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Blastinus
Feb 28, 2010

Time to try my luck
:rolldice:
Crap.

FoolyCharged posted:

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.

Not just the physics engine. Half-Life 2 was also the killer app for Steam and digital storefronts in general. Back then, it was considered the norm for games to come on multiple installation CD's, but HL2 released on five. And Valve reveals this new way of purchasing games where you can just sit back and wait for games to download instead of having to swap in disc after disc...

Honestly, I can believe that it took that many CD-ROMs to install this game, but it also coincidentally sold Steam to me better than any marketing pitch could.

e: By the way, I've got commentary done on the next couple of episodes, so expect it to be dropping tomorrow. Had to chop up the next chapter in two again, for obvious reasons to anyone who's familiar with it.

Blastinus fucked around with this message at 14:51 on May 3, 2022

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Laughing Zealot
Oct 10, 2012


I remember World of Warcraft using a lot of cd's, six I think? I've got little idea other than personal experience but how long did it take before online storefronts overtook the physical market (on pc at least)? Somewhere around the early 10s?

MA-Horus
Dec 3, 2006

I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am.

Laughing Zealot posted:

I remember World of Warcraft using a lot of cd's, six I think? I've got little idea other than personal experience but how long did it take before online storefronts overtook the physical market (on pc at least)? Somewhere around the early 10s?

Pretty much as soon as Broadband internet was widely and cheaply available with limited/no bandwidth caps, so your timeline is about right.

Blastinus
Feb 28, 2010

Time to try my luck
:rolldice:
Crap.
Just a quick update on the update. I've got everything uploaded and I'm mostly just working on the blurb and the title card. While I'm getting everything finalized, a friend of mine linked me something really cool.

You remember that canceled Arkane Half-Life 2 game I was talking about set in Ravenholm? Well, NoClip Video Game Documentaries went down to Arkane Lyon to learn about some of their canceled games, and they were allowed to actually play and record the development build that Arkane had created. Give it a look-see!

Blastinus
Feb 28, 2010

Time to try my luck
:rolldice:
Crap.


Also known as: The Update Where Everything Goes Wrong.

Highway 17 is another vehicle chapter, and that means careening out of control and smashing into stuff. At least that's what it means for me. The Scout Car reminds me a lot of a really questionable go-kart that I helped build as a team project in college, all cobbled together and clearly designed out of whatever spare parts were lying around. It is outfitted with the Tau Cannon, an old favorite from Half-Life 1 that works basically the same way, except with infinite ammo. I complain about the boost feature in the update, but it's honestly not that bad as long as you take your time to actually line up your sweet jumps. It also has a handbrake, but there's never really a time where you need to perform a hairpin turn, so I tend to forget it's there.

Joining me this chapter is Ambient Oatmeal, who had a small problem with their headset that I mostly took care of, but a bit still creeps in now and then. I've been discussing this game with them over Discord, and I figured it'd be fun to invite them in to comment over what is otherwise me just driving from place to place and shooting the same soldiers over and over.

Speaking of shooting things, we also get a few new fancy toys, which will round out our entire arsenal except for one particular gimmick "weapon" that we'll see in a couple of updates. The Combine Pulse Rifle is our assault rifle analogue for this game, and it certainly has punch to it, but for an energy weapon, it's pretty bog-standard and boring. Its secondary fire has a fun surprise to it, but the ammo's even rarer than SMG grenades, and that's saying something. The crossbow is a sniping weapon, albeit with a slow-ish projectile and dropoff over a long distance. It'll instantly kill...pretty much anything that isn't a boss or a robot of some kind, but actually hitting anything is a bit of a learning curve.

Finally, the rocket launcher, which is an interesting weapon in that it's specifically designed for fighting our new recurring nightmare: the Gunships. Considering their surprising ability to track the rockets you fire at them, you have to use the laser sight to guide the rocket around them and hit them a set number of times: 3 for Easy, 5 for Normal, and 7 for Hard. Considering that you can only hold three rockets at any given time, you're going to be constantly running for the nearest rocket ammo refill crate, which makes Gunship battles into a constant frenetic chase as you try to go from cover to cover while restocking ammo and trying to outwit an enemy that's way smarter than you'd think it'd be.

Needless to say, it's a heckuva lot of fun.

