T w e n t y S i d e d
For those of you who have been eager to hear us criticize Valve a bit… your moment has come.
Link (YouTube) |
Crysis 2
Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?
Civilization VI
I'm a very casual fan of the series, but I gave Civilization VI a look to see what was up with this nuclear war simulator.
What is Piracy?
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
Object-Oriented Debate
There are two major schools of thought about how you should write software. Here's what they are and why people argue about it.
Skylines of the Future
Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this series go next, and what changes would I like to see?
Its a good thing you were recording,because you arent repeating that.Its so cool.
Also,HOW DARE YOU CRITICIZE VALVE,RAAAURGH!!!But yes,the buggy was kind of annoying.I didnt mind the mines so much though.Oh and the tease in episode 2 with the sniper rifle(grumble).Still those are all minor complaints.
What I dont get is why didnt they separate the suit and the flashlight retroactively after episode 2,like they did with the crosshairs.And its not that I mind them being bunched together,it is a suit with a single power source,but why does the flashlight draw so much juice?Its not like its a giant flood light used on stadiums,its a regular flashlight you can power for days with ordinary batteries.
I think the rebels were using a homemade battery – a wet cell battery with lemon juice, some paper, and alternating copper/non-copper coins.
They did seperate the HEV suit battery (for sprinting and breathing underwater) from the flashlight. In episode 2.
Daemian is asking why they didn’t retroactively change that for HL2 and Ep1 (where they’re on the same battery), after they did separate them all in Ep2.
Ah, I see. I misread.
Probably because of the flashlight “puzzle” in ep. 1. It was designed to make you use zombies as torches, and to be irritated at the flashlight.
I don’t think the Lowlife chapter in Ep1 would have worked with the improved flashlight.
I think the one good thing about the mine is that it’s relatively short. Ignoring the headcrabs and the barnacle you could run it through in about 1-2 minutes I’d bet.
What they should have done is, they should have stuck with the old flash light until the Vort upgraded it by shocking it just before entering the mines. That would provide the justification and be in time for the chase around the tunnels.
Poor Ant lion. It finally musters up the courage to leap beyond the thumper, and then it overshoots.
Antlion: OH HAI THERE *thunk*
And yeah, I didn’t find the buggy to be too bad — it handled annoyingly sometimes but it was still an interesting way to get around. The car later was much better to actually drive, though.
Also, can’t you join up the highway levels in a steam mod or garry’smod or something? I thought that was the sort of thing you could do
I’m ambivalent toward Highway 17. Yes, it stretched on for way too long and I didn’t like driving the buggy, but on the other hand, it has the bridge scene.
The bridge scene is excellently done. Perhaps too excellently, at least from my point of view as an acrophobe; it’s very difficult to play if you’re constantly freaking out about how high up you are.
I greatly preferred Highway 17, partly for the bridge scene, partly for the rest.
1. Maybe G-man did plant Father Grigori there. He’s so mysterious, how’d anyone know the difference?
2. Not that it should be a game or anything, but playing through Ravenholm, maybe right after the attack, as Father Grigori would be awesome if a good system for good, dynamic first-person speaking in a video game was made. Bastion+Half-life+The survivalist diaries. That’s what Bioshock: Infinite wants to do, right (the talking thing, not the +++ thing)?
3. Who says those action heroes hitting without looking isn’t realistic? Maybe they all just get really, really lucky. Poor antlion…
yeah but if they did then they would all just have a perpetual WTF look on their faces.
You talk about how the loading screens were perfectly placed in this game and here, RIGHT HERE, in THIS level, is where you are proven ABSOLUTELY WRONG Shamus. I could not have been more aggravated by the loading screen placement in the car level. Half the time it was just before a turn, so when the game finally did load up, my car would be face planted right into a wall. Got me so damn mad.
I criticized the loading transitions quite a bit in Ravenholm.
Where would you prefer these transitions? In the open road?
Remember that the point of the tunnel is to occlude your view of the other side. (Because it’s empty space until you go through the load.) To do that, you need a bend, and you need the transition to take place before the bend. I suppose they could have all tunnels be baffle-shaped, with a bend, transition, then another bend. And I suppose putting a LIGHT at the bend would have been a really, really good idea. But you can’t move those transitions without breaking something.
