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A nice thing I noticed on the edit; when you exit the G Mod section, Gordon walks out a door. The first person perspective comes back exactly after going through that door, tying the segments together nicely.
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May 23, 2022 02:00
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 Entanglement (I say Entangled during the update to my eternal shame) is a brilliant puzzle of a chapter. You've got three different scenarios where you have to arrange turrets to deal with an onslaught of Combine troops and there are so many different right ways to handle it and you feel like such a creative badass if you manage to do it correctly. Half-Life 2 doesn't entirely stick the landing as an "intellectual" FPS and I really wish there'd be more stuff like this where you're given tools to handle a situation and it's up to you to find ways to use what you're given to clever purpose. Also, lots of plot to sift through here. Betrayals, reunions, tragedies, loss...you know, bullshit like that. It'd be all really interesting if I could do anything about it. Even if you see the events unfolding, you're forced to just stand around and let it happen, and that's really kind of frustrating and stupid. Gordon's passivity is irritating in most cases, but in this particular one, it's outright harmful to any agency that the player might feel in this story they're trying to tell. This chapter will play out the exact same way, no matter what you try. Nonetheless, this brings an end to what you might consider Act 2. Act 1 involved the player trying to get to Eli's Lab, Act 2 involved trying to rescue Eli, and Act 3...is also about Eli, when it comes right down to it. Are we actually sure that the game is trying to set us up with Alyx?
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May 23, 2022 13:28
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I always thought the game was trying to set us up with Lamarr
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May 23, 2022 13:33
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What you can do - and I have done - is to take all the turrets along into the final section. Five in the second siege, eight in the last make things a lot more boring, but in some way also fun to watch if you set them up right. Don't gotta lift a finger. It's something of a chore to get them all where you want them, but I like doing it anyway.
Lynneth fucked around with this message at 15:31 on May 23, 2022 |
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May 23, 2022 15:27
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One interview with the makers of the game said they conceived of the Citadel and Combine technology as being parasitic in nature. There's a lot of concept art showing various Combine transhumans, and cyborg modifications of other creatures and races, with the idea being that you start with a base 'organism' (be it an actual living creature or a city), and then Combine technology starts to infest and grow into it. Also, a few notes on Combine terminology that I've noticed over this LP: 'Restrictors' = thumpers 'Necrotics' = zombies 'Sterilizers' = turrets 'Containment fields' = force fields Cythereal fucked around with this message at 15:55 on May 23, 2022 |
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May 23, 2022 15:33
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FoolyCharged posted:I always thought the game was trying to set us up with Lamarr I think that relationship is only one-sided, sadly. By the way, I've been keeping mostly quiet during plot sequences in order to not talk over the actors. Otherwise I would have been seething during that scene in particular. Do you mind if I do commentary over "cutscenes" or would you rather I just let folks talk?
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May 23, 2022 15:33
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Blastinus posted:By the way, I've been keeping mostly quiet during plot sequences in order to not talk over the actors. Otherwise I would have been seething during that scene in particular. What part was that?
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May 23, 2022 16:09
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Laughing Zealot posted:What part was that? Telling the traitor mossman to punch in the coordinates to teleport to and just trusting her to do it. catastrophic lapse in judgment no matter how you slice it Cythereal posted:One interview with the makers of the game said they conceived of the Citadel and Combine technology as being parasitic in nature. There's a lot of concept art showing various Combine transhumans, and cyborg modifications of other creatures and races, with the idea being that you start with a base 'organism' (be it an actual living creature or a city), and then Combine technology starts to infest and grow into it. Yeah combine newspeak is neat worldbuilding that we unfortunately catch very few snippets of over the gunfire. My favorite was finding out that bullets are 'verdicts' in civil protection-speak. Also the parasite thing is very well rendered and is an incredibly coherent theme throughout the combine, one that makes them stand out as truly horrific and alien, as well as incomprehensible. There will be a few more instances of the parasitic philosophy coming up, but suffice it to say that they are not content with stripmining the planet and draining the oceans. So much more to extract. mortons stork fucked around with this message at 16:32 on May 23, 2022 |
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May 23, 2022 16:26
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Laughing Zealot posted:What part was that? In the update I just posted, there's a part where you're allowed to move around freely while a character pulls a fast one and gets away, and you can basically do anything under the sun and it won't change a friggin' thing. Block them, shoot at them, doesn't matter. It'll happen regardless. And the weird thing is, there's a distraction in that scene where you could have conceivably been the one to handle it, and that would have realistically made it impossible to stop the aforementioned character from escaping. If you had been the one handling the beeping console, you'd have been over on the other side of the room with your back turned and it would have actually made it feel less railroad-y.