Our new character for this update who we'll never see again is Colonel Odessa Cubbage, played by John Patrick Lowrie, who you might also know as Bruno Lawrie from the No One Lives Forever games and the Sniper from Team Fortress 2. He's also done some voiceover work for the Halo series, but is otherwise more or less chained to Valve. He also directed a hydrid movie/play called Night, Mother in 2021 which was performed live over Twitch streaming with prerecorded segments interspersed. Haven't seen it myself, but it certainly sounds interesting.

Not pictured, by the way, is leeches. I mentioned that you'll get killed almost instantly by Xen leeches if you try swimming anywhere, but the effect is just a flat image while you take damage at a constant rate. You don't even get to fight back against them, and it's just really kind of boring to watch.

nine-gear crow
Aug 10, 2013
John Patrick Lowrie is also Ellen McLain's husband :eng101:

DreadUnknown
Nov 4, 2020

Bird is the word.
I remember OG Steam when I bought HL2, I dont miss that old launcher at all lol.
Like HL2 isnt even on my purchase history because I got it at COmpUSA, the first thing is Portal.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
This is what I think of as the Halo chapter. The seamless on-foot/in-vehicle transition, enemy vehicles, driving a linear path with small detours with goodies and enemies, and so on and so forth very much call to mind Halo for me.

GunnerJ
Aug 1, 2005

Do you think this is funny?
I loved the Combine Pulse Rifle. Did good damage, had a satisfying meaty sound effect that was different enough from a normal gun to feel cool, reloads super fast. Definitely the most insulting case of artificial ammo scarcity, though, since the magazines are about the size of a bullet so shouldn't you be able to store like 30 reloads for it?

Blastinus
Feb 28, 2010

Time to try my luck
:rolldice:
Crap.

GunnerJ posted:

I loved the Combine Pulse Rifle. Did good damage, had a satisfying meaty sound effect that was different enough from a normal gun to feel cool, reloads super fast. Definitely the most insulting case of artificial ammo scarcity, though, since the magazines are about the size of a bullet so shouldn't you be able to store like 30 reloads for it?

I know, right? If I could store something like 120 or 180 rounds, then it'd be a great weapon for protracted firefights, but it runs dry so quickly, and it doesn't make sense as to why.

That said, Combine assault teams will almost always have a Pulse Rifle somewhere, so staying restocked isn't the worst thing. Just more of a pain than it should be.

FoolyCharged
Oct 11, 2012

Cheating at a raffle? I sentence you to 1 year in jail! No! Two years! Three! Four! Five years! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!
Somebody call for an ant?

Oh man, the subtitles were so beautiful on this one.

"Her father has been captured.
*moan*moan*moan*"

Kibayasu
Mar 28, 2010

Outside of the ammo capacity the real issue with the pulse rifle is the, before you get it, quasi-hidden accuracy bloom your guns have. It’s basically the first and only gun that it will actually have a noticeable effect on unless you turbo click with the pistol. Shotgun and magnum shoot too slow for it happen and the SMG is inaccurate enough already that you don’t notice. But if you hold down the trigger on the pulse rifle you’ll be drawing an outline around what you’re shooting at by the time your halfway through the magazine.

Tenebrais
Sep 2, 2011

Pulse rifle was definitely my favourite gun in HL2. It's solidly strong and while the ammo capacity isn't very large, you'll be fighting Combine soldiers for basically the entire remainder of the game, so you get refills constantly.

anilEhilated
Feb 17, 2014

But I say fuck the rain.

Grimey Drawer
I honestly had a hard time differentiating it from the SMG. Sure, they've got different secondary fires, but it never felt particularly meaningful, it's just a better version of a gun you already have, and I wouldn't call that good shooter design.

Zedd
Jul 6, 2009

I mean, who would have noticed another madman around here?



Blastinus posted:

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.

NoClip recently released a video about this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMygnmB9Zw8

Blastinus posted:

You remember that canceled Arkane Half-Life 2 game I was talking about set in Ravenholm? Well, NoClip Video Game Documentaries went down to Arkane Lyon to learn about some of their canceled games, and they were allowed to actually play and record the development build that Arkane had created. Give it a look-see!

:argh: beaten to it.