My beef isn’t that it’s in a tunnel, my beef is WHERE they are in tunnels. The game designers didn’t seem to take into account that when you’re in a vehicle, you are going significantly faster than when you are on foot and need more distance to alter your direction. If they’d allowed a few more hundred feet in those corridors to straighten out my car before slapping a loading screen on me (they actually do in some spots if I recall correct), it wouldn’t even be an issue.
They ALSO didn’t seem to take into account the fact that when UNloading the content for the next level, the game essentially lagged. Unbeknownst to me, the game would be playing in the background while I was staring at the loading screen, using my last keystrokes to control the vehicle. This would mean that by the time the loading screen was gone, I’d be looking at a wall. Hell, I’d actually be able to hear the sound cues of my car crashing before I could regain control, like a taunt.
This isn’t as big an issue anymore naturally, but using the technology of this game’s time…it struck me as remarkably poor design.
I seem to remember the lag issue myself,but I think that got fixed in a patch or something,because I didnt experience it when I replayed it recently.
Ah. I see. Yeah. I remember plowing into the walls myself in 2004. I thought you were objecting to the idea of putting them in tunnels.
For me, it wasn’t placement but lighting. I didn’t even mind bumping into the wall, I just wanted to be able to tell which way I was supposed to be going once I recovered. Guess wrong, and you have to go through the level load twice more. :(
YES! THAT! Oh God, it’s all coming back to me…
I did this back in the day. And it was worse when the loads were a lot longer.
Yes. I ended up just hitting the brakes on the car whenever I got to a loading screen.
I’m going to explain the technical aspects of the Source engine which dictate the placement of loading screens, because I’ve been vaguely mentioning them every time someone complained about loading screens.
The first thing to understand about the Source engine is quite simple: It doesn’t do dynamic loading. When you leave a loading screen nothing new is going to be loaded until you enter the next one.
This is why loading screens are so mind-numbingly long, but it does mean you never have partially-loaded textures or slowdowns. I think technological changes may have made dynamic loading the superior option today, but Valve doesn’t want to switch engines. At the time, I think it may have been critical to having the open areas in the first place.
Point #1 feeds into the second point: Any geometry you can see from both sides of the loading screen needs to be duplicated on the new level. So if you had a massive, open area full of plenty of objects and a loading screen halfway through it, when you passed through the loading screen the system would proceed to purge it from memory and load the whole thing up again. This is why most loading screens are in airlocks.
Point #3 is presumably why they have bends: When there is any exposed empty space, it breaks more than graphics. It also means the game can’t generate the node map used for pathing, so hostiles can’t move. So they can’t just slap something non-solid on the end of the tunnel, there actually is something beyond the end and the less of it the better.
These constraints shape where loading screens can be, and ultimately any other rules of game design must bow to making sure the minimum system requirements can run it at an average of 24 FPS without catching fire.
WTF FREEMAN BOSS USES AIMBOT!!!!!!! THIS GAEM CHAEtS SO HARD! VALVE SCKS!!?!
The mine seemed rather pointless to me as well. Yes it made sense that the mine was there but we didn’t need to climb down into a large chamber filled with head crabs. Honestly if we had climbed down and saw a destroyed elevator with a combine shell going through it and then maybe 5 (at the most) zombies it would have made for better environmental storytelling. Heck throw in a corpse or two in those shacks with all the supplies and suddenly everything would be justified and even give you an idea of the hour when the combine attacked.
Indeed.Make it look like some people bunkered there waiting for rescue,but it never came,and they all got slaughtered/turned.
Fridge moment: Father Gregori (I presume) made that mine-cart-blade trap, right?
How did he get out afterwards? Why didn’t he just leave it on, or provide some means of keeping the headcrabs and zombies from leaving the same way we do?
I never understood that either. There’s no obvious way out unless he can jump 10 feet in the air or he doubled back after coming out the same way you do.
Of course since he has strange ability to have access to every rooftop and travel across them quickly and freely, maybe he’s just some sort parkour master and can just run up the walls and leap across alleyways with ease.
That’s actually a funny image.
I am pretty sure that Alex mentions the tau cannon when talking to the rebel.
And the car section is a bit more fun in coop because its turn half life into a racing game for some diversion.
You know, I didn’t like Coastline 17 at all at first – but after a few years and a really comprehensive playthrough, I found myself enjoying it a lot more. For the variable pacing dependent on your own exploration instincts, for the atmosphere, for the visuals, for the setpieces – I actually like it better than Ravenholme. Mostly the reason I didn’t like it at first was Rutskarn’s issue with the buggy, but I swear they’ve inserted some sneaky patch since 2004 that improves the vehicle handling and I haven’t managed to flip that thing in a long while.