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May 23, 2022 16:28
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 So, not gonna lie here, HL2's themes are seeming less like fiction every day. At its core, the game is a Star Wars-esque "lone hero joins a rebellion and fights an empire", but also throws in the ideas of transhumanism, the destruction of the environment, the treatment of human beings as cogs in a machine, and other concepts that would be at home in anti-corporate cyberpunk fiction. On top of that though, you also have implicit commentary on the overreach of the police state, the systemic genocide of the underclass, the abuse of authority by those who claim to be protecting us, and how those in power will use rhetoric and doublespeak to make even the most heinous actions seem justified. Here's the problem though: these are themes. They're subtext, and at no point do characters actually debate these ideas back and forth. Your character is, by nature of never assuming control, entirely incurious to the concepts being thrown back and forth. Gordon Freeman's goal, as defined by the gameplay, is just to get from one place to another while shooting anything that comes in between, and all the stuff being talked about is entirely incidental to the gunplay. And then on top of that, it's like, okay, Anticitizen One is fine, but in execution, it's yet another iteration of the tried-and-true "gunfights in ruined buildings where human enemies and human allies and alien enemies have a big ol rhubarb with one another." Except in Half-Life 1 you had a human military with helicopters and bombing runs and tripwire bombs and minefields. ACTUAL minefields. Not these comical oversized jumping things. The resistance has no vehicles and is just running around doing disorganized gun battles without any kind of planning or strategy so you can't even enjoy the scenes on display. It's difficult to maintain a decent flow of commentary when it's just like "and we shoot some more people, and we shoot some more people, and oh look here's zombies." Overall, this chapter became a bit hard to comment on, and I apologize in advance for stumbling over my words more than usual. That being said, there is a new gimmick for this chapter, and that's "tactical" "squad" "gameplay". Four chowderheads at a time will merrily file along behind you and obstruct your attempts to get places. They're not the best, they're not the brightest, they're completely disposable and the game will still call you a hero with 100% approval ratings even as you lead these lemmings to their inevitable doom. You can't even do any real advice like telling someone to man a turret or flank an enemy position. It's "go here" and then "come back here" and half the time they don't even get those commands right. Kind of a mess, all told. I had a demonstration I was planning to do where I filed them one-by-one onto a burning tire, but unfortunately it didn't end up as funny as my imagination. Normally their pathfinding is pretty good at not walking into things that will kill them, but the tire is movable terrain, so to speak, so they don't have the same problems with it. I still have the video here if anyone's interested.
