committed to Gordon being basically a moving prop who gets occasionally gets talked to so both those constraints result in this scene. on top of that, yeah the whole Alyx romance angle thing in retrospect is uhhhhh not the best? Especially as she's supposed to be projecting feelings into the script-devouring void that is Gordon, who absorbs all lines and spits absolutely nothing out.
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Apr 24, 2022 13:20
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I feel like a big weirdo as a Half-Life 2 player because I never used the gravity gun for combat if I had ammo for any other weapon.
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Apr 24, 2022 14:52
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GunnerJ posted:I feel like a big weirdo as a Half-Life 2 player because I never used the gravity gun for combat if I had ammo for any other weapon. I mean yeah, I'm with you there as well. When I first played the game, my mind immediately sorted the Gravity Gun into "puzzle solving weapon" and I mostly just used regular weaponry. As it turns out, there are a number of enemies that become exponentially harder when you play the game that way, but we'll get to that.
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Apr 24, 2022 15:12
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Very much veem enjoyed the LP so far, and yes keep the voice. HL2 was.one of my first "modern" games back in the day and Highway 17 is my favorite level so if you want somebody to be nostalgic on commentary I'm your guy
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Apr 25, 2022 02:25
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Hooray! Now Gordon can punt those highly explosive things all over the place.
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Apr 25, 2022 03:17
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 I hope you've enjoyed what has been a pretty straightforward and mundane shooter game so far, because Ravenholm is where the game takes off running. The game's toyed around a little bit with demonstrating the physics capabilities of the system, but once you get the gun that throws things around, then the game really shows what makes it special. If you've listened to my commentary about the game up to this point, you might get the impression that I hate it, or at the very least find it boring and mediocre. And it is, right up until it isn't. You've likely heard the strange endorsement of "just wait until a few chapters in" for various things, and it's just as true here. Ravenholm itself is a masterclass in storytelling through the environment. No one really tells you what happened here, only that it's so terrible that they had to seal it off entirely. And then you climb that ladder and boom, you see the body hanging from the tree and the headcrab pods and the bloody, messed up bodies and yeah...you know what happened without having to be told a single blessed thing. And it isn't pretty. The game doesn't have to have someone say that the Combine are horrible, callous and cruel because the evidence is everywhere you look, and I think that's the biggest strength of Half-Life 2. When the player is allowed to just see the world and draw their own conclusions, I think the game is at its best. This chapter also introduces us to the Shotgun, which apparently is meant to be a SPAS-12, but don't ask me. I'm not much of a gun nut. Regardless, what a gem it is. This beast of a weapon has next to no spread and still retains its double-barreled shot from Half-Life 1, meaning that it's capable of dropping pretty much any basic enemy in 1-2 blasts. Considering how plentiful ammo is and how quickly Gordon feeds in shells for his reload animation, it's difficult to justify using the SMG over the Shotgun except if you need the grenade launcher. In addition, we have a companion character for our trip through Ravenholm. As mentioned, NPC allies do have health pools that can be depleted if you're careless enough, but their health regenerates rapidly, allowing them to survive through some theoretically deadly encounters.  This particular friend is Father Grigori, played by Jim French, who got his start performing radio shows during World War 2, and continued performing radio dramas after the war was over, having performed over 500 shows by the time he was hired by Valve to do voice work for them. Aside from this role, he would also play the part of Bill in the Left 4 Dead series and a character in Dota 2, before his death in 2017. Not a very long list of credits on IMDB, but his distinctive voice gave life to some very memorable characters in Valve's library. He also played a character in a very specific Valve side project, but I'll be showing that off shortly  .Here's a fun fact you might not know: Arkane, creators of the Dishonored series, were partnered with by Valve to make a side game in the Half-Life 2 chronology set during the timeline of the Episodes, and their idea was to reintroduce Adrian Shepherd from Half-Life: Opposing Force and have him fight zombies in Ravenholm alongside Father Grigori. It had actually gotten several levels in before Valve unceremoniously shelved the project, as Valve is wont to do, and apparently the folks at Arkane have kept their build from the project, just as a reminder of what could have been.
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Apr 28, 2022 00:52
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The HL1 shotgun was always just a bit too weak to kill what you needed it to, IMO, even with the double shot, but this? This is perfection. The HL2 shotgun belongs in a museum alongside, like, the Serious Sam 2 and Blood shotguns, and the Postal 2 Sawn-off.
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Apr 28, 2022 04:26
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Ravenholm is a fantastic piece of environmental storytelling because nary a word is spoken about it directly, and yet it tells a complete story about the true level of brutality the Combine was/is willing to stoop to when they meet any sort of large-scale resistance. In this instance, "resistance" comes down to people just trying to exist freely outside the bounds of the Combine. So like any fascist government, the one thing the Combine can't abide is anything and anyone existing outside the bounds of its rule, and the easiest way to fix that problem it turns out isn't just conquering them, it's eliminating them. Blast says in the video that Ravenholm isn't scary, and he's right. It's downright chilling.