I know they’ve updated everything but Lost Coast to use the Orange Box build of the engine, which means that HDR is now baked in to the original Half-Life 2 (but can be left off in the graphics options if you so desire, since I don’t think the levels have the necessary information to make full use of it)
And I don’t know about the buggy, but I definitely remember the airboat being more of a pain to control back in 2004, and that was when I still had reflexes (the subsequent decay being why I generally play Heavy in Team Fortress 2, since a Heavy with Natascha has little need for reflexes)
Man, I hate all half-life 2 vehicles. The airboat, the buggy, the car when you’re with Alyx. I just can’t handle the controls and always end up in a wall as soon as the path bends a little. If only valve had made these levels in a perfectly straight line…
I’m currently in Ravenholm in my replay, and contemplating using the console to unlock chapters because dangit, I played through this in 2004, and I want to get to the part I consider FUN again. That means skipping the mine, and going to Highway 17. I really liked the buggy.
And Josh punting the antlion off the cliff is one of the funniest moments I’ve seen in Spoiler Warning, all the more so for his reaction.
11:10 – My favorite song on the soundtrack.
11:58 – … DANGIT, RUTSKARN!
Wait, you could kill the snipers?
Damn it, I ran the whole way trying to dodge them and wound up getting through with about 20 health.
Same thing on my 1st playthrough…
Me too, but because I ran out of grenades. I’m so bad with those.
JRPG MENU MUSIC? We shall duel, sir. DUEL TO THE DEATH.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mHxxY-8pZk&
Mind you, it might be more fitting depending on how you play. I sort of roleplay Gordon — a bit — so I went over to the guy with the two others around him and crouched down next to him for a moment. And it’s a very human, conventional sounding piece of the soundtrack landscape, sort of one for the humans while the rest is much more heavily electronic.
I tend to roleplay as Gordon too. I remember holding the shift key throughout the entire intro to Half-Life 1 as I walked past all the scientists. It didn’t feel right speeding around.
Excuse me, I’ll give my honest and calm opinion about the episode later.
For now give me an hour or two to rewatch the antlion scene fifty times while laughing myself into the ground.
You’re… you’re not supposed to just jump down that first mine shaft like that. You circle around the edge of it on the beams. There are bits that angle down as a “hey, this is your slope down” indicator.
A classic example of Half-Life breaking all that immersion they painstakingly generated. Jumping down ten feet onto an unsupported wooden beam? Sure, let me do that another half-dozen times! With my finger on the quicksave key because I don’t know if there’s any health at the end!
Basically this entire section is why I don’t like Half-Life 2. It takes way too long for no real payoff. System Shock 2 had these same atmospheric scenes, but you didn’t have to jump through hoops to see them.
Alright, I simply could not stop laughing at the Antlion bit at the end. That. Was. Beautiful.
Hey, are you going to cover the “skip the bridge” thing?
Ok, the last antlion was hilarious.
There is one thing that is subtle which I havent heard you guys talk about yet. If you fast forward to 17:20 in the clip and pause – you see a orange-ish Half Life symbol on a door that Josh is about to throw away. If you have never played the game, these symbols indicate places you can look for ammo/power/first aid, and are all over the game. In fact, if you watch the episode carefully, there are several others scattered around.
Also you can see that theyve added an achievement for finding them all,since the progress bar has appeared whenever Josh found one of the stashes.
Oh, Highway 17. Probably my favorite level in any video game. Long and fun and a great atmosphere and the introduction of the crossbow. Oh, and it has that ‘Triage at Dawn’ song at the end of the Ravenholm level, which is also great.
I finished half life 2 for the first time when you did the first half life 2 episodes, I was playing mostly blind, I don’t know how I managed to get to 2011 without having any spoilers :)
It really does date well, if you didn’t know you could easily say that it came out this year or last. Personally I really enjoyed the story and found that the gap between the story segments was probably just right, if it was any longer you’d feel that it was too long and any shorter, too short.
I really hope you can finish half life 2 and hopefully all the way to episode 2. Also I can’t wait till you get the super gravity gun
p.s. I tried to spoiler it but didn’t work
“p.s. I tried to spoiler it but didn't work”
I think that its because the s tag doesnt work,you have to use the strike one(at least that was a problem long ago,dont know if it persisted).
Thanks, can’t edit now, at least I’ll know for later.