Blastinus
Feb 28, 2010

Time to try my luck
:rolldice:
Crap.
Having watched the video fully, I really hate that Valve decided to can the project. All the creativity on display with the electrical circuits, the AI for the test subjects, and the overall environment design suggests that Arkane had a real passion for the project. Seems like a shame to just shelve the whole thing and let it all go to waste.

But, well, creating sophisticated technology and then just dumping it on a whim seems to be Valve's stock in trade. They designed a creature during the beta that was a glowing blue tentacle-like enemy that could move around obstacles without the aid of scripting, but ended up removing it because when it was chasing you, all you saw was a pinprick of light. A true waste of time and potential.

ChocolatePancake
Feb 25, 2007
I agree. That game looked like it would have been a blast to play. Assuming you can get past how unrealistic the electricity is. It does not work that way! But still, very cool concepts.

nine-gear crow
Aug 10, 2013

Blastinus posted:

Having watched the video fully, I really hate that Valve decided to can the project. All the creativity on display with the electrical circuits, the AI for the test subjects, and the overall environment design suggests that Arkane had a real passion for the project. Seems like a shame to just shelve the whole thing and let it all go to waste.

But, well, creating sophisticated technology and then just dumping it on a whim seems to be Valve's stock in trade. They designed a creature during the beta that was a glowing blue tentacle-like enemy that could move around obstacles without the aid of scripting, but ended up removing it because when it was chasing you, all you saw was a pinprick of light. A true waste of time and potential.

It is absolutely indicative of just how rudderless and capricious Valve was during its wilderness years. Entire nearly-completed games would get thrown into the trash because peoples' attention spans waned or they just weren't feeling like working on the game anymore, or someone else on the flat hierarchy where no one was actually a leader came up with a new brilliant idea and lobbied everyone to stop working on Jim Bob's 90% finished previous brilliant idea and come work on this one instead.

It was like some nightmare parody of a new age Silicon Valley startup, one of those things that effectively masqueraded as an adult daycare center for intellectually derelict mental children in adult bodies. The type of work place that has nap times, and free juice boxes, and silly slides instead of stairs, and a trampoline room, and that scrunky foam puzzle piece flooring with letters and numbers on it that you'd find in children's activity centers. Just the most infantilizing, child-psychology-applied-to-adults gone wrong level bullshit you could think of.

That was Valve. For like 15 years. And probably still is, I dunno.

Jalak
Nov 23, 2013
For what it's worth, for all the flaws that Valve can have, 'company wide ADHD' is probably one of the milder ones, especially when you compare them to other companies such as EA. Granted, if Valve didn't have Steam to give them the finances to casually dump their projects as they have, they'd either be forced to pace themselves to release these products, which would not be guaranteed to be as successful as their other titles and could easily bomb, or they would have shut down years ago. Who knows.

Crazy Achmed
Mar 13, 2001

Yeah, I thought the format of the HL1 expansion packs was really good - expanding on the world by doing side stories happening parallel to the main one, without really interfering with the central plot too much. Not sure how keen I am on having a secondary character guiding you via radio the whole time - the isolation was one of the cooler parts of HL1's atmosphere, really, but everything else seems more than good enough for the game to have been a solid title for the time.

anilEhilated
Feb 17, 2014

But I say fuck the rain.

Grimey Drawer
"It didn't interfere with the central plot" is probably the second best thing one can say about Blue Shift, right behind "it's mercifully short".

Crazy Achmed
Mar 13, 2001

Look, I said the format was good, OK? The series has always done a good job of making the world around you feel larger than the setpieces that you actually get to interact with, so having the player explore other bits of it or go through the same areas and situations from a different perspective is a good way of capitalising on that.

Discendo Vox
Mar 21, 2013

We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.
Gah, I've only just found this LP; I have so much to say about HL2 and valve generally, and I need to do a lot of catching up. That said I have a couple general observations I hope haven't been made in the videos yet.

Much about valve, and half-life specifically, is clarified by remembering the company was founded by a pair of Microsoft devs.

1. Money to burn. Quantity is a quality unto itself, and nowhere is this more true than videogame development and money. Games are very hard to plan and budget well, and money is the infinite lubricant that allows error and refinement. Time and its completely fungible equivalent, money, are the biggest sources of risk for almost all game development, and the true root of most of the worst disasters in gamedev. For most game development, especially in resource-intensive, high-asset-cost projects, needing to cut an even partially implemented space or segment reflects a major management misstep and a sign of serious trouble.