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Apr 28, 2022 05:04
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There's a model, never used in game, of a Gonarch from HL1 with its legs chopped off and hooked up to Combine machinery. This is presumably where all the headcrab artillery comes from, when the Combine overran Xen they saw the headcrab species and thought "Hey, we can use this!"
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Apr 28, 2022 12:11
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I'm with you on not wanting to think too hard about what the headcrab zombies are screaming. Valve really upped the nightmare fuel level on them... there's a part of Route Kanal iirc where you see a guy in the middle of getting crabbed and it fucks me up to even remember it. In hindsight, Kleiner's pet headcrab just riding around on his head was a pretty messed up detail to allude to! At that point you might think the headcrabs have been reduced to a rare pest that has been controlled and even domesticated, but nope...
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Apr 28, 2022 12:49
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I had no idea about that Shepard game in ravenholm, that would have been incredible. Hell, bring it back as a VR game like alyx.
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Apr 28, 2022 14:50
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Poison headcrabs are great. By themselves, they are completely harmless, but their ability to drop you to 1HP even temporarily makes them terrifying.
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Apr 28, 2022 16:20
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What Blastinus said about "players dropping everything to hunt down the source of that sound is far too accurate. gently caress those headcrabs.
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Apr 28, 2022 23:43
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Very grateful they gave them an obvious windup to the pounce Unlike the fast headcrabs which will throw themselves at you like a physics prop
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Apr 29, 2022 00:13
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Give me back the two extra shells the shotgun had in HL1 Valve  -- Me, 2004
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Apr 29, 2022 05:53
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Blastinus, I'm a little surprised you're not using the HD Enhancement for HL2, or did you want to show off the game in it's original glory? I remember being amazed at how forgiving the Steam engine could be on low-end computers. HL2 released days before I blew out my gaming PC so I ran it for weeks on a lovely Compaq laptop.
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Apr 29, 2022 15:35
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MA-Horus posted:Blastinus, I'm a little surprised you're not using the HD Enhancement for HL2, or did you want to show off the game in it's original glory? Yeah, I'm trying to aim for as authentic an experience as possible. Half-Life 2's had graphical updates and enemy placements moved around by Valve, and of course advances in technology mean that I can't replicate the interminable loading times, but otherwise, it's as close to the original as I can get.
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Apr 29, 2022 16:21
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I have the original loading times etched into my memory. I involuntarily flinch every time I know one is about to come up.
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Apr 29, 2022 21:05
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You know its also surprising how short Ravenholme really is considering its place in the collective memory. The first part of the next level kind of counts but not really.
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May 1, 2022 03:27
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Count me as someone who did the gravity gun achievement. I actually took the time to get all achievements, which meant replaying the game as they didn't get added until quite some time after it had been out.
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May 1, 2022 04:19
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last time I played I was trying to get that achievement while also trying to make it through with the roller mine from the previous map, which is really hard with all the fire and gas barrels.
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May 1, 2022 04:59
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Kibayasu posted:You know its also surprising how short Ravenholme really is considering its place in the collective memory. The first part of the next level kind of counts but not really. It's been a long time since I last played but by my memory Ravenholm is a very easy level to get lost in and end up going round in circles, so that's probably part of it.
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May 1, 2022 11:11
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It's also the best level in the game by far. Nothing else really comes close.
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May 1, 2022 12:15
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Ravenholm is very good, but I think I had more fun in a certain later "gimmick" level.
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May 1, 2022 14:50
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anilEhilated posted:It's also the best level in the game by far. Nothing else really comes close. I think it's this. Half-Life 2 has some great set piece design, but the setting, visual design, characters, weapons aside from the gravity gun, and bad guys are all very generic. HL2 made a big splash when it first launched, but I think the hosed up pipeline with the Episodes and whatnot is the only thing that's kept it from being wholly forgotten. Half-Life 1 was a distinctive and memorable setting. Half-Life 2 not so much.
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May 1, 2022 14:53
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Even without the episodes the impact HL2 and the source engine/Havok had on games and game design in general was huge. It made its contemporaries in 2004 (farcry, doom 3, ut2004) look dated. Its not an understatement to call it a foundational game for the rest of the decade.
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May 2, 2022 23:36
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HL2's physics became the standard for high-budget games for at least a decade, and it's the game that launched Steam as a platform. It would absolutely have had the historical significance to be remembered. That, the way it did cutscenes, the very high production values for its time... it was a very special game. Nearly two decades on it's easy to see a lot of its flaws now that there have been so many other games doing so much more, but I don't think there's any classic game that escapes that.
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May 2, 2022 23:49
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| # ? May 8, 2024 14:10 |
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Honestly, what I'm seeing looking at it again so much later is that the game wasn't just selling a game to kids, it was also selling the hell out of their physics engine to other companies.
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May 3, 2022 14:06
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