So in theory this worksI just wanted to point out that, having come from a New England state originally, it took me literally until the last three minutes or so of the episode to get the pun in the title. (In Massachusetts at least, “aunt” is pronounced with the same sound as “awesome” or “October.”)
Pretty epic fail on my part.
Don’t feel so bad, it took me a minute after reading your comment to see the pun, and where I live we even pronounce it “Ant”… i think, now that I think about it I don’t even know XD
I don’t know, after reading that episode title, I can only think of The Little Antlion That Could as the new Elder Lyons from D.C.
Man, the radiation wasn’t kind to him. Even worse, he found the one lunatic from DC who kept murdering everyone and punching him in the face. He just can’t win.
Fortunately, it’s still every bit as hilarious. :D
Oh! So thats what that was. Yeah, from the UK myself, where Aunt is not pronounced ant.
I am also from the uk, I guess I was wrong, it’s not a word I generally hear to be honest.
That, or maybe different regional accents. I pronounce it Arnt.
I don’t use ANY of the same sounds for “awesome” and “October”.
I get that you say “Awe-nt”, but how do you pronounce “October”?
im getting sick of these mainly because i don’t like valve. I have played all of their games except for Portal 2 and I havent enjoyed any of them. I can’t even finish them because they i just get bored or the game screws me over(Looking at you half life 2). Lastly most of those design decisions you guys praise I don’t like at all.
Put me in the “I don’t agree with him” category. Keep HL2 alive!!
Then why did you play all of their games?
I bought the orange box.(My first time experiencing Valve) And I played the other games at friends houses or borrowed them. In the end I only spent like 20 bucks on valve
I’m not much of a Valve fan, either, but I do love TF2 and can see the SW crews complaints and where they stem from.
The downside to that is I feel guilty when I enjoy any game they bash or point out has these flaws. Though that may be because I’m a bit of a PS3 fanboy.
Aww, not even Portal? I didn’t think it was possible to dislike Portal…
I think you need, like, special dispensation from the government.
Motion sickness and that game don’t go well together.
So… you don’t think that the fast zombies are well-designed creatures? Specifically: They are more mobile than the player, but noisy and visible about it; they appear to be humans with their skin and some other organs removed and muscles visible, and that is creepy and scary; they attack a few times before howling/screaming; they exist in a manner which allows them to be seen closely and in detail; and the headcrab survives the death of the host.
Those are some of the design decisions praised; why don’t you like them?
I can’t hear that rifle (which can shoot a big ball, whatever they are called) sound without thinking about the Ballad of Black Mesa. Link below. Just something I realised while watching this.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTbL5elVXrU)
Oh, and also? SURPRISE ANT LION! SUPPLIES!
Highway 17 is the one part of Half-Life 2 I absolutely loathe. I keep flipping the buggy and then getting eaten by the infinite horde of antlions while trying to right it. I think the reason I hate the buggy but not the others is that when I slam the others into an obstacle I can just immediately keep driving. When I do that with the buggy I am forced to exit it and desperately try to right it before the antlions finish gnawing on my health bar. Then I do it again.
I love Highway 17. I loved the video as well. Your commentary, as always, was informative and funny. I just rewatched some FO3 videos and it wasn’t until after I watched this video that I realized Mumbles is gone. I also laughed out loud when Josh crushed the box on an unexpecting antlion, and it flew off into the horizon. I began laughing my head off, and then when Ruts and Shamus caught up to it in the stream they started laughing too.
I absolutely loved the sandbuggy, while the mines scared the ever loving crap out of me. Of course I’d already trained on the warthog from Halo, which also had slightly wonky steering, so I was used to learning how to compensate and once I got it down it drove perfectly. I also didn’t mind the thumpers-the steady pounding marking a safe zone ahead was always nice. And the smg ammo crate was a nice touch that I didn’t even know about the first time, but came in real handy for later runs.
Whaaaat, you don’t like that song? I love that song! It ties in with what the one rebel lady says about Winston being hit. It’s a little moment, something people who just want to get to more of the game might not notice as much, but it’s a reminder that the rebels are real people, which might make you feel ever so slightly worse about the massive amounts of them you’re going to burn through later in the game. :P
I have to agree with you on the buggy section. Some people think it’s the greatest thing in the world, but… not me. It’s difficult to control, especially in the steering. Granted, it’s a whole lot easier to control than most videogame vehicles I’ve driven (I’m replaying ME1 at the moment and I want to set the Mako on fire myself), but it’s still not very good. The airboat, on the other hand, is perfection. It goes on both land and sea, you eventually get a sweet gun for it, and it never ever ever can be flipped, no matter how hard you ram something. (because you don’t have the grav gun at that point)
Also, the antlion part was absolute GOLD.