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May 29, 2022 19:33
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a robot dog that just runs around and picks up things most of the time seems entirely on brand for a robot dog
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May 30, 2022 00:06
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Cythereal posted:One interview with the makers of the game said they conceived of the Citadel and Combine technology as being parasitic in nature. There's a lot of concept art showing various Combine transhumans, and cyborg modifications of other creatures and races, with the idea being that you start with a base 'organism' (be it an actual living creature or a city), and then Combine technology starts to infest and grow into it. Fun fact, throughout the entire series, the overwatch voice and many scripted combine lines reflect a remarkably broad and consistent internal coded vocabulary. This holds true for the generic chatter lines too. I can't share vids yet due to spoilers, but there's a youtube account that pieces them together and infers a lot of it. Combine soldiers generally have a remarkably complex AI...which is largely wasted because they and the player both use hitscan weapons and the game's underlying design structure does little to finish attaching it to the environment in a way the player can notice. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 07:20 on May 30, 2022 |
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May 30, 2022 07:15
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Blastinus posted:So, not gonna lie here, HL2's themes are seeming less like fiction every day. At its core, the game is a Star Wars-esque "lone hero joins a rebellion and fights an empire", but also throws in the ideas of transhumanism, the destruction of the environment, the treatment of human beings as cogs in a machine, and other concepts that would be at home in anti-corporate cyberpunk fiction. On top of that though, you also have implicit commentary on the overreach of the police state, the systemic genocide of the underclass, the abuse of authority by those who claim to be protecting us, and how those in power will use rhetoric and doublespeak to make even the most heinous actions seem justified. I'm not convinced anything of value would've been added had Gordon had a VA who opined in over-wrought language what a crime against nature, humanity and the cosmos everything around him is. The game offers you a nightmarish dystopia and then some, and the player is free to take in from it what they want, or can. Gordon's, or by extension the player's, objection to the world the Combine have created can equally well be the Cronenbergian police state de-terraforming horror show that's enveloped not only all of humanity but everything on Earth, or the general lack of blackjack and hookers the player hopes to encounter.
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May 30, 2022 11:49
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For a sort of similar take on this aort of idea id say wolfenstein TNO gets closest, even if the villains are very human. But in that BJs inner monologue isnt just commentary about the world but also commentary on himself as a character, his identity, fears and hopes, and he interacts with other characters in a way that shows he has agency and initiative. Gordon needs to become a character first for any commentary from him to not feel vapid and rote. The method by which HL2s story is told when it exposits at the player has to change first.
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May 30, 2022 12:06
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The protagonist, generic UNN soldier, from System Shock 2 is pretty similar to Gordon. Both are trapped in a really messed up situation, and are railroaded by the game plot into shooting/smashing things, and they keep their thoughts to themselves (or let the player have theirs). SS2 has more RPG-lite elements, though, Gordon doesn't get skill points 
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May 30, 2022 12:22
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Rappaport posted:The protagonist, generic UNN soldier, from System Shock 2 is pretty similar to Gordon. Both are trapped in a really messed up situation, and are railroaded by the game plot into shooting/smashing things, and they keep their thoughts to themselves (or let the player have theirs). SS2 has more RPG-lite elements, though, Gordon doesn't get skill points Shame, that. I'd be sticking all my points into the crowbar and the pistol.  And yeah, I get your point. If they're going to make Gordon mute, then you get to choose what's important for you. You don't need to be told what's Gordon's motivation, because the story at its base is about survival/defeating the bad guys, which I think anyone can relate to.
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May 30, 2022 13:47
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Rigged Death Trap posted:For a sort of similar take on this aort of idea id say wolfenstein TNO gets closest, even if the villains are very human. I was thinking about the recent-ish Wolfenstein games myself. Of course, Doomguy also gets a fair bit of characterization in the 2016 game despite being a silent protagonist like Gordon, so I definitely agree that Valve could have done a better job making Gordon anything other than a cipher for the player's mouse and keyboard inputs.
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May 30, 2022 13:49
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One thing about Gordon's involvement in the anti-Combine resistance that does complicate it is how much it's heavily implied that the resistance has been working with or influenced by G-Man to get Gordon's help. And if you can't trust G-Man's motives, who can you trust? The thing about Gordon being this messianic figure that the good guys have been waiting on to save them is that, well, okay, he basically has power armor in the form of the HEV suit that no one else has, but we all know his real advantage is being controlled by a video game player with access to "save" and "load." There's room for some metanarrative interpretations since the G-Man (i.e., Gordon's handler) is seemingly some kind of extra-dimensional entity.
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May 30, 2022 14:00
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One visual detail about the Combine soldiers I find interesting is that they're clearly wearing 'soft' armor, not rigid plates like you might expect. If you look at how Combine soldiers move, and look closely at their textures, the Combine gear looks more like a really heavy sweater than the kevlar plates or powered armor that you might expect. I find it doubly interesting from a design perspective because the Combine aren't shy about rigid metallic surfaces everywhere else with their technology.