From the beginning, even before the steam moneyprinter, Valve has had an unprecedented capacity to just...burn resources and prototypes and time for years. This is the thing that really sets them apart, and why they have such a panoply of prototypes and concepts and one-off elements and cut content in their products. They've got talented devs, to be sure, but those devs have an infinite safety net in a way virtually no one else does. It's a major factor in what led to the "dark period" of internal development; from a bottom line perspective, it really didn't hurt them that much!

2. It comes with Office. Valve has never really been in the business of games for their own sake. Virtually every game they have released, ever, is built around the promotion of some other underlying system. This is not a coincidence! Gabe Newell worked on all the earliest versions of Windows! It may be a game engine, it may be a steam function, it may be a peripheral, but there's always something else being hooked in that will separately become an income stream. With Half-life 2, it's the source engine, of course, but half-life 1 was also tied heavily to the development and promotion of its own engine. While they don't always succeed, every product is linked to gems, stamps, ingame shops...Valve uses its products as tentpoles for broader money-printing infrastructure.

3. Killer Apps, Killer Everything. Valve has, for a long time, had another sort of safety net, beyond money. Because of their insane success and market power, the entirety of design space in gaming has been warped by the black hole of their influence. Design talks and prototypes and concepts from the studio become the basic vocabulary of game design almost immediately. Everyone has seen this loving slide deck twice by now. Everyone knows water flow and lighting can be used to direct players, and I'd wager half the goons in this thread can remember which floating commentary node mentioned each of those. Valve products inspire entire genres of copycat products and aesthetics, and often fully occupy a design space for years; it's very hard to compete directly with a valve game while it's actively updated, but a sort of wake of alternate forms follows each new game produced. You're going to compete with TF2? With Left 4 Dead? Are you sure? How are you going to differentiate yourself without inviting an absolute wave of comparisons? This effect has diminished somewhat over the last couple years, but it's still a significant force.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 06:41 on May 7, 2022

Blastinus
Feb 28, 2010

Time to try my luck
:rolldice:
Crap.


This update is going to be a little experimental. Just slightly though, as a treat. I had a bonus feature planned, but then I realized that even with me going as slowly as possible, I was only able to squeeze 15 minutes of content out of it, so I just decided to throw it in to the update itself. You'll probably be able to see the transition coming.

Despite the joke I made in the update, Lost Coast's exhibit of HDR is specifically meant to show how Valve's Source engine is capable of rendering multiple light exposure levels, including the cataclysmic eye-searing brightness of Bloom, and creating light reflections on surfaces and in moving water. I recall that on its release in 2005, Lost Coast was a ridiculous strain on graphics cards, and even now, my attempt to record it at the highest settings didn't end up being as seamless as I hoped. Aside from the graphics on display, Lost Coast also features the first instance of Valve's ingame commentary tracks, which became a recurring theme in their mainline titles going forward. I'll be disabling them for Episodes 1 and 2, but I wanted to show them off here since there are some fascinating insights into the back-end of how the Source Engine functions.

Slight bit of trivia, but interestingly enough, this is not actually the first video game commentary track. Lucasarts (of course it would be Lucasarts) beat Valve by five years by including a commentary track on Star Wars Episode 1: Battle for Naboo and Star Wars Rogue Squadron II. Lost Coast is actually sixth in line, the other titles being Sly Cooper 1, Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, and Stubbs the Zombie, of all games, beating Valve to the punch by 9 measly days.

FoolyCharged
Oct 11, 2012

Cheating at a raffle? I sentence you to 1 year in jail! No! Two years! Three! Four! Five years! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!
Somebody call for an ant?

"As well it should... be."

Scaramouche
Mar 26, 2001

SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

I don't know what those explosive barrels on the cliff side are for either; I always notice and pop them on HWY 17 as well. I'm fairly sure they're not part of any sequence, or if they are it was a cut one. Maybe the APC powering the gate later was originally going to fall down there or something.

Kibayasu
Mar 28, 2010

I distinctly remember being annoyed at the time by some aspects of HDR in Lost Coast but especially the part mimicking the human eye moving from light to dark or dark to light. Not being able to... see for a moment in a video game didn't feel right at all.