I finally remembered to watch this Ravenholm series. I love that level, but I was an idiot the first time through. I hadn’t mastered the grav gun at all yet and really struggled with the low amount of ammo. Now I almost never touch my guns going through.
As for this video: argh, I hated the car so much. I thought I hated the boat from the beginning until I drove the car for a while, then when I went back to the boat I found I loved it. The car in episode 2 was a bit better, but I still prefer the non-driving portions.
I know the buggy was mentioned a lot but… it made me sick. like, actually nauseous. The airboat too. Dunno why, maybe I’m motion sick *shrug*
You might just be too close to your monitor (or otherwise too narrowly focused on it). Much of the time motion sickness is the result of the confusion in your brain when the sensory input from your eyes is out of sync with the balance and motion input from your inner ear.
If you can see enough of the room around you, it should be easier for your brain to understand that you aren’t actually moving, and that the stuff on the monitor is just something else moving around in your field of vision. It might be less immersive, but at least you won’t have to clean vomit out of your keyboard.
Or, you could just be one of those people who gets nauseated playing video games.
Half life 2’s engine itself is, iirc, more likely to cause the motion sickness than other engines. I don’t know if it’s due to their default FOV setting, or some rendering procedure, or the way they handle perspective as such, but for me anything in source – especially if running at lower framerate – has been more ‘queasy’ than any other game / engine.
That’s a good point. The default FOV is 75 I think for Half Life 2. I always try to kick it up to near 90 and that takes care of any (admittedly slight) consequences of everything being a bit “zoomed in”.
I still get a little sick sometimes when I play first person games. The very first one I played was actually HL2 and by the time I got halfway through the train station, I was having to take long pauses and look away from the screen to turn. I got used to it eventually, but every so often I still have to take a break and let my stomach settle. Some people are just prone to motion sickness (cars are a misery for me) and people who aren’t will never understand what it’s like.
Alternatively, you could just play all those sections whilst actually driving a car.
…
Maybe not…
I found that I mostly get HL2-sick when I’ve eaten a bunch of candy immediately prior and seemingly more often in dim sections for some reason.
I find that motion sickness for vehicle sections in Half Life (at least for me) has more to do with me not keeping Freeman’s “head” pointed in the same direction as the vehicle is going. I think it has to do with one’s brain anticipation motion along one vector but seeing motion along a different one, coupled with the inner ear not feeling any motion at all.
That reminded me of one of the early Terminator FPS game’s vehicle sections. It required independent aiming and steering, with the added bonus that steering didn’t change where you looked, and the vehicle wasn’t rendered at all. If you weren’t moving, you really didn’t know which way you were pointed.
That Antlion is BLASTING OFF AGAIIIIINN *TWINKLE*
So here’s a question for us Valve fanboys: Is Valve’s recipe for games like Half Life (assuming they ever continue it, given recent statements about embracing the TF2 micro-transaction model of money generation) one that will ever be emulated? I ask this because even though HL has surely been a money-maker for Valve, some of the biggest games on the market right now are abominably stupid shooters festooned with chest-high walls, characters you’d rather kill than have at your side, etc.
I guess I’m wondering if Valve’s method of gameplay/storytelling can stand up to what appears to be a Hollywoodization of games, in the way that a thoughtful sci-fi movie can easily be trounced by some drek from Michael Bay.
Unfortunately they cannot simply recompile the chapter as a single level. The Hammer editor for HL2 has a hard coded limit for the number of brush faces.
The counter for the brush faces is an INT var, and I actually ran into it when trying to compile a large custom map.
The mine level was originally supposed to have you destroying a Gonarch-type mother headcrab that was actually producing all the crabs that eventually found their way into Ravenholm. (They changed the delivery method to headcrab shells later on in production.)
Going down into the mine slowly and seeing all the spidery skittering by the fast headcrabs (that would have been endlessly respawning in the original version) far below you is a great underrated creepy moment, BTW.
Not to mention coming out of the mine into the daylight and finally being all IM FREE and having a poison headcrab jump up right behind you.
Moments like these are why we love Valve playtesters so very, very much.