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May 30, 2022 16:30
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Yo, just letting you know that I'm taking a break. The next update will probably be in a week-ish. Sorry for the delay.
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Jun 7, 2022 13:52
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Apology not accepted. 
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Jun 7, 2022 14:23
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 So uh...yeah, I might have gone a bit overboard on this one. But if I had to describe what it is that makes this game (heck, ALL the games in the series) into such a massive snoozefest, it would have to be the music. The soundtrack itself is fantastic. It's a catchy blend of different electronic themes that's both atmospheric and also knows when to get louder and more action-y. The problem is the way the music is used. Valve just kicks their songs out there at scripted moments to loop once and die, and there's no actual feeling to that. Music should be used to enhance a scene, and their songs, in context of when they're used, fail at that. So I just threw in one of my own. Well, it isn't my "own", per se. Someone else composed it and threw it on a Creative Commons library to be shared by others. Here's hoping I don't get flagged for using it...but regardless, this particular firefight is one of the most memorable moments in this game, and I figured it deserved it. Feel free to make fun of my taste in music if you like. I also threw in some footage of Left 4 Dead 2 to fill the space in a rant I made. It's a perfect example of a game that melds music and gameplay, and it's encouraging that Valve gets better at figuring out the value of music in their later titles.
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Jun 11, 2022 23:13
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Music can improve or detract from atmosphere. Reaching way back, Marathon in my opinion is better without music since that reinforces the isolation of being alone on a giant spaceship being invaded. And then Doom is nothing without it's track.
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Jun 11, 2022 23:42
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Alyx getting captured there never stops feeling awkward. The music addition is good, that fight is a snooze fest.
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Jun 12, 2022 00:10
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Deathloop and Dishonored both thrive on their soundtracks
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Jun 12, 2022 01:43
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 Striders. Big, imposing, honestly genuinely terrifying. The amount of work that had to have gone into making these tripedal behemoths work correctly is downright insane, what with their bendy legs and their swivel heads and the distortion around their giant laser cannons...Like, I'm sorry, but I really have to geek out about these things. They are just phenomenal to behold, and it's a shame that they kill you in seconds. Makes it really hard to appreciate them for any amount of time. If I had to temper my praise with the slightest criticism, it's that I feel that 7 rockets is too much punishment for them to take, considering how many we're going to have coming at us over the course of this chapter. But you know what, that's an intentional design choice, and I can't fault Valve that much for deciding to make them these seemingly unkillable monsters that are just awe-inspiring to behold. Where I can fault them is what they've done to my boy Calhoun. Barney's had his turn in the protagonist seat, and he's falling over himself to provide unsolicited advice, often in a condescending manner. That's not to fault his accomplishments. In his own game, he blew up a tank, ran in and out of Xen while under fire from just about every enemy type, and he managed to actually escape Black Mesa with some surviving scientists who'll never be mentioned again. Not a bad bit of work, all told. Just wish he'd shut it and let me work in peace, is all. Small aside, I didn't notice this until I got the B-roll footage for this shot, but the strider actually demonstrated the thing I was talking about in the video where they can step on and impale their enemies (including YOU) on their giant feet. Check out the right leg there. Kinda off-putting, but also cool.
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Jun 17, 2022 16:07
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Gordon! Use the post button to reply to this update! The post button, Gordon! Hurry!
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Jun 18, 2022 13:45
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I guess the goal (and I'm totally speculating here, in no place is this backed up by the plot until maaaaaybe like Episode 2) for the resistance is to make keeping a presence on Earth more trouble than it's worth. Sure, they can't turn of the spigot of war material from the Combine homeworlds but maybe they can make it so that the bottom line starts to look bad. Which is a LOT of assumptions including the Combine's attitude towards cost/benefits and whether or not they even care about the bottom line and also whether they can even cause enough damage to Combine resources on Earth to affect the ledger. But when the other option is submission to an alien totalitarian state that will ultimately strip you of your very humanity and reshape you into a thoughtless drone, may as well blow poo poo up or die trying.