The rolling mines are probably one of the stranger enemies in the game, not in terms of how they look but just how non-threatening they are. Like yeah they'll stop the car but they never appear in areas where that would actually be a problem.

Blastinus
Feb 28, 2010

Time to try my luck
:rolldice:
Crap.
This episode is brought to you by:



Sand! It's everywhere! I've used this joke in a previous LP, but it keeps becoming relevant, so I don't care. Pour one out for Laszlo. Finest mind of his stupid, stupid generation, taken at so young an age. I'm reminded of that World War Z movie, where the guy who knows how to solve everything falls over and shoots himself in the head. But where both these brilliant men failed at life, we will succeed.

Sandtraps is hard to nail down in terms of overall theme because it runs the gamut of defending against waves of enemies, tiptoeing across an infested beach, and then commanding a platoon of allies to storm a beachhead. It's a veritable hodgepodge of gimmicks and ideas and I think that's fine since, individually, they all work in their own separate sections, even if almost nothing we do in this update is going to be applicable to the rest of this specific game. Sure, there will be another car, and sure, we will have to tiptoe around Antlions again, but we won't have to do these things until the Episodes, so...look forward to that, I guess.

I suppose I should talk about the Antlion Guard, since it made a very brief appearance in the video before a Vortigaunt tasered its balls off. While technically bosses, their attacks consist of charging at you head-first or going slightly slower towards you and then swinging its head instead. Kind of a one-track mind, and it's even possible to get it to bash its head against a wall and stun itself momentarily. In fact, all explosives will stagger it as well, leaving it open for even more damage. If you don't know about the suit's sprint function, then it is faster than you and can basically headbutt you into oblivion with impunity. I've heard that a number of folks playing this game did not know that you could sprint, and I can see why certain parts of the game would be substantially harder as a result.

From the Antlion Guard, we get an infinite supply of Pheropods, also known as Bugbait, and this will round out our arsenal. Obviously a situational weapon, since it only works where Antlions exist, and knowing Valve's track record for discarding gimmicks, it won't be long until these party favors are just sitting in our inventory doing absolutely jack. But until then, they act as throwable target designators, allowing you to inform Antlions where they should concentrate their efforts. They are of the utmost necessity for this chapter and will also factor into the next, as you might imagine. Antlions are suspiciously effective against the Combine (they're supposedly coded to perform one-hit kills on soldiers, but it seems like it takes two hits sometimes) and as a result, a very effective tactic is to just send your infinite waves of minions into a packed area and wait for one of them to get lucky.

You could say that it's unethical to treat your soldiers as disposable just because you have infinite reserves, but the Antlions won't object. There's no loyalty mechanic in this game, and the world is better for its absence.

Blastinus fucked around with this message at 02:52 on May 13, 2022

Rappaport
Oct 2, 2013

There's a scene in Tremors where they have to pole-vault from rock to rock to get across the desert, which is great fun to watch, and back when I played this I felt this was a fun homage to that. Even if the mechanic isn't exactly the same.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
Five rockets take out the troop pods, for what it's worth. It's generally not worth the effort, since you need to expose yourself to the dropship's guns and by the time you get five rockets into them, plus the time to find reloads, they'll probably have disgorged most of their troops anyway.

One detail I like about the design of this level is how you smoothly transition from seeing thumpers as points of safety into seeing them as obstacles to disable. The game already taught you what they do, and so you know what to do when the context changes.

Cythereal fucked around with this message at 14:29 on May 13, 2022

Blastinus
Feb 28, 2010

Time to try my luck
:rolldice:
Crap.

Cythereal posted:

One detail I like about the design of this level is how you smoothly transition from seeing thumpers as points of safety into seeing them as obstacles to disable. The game already taught you what they do, and so you know what to do when the context changes.

Absolutely. Valve is great at teaching how things work in a safe way, then having you apply it later in a more advanced process.

Take the seesaw puzzle. You have no risks for falling off in Route Kanal and can take as long as you want at it. Then Sandtraps introduces another seesaw with cinder blocks nearby and the player's like "Oh hey, this is familiar."

Though I don't think they planned for part of the seesaw blocking you halfway and sliding you off. I don't even know why that happened.

El Spamo
Aug 21, 2003

Fuss and misery
Collision detection in the source engine has always been...wonky.
God I can't tell you how many times I've fallen off ladders to my death.