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Jun 18, 2022 17:11
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I think that generator fight in Anticitizen is easily one of the hardest in the game on higher difficulty. Your health/armor refills are extremely limited and the only real cover is behind the thing you need to be protecting in the first place. Even just going there for the wall kits can invite grenades.
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Jun 20, 2022 02:09
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El Spamo posted:I guess the goal (and I'm totally speculating here, in no place is this backed up by the plot until maaaaaybe like Episode 2) for the resistance is to make keeping a presence on Earth more trouble than it's worth. It's a reasonable goal but a mass uprising in a single city is absolutely the wrong tactic for something like that: even if the rebels do City 17, the Combine can just nuke the city as a warning to everywhere else. The better way to hit the Combine's bottom line is what the rebels have been presumably doing up until now: asymmetrical warfare with small partisan squads who can be protected by sympathisers among the rest of the population. Of course, that plan all goes to hell if some idiot in an HEV suit goes and blows up a symbol of the Combine's power and the general population decide that gently caress it, full rebellion now let's go. And going by how directionless the rebels seem right now, that does kinda seem to be what's happened.
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Jun 22, 2022 19:40
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 Get to The Horse, they say. Easier said than done when the entire battlefield is a crumbling mess. The last bit of Follow Freeman is a frenetic chase through broken structures with occasional bits where you just have to hold the line until a part of the world explodes. As a sendoff for the urban combat section of this game, it is a phenomenal giant setpiece with regular refills so you're never entirely overwhelmed. It also leads very naturally into the next chapter, which is why we're doing another two-fer today. Our Benefactors can be thought of as a final exam for the Gravity Gun. For reasons that will become clear in the update itself, none of your other weapons can help you any more, so you have to instead depend on the gimmicky weapon for the entirety of it. The feel of entering the Citadel reminds me a lot of seeing the otherworldly Xen environments for the first time. You've been running around in very "real" settings thus far and now for the finale, you've just taken a step into the fantastical. The Citadel has the feeling like you're moving through the innards of a giant machine in perpetual motion. It's not as stark as the intense biological nature of Xen, but the mechanical "world" you enter is nonetheless distinctly alien. We also get a number of opportunities to hear disingenuous concern trolling from a man with zero qualifications except the ability to fail upward. Dr. Wallace Breen is not a skilled general, an inspirational leader, or even someone who commands respect from those beneath him. Like many of those who seek a career in upper management, his skillset is limited to his ability to eloquently polish a turd and explain why everyone else should be happy to eat it. In that sense, he's the antithesis of Gordon Freeman, who doesn't speak but commands respect through his ability to survive overwhelming odds. Breen didn't earn his place in the high seat of the Citadel. He's nothing more than the wrong man who just happened to be in the right place.
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Jun 23, 2022 02:47
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Gordon's most lasting creation by way of his destruction would be freedom for the Vortigaunts. But of course they're not the path forward for humanity or even worth thinking about working with, they didn't come with big guns and overwhelming force enough to blow up all our armies... that, and Breen never read "Kingsmeat" (short story about a shepherd who talks aliens that like to eat people into not eating them all at once like they do everywhere else, then preserves the colony by basically just lopping off a limb or some fingers/toes of the colonists here and there long enough for some other people to come by and rescue them, and who gets rewarded for this by the colony by basically being turned into a brain in a jar). Though who the hell knows if he'd get it even if he had read it.
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Jun 23, 2022 04:10
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I'm sticking with my feeling that the second cage ride just isn't a good decision but that may also be because I'm not a huge fan of the super gravity gun section in general.
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Jun 24, 2022 01:33
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So is Breen a true believer you think, in whatever the "evolutionary progress" thing is? Or is he solely concerned with his own survival and empowerment.
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Jun 24, 2022 02:00
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Scaramouche posted:So is Breen a true believer you think, in whatever the "evolutionary progress" thing is? Or is he solely concerned with his own survival and empowerment. From the VA's performance and the vibes they give off, most definitely the second. I think they are also trying to imply that anyone at black mesa who had to work with the guy probably hated him too. He's meant to be one of those smarmy middle-manager bosses.
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Jun 24, 2022 02:15
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This is actually why I think the "collaborator" Breencast is great. "Heh, yeah, I'm a collaborator... With the good guys!" is exactly the kind of unconvincing nitpicky equivocation someone like Breen would think is clever. Just a great example of how poorly suited he is for the role of the alien overlords' viceroy beyond being a dependent lackey they can control completely.
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Jun 24, 2022 02:32
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Yeah, the way the story is laid out, we're definitely meant to see Breen as a massive hypocrite on...basically everything that he's saying. In particular, despite touting the virtues of cybernetic augmentation, the man is organic from head to toe. Which is a shame, because fighting a giant Mecha-Breen would have been a cool final boss compared to what we got. Speaking of which, expect the final update for this leg of the LP to land around Wednesday next week. I'm going to be moving in mid-July, but it's my goal to at least close this whole thing out before I get super busy.
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Jun 24, 2022 13:39
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Blastinus posted:The Citadel has the feeling like you're moving through the innards of a giant machine in perpetual motion. It's not as stark as the intense biological nature of Xen, but the mechanical "world" you enter is nonetheless distinctly alien. The art book, for what it's worth, clarifies that the intent was to make the Citadel feel like a living creature, per the whole medical terminology the Combine use. The image you're supposed to get, according to the artists, is the idea that the Combine see no difference between flesh and metal, creature and machine. The Combine in general was supposed to feel parasitic, implanted in human technology and architecture and spreading and taking over of its own accord, and this is the beating heart of it all, a parasitic cybernetic entity thrust into Earth's crust that is slowly spreading and overtaking the planet. Those big frog things you pointed out in the video are a cut enemy, called 'mortar synths.' They were imagined as being enemies for the final stages of the game that would rain down artillery fire on you from afar, and there's concept art suggesting that these, the striders, and the gunships are actual Combine military that they brought with them to Earth. These are the weapons that destroyed Earth's militaries - note how you never see an APC again after that one right at the start of the time skip. The concept art for this final arc of the game was imagined as the transhumans being phased out of the Combine and them bringing their actual military strength to bear on you and the rebellion. Unfortunately, they were running out of time and money by that point so a lot of concept enemies and scenery wound up being cut. Cythereal fucked around with this message at 14:26 on Jun 24, 2022 |
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Jun 24, 2022 14:05
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 So here we are, at the center of the Combine's power, and all the players have been assembled. As you might expect, Dark Energy is where the plot of the game comes to a head, featuring startling revelations about the world in general, unexpected resolutions to character arcs, and greater mysteries about the powers at play in the wider scheme of things. What it does not feature is a good final boss fight. Oh sure, it's functional. It's not frustrating or difficult, and just about anyone can figure out how to do it. It's not even tedious or annoying, since you can finish it faster than the characters can talk at you. It's just incredibly...fine. It's alright. It's okay, and I don't know what they could have done differently, short of taking the whole premise apart and starting over. Physics puzzles up until now have mostly involved grabbing nearby objects and inserting them into or on top of things, and this certainly is...that. You know what, though? Like tearing off a band-aid, this had to be done, since it means that we can get into the Episodes. Those are going to be very interesting in their own rights since, like Doom 3 versus Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil, Valve's going to start experimenting with the formula a little and trying various unusual scenarios. I can't wait to show those off.
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Jun 26, 2022 21:53
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Breen was a giant weenie that didn't deserve a final boss fight. I like him whining impotently at Gordon while trapped helplessly in the teleporter. They should have dumped the helos and just had you blow it up by pushing a cart into the beam. Bring things full circle like with the evil tram.
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Jun 27, 2022 03:49
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