Kibayasu
Mar 28, 2010

I think the first part of Sandtraps is let down by the gravity gun being great at pulling, great at propelling, but not so great at placing juuuuuust over there. If you want to to stay off the sand those larger open areas are a bit of a slog as you slowly drop debris one step in front of you, pick what you just stepped off of, drop it again, etc.

Meaty Ore
Dec 17, 2011

My God, it's full of cat pictures!

Kibayasu posted:

I think the first part of Sandtraps is let down by the gravity gun being great at pulling, great at propelling, but not so great at placing juuuuuust over there. If you want to to stay off the sand those larger open areas are a bit of a slog as you slowly drop debris one step in front of you, pick what you just stepped off of, drop it again, etc.

I did it this way until I was able to get the achievement, and in future playthroughs I just booked it across the open spaces, because I didn't Have Time For This poo poo. The rest of the chapter is probably my favorite part of the game, though. Storming the beach and breaking into the prison with a bunch of antlions set to some groovy music was great fun, even if I did consistently get torn to shreds by the two gunships at the end.

Meaty Ore fucked around with this message at 16:40 on May 14, 2022

Blastinus
Feb 28, 2010

Time to try my luck
:rolldice:
Crap.


Ah, Nova Prospekt, the moment where you stop running and start actively ruining the Combine's day. Dr. Kleiner's description of Gordon as a walking disaster area is incredibly apt, since his very presence is bringing about the downfall of a facility that people in this universe treated as a veritable boogeyman. Though as I say in the update, it looks like it was already falling apart even before we got here.

Gameplay-wise, the big draw of Nova Prospekt is playing a reverse game of Tower Defense where you're in the background, dismantling turrets so that an endless horde of Antlions can advance. The Antlions are more than capable of pulling their weight against the Combine prison guards, so in most cases you're safer just sitting back and watching them go to work. There's a third wheel in this relationship, and it's most definitely you, which is fine, since Gordon is not intended to be a hulking one man army, as I also mention in the update. Nova Prospekt is a showcase of Gordon's ingenuity and problem-solving skills and his ability to improvise on the fly with the tools he's been given, not so much his own personal strength.

For this update, I also go briefly into Garry's Mod, a free sandbox tool designed for Source Engine shenanigans. For this update, I only use the Camera tool in order to poke around in the world slightly, but there is a wide suite of tools available, including model posing, physics modifications, and the ability to make full-on fan videos if you've got the chops for it, or even if you don't, considering some of the "quality" productions that exist out there. If you've seen videos of Source Engine skits with characters just flopping around and weird stuff happening, it's probably Garry's Mod. Folks have also achieved crazy results with a different tool called Source Filmmaker, but dang if I can wrap my head around it.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
This is my favorite stretch of Half-Life 2, because to me it evokes the feel of the original Half-Life very well: a facility that's a curious mix of high-tech and run-down, relatively intelligent [trans]human enemies mixed with alien monsters, and an emphasis on puzzles and manipulating the environment over head-on confrontations.

Kibayasu
Mar 28, 2010

Another thing Nova Prospekt seems to evoke is just that whoever it is behind the combine you're fighting just doesn't really care. If this place is destroyed by the antlions, meh, whatever, probably just build another. Not like the soldiers there really matter (see Breen's speech).

GunnerJ
Aug 1, 2005

Do you think this is funny?
The Breencasts are all really good worldbuilding. You're not even the target audience for some lore dump, you're gleaning detail and context from the implications of your enemy's propaganda.

Meaty Ore
Dec 17, 2011

My God, it's full of cat pictures!

GunnerJ posted:

The Breencasts are all really good worldbuilding. You're not even the target audience for some lore dump, you're gleaning detail and context from the implications of your enemy's propaganda.

I think my favorite thing about Breen's broadcasts is being able to see/hear his "wise leader" facade slip away a little more each time he shows up. By the end of Nova Prospekt it's clear that he isn't actually in control of anything. You can't help but laugh at him getting sold a bill of goods by his "benefactors".

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Blastinus
Feb 28, 2010

Time to try my luck
:rolldice:
Crap.
What I like about this particular Breencast is that it's pretty clear that he has no idea what's going on at all. Antlions are raging through the facility and guards are falling left and right and he's just like "Okay, time for your annual performance review."

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