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We had some trouble with Windows/Graphics card updates messing with our PS4 recording process this week, so we decided to do something completely different! Half-Life! But the weird one! And Shamus isn’t even here! It’ll be great.
The first time I played this game was long after the original Half-Life came out. If I recall, my impressions at the time were that it was far harder to no apparent benefit. Playing it again now, I think I was spot on. Admittedly, I was playing it on hard and I’m very out of practice with late-90s shooter movement, but I’m also pretty sure I’ve played through Half-Life itself on hard a number of times, and I don’t remember ever having this kind of trouble.
It’s more than simply the lack of resources (although I’m certain Half-Life was more generous in this regard), it’s nonsense “gotcha” enemy spawns that will definitely kill you at least once. It’s long unbroken gauntlets of enemies with little downtime. Half-Life was about exploring a place; Opposing Force feels more like someone wanted to take Half-Life and make it HARDCOREâ„¢, and a lot of the unique aspects of Half-Life suffered in favor of this.
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Silent Hill Origins
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
“20minutes with”. Is actually 56 minutes. Goddamnit Josh.
I mean…. Are you complaining? That’s more free content.
Mainly because I was supposed to be in bed already. So really just me being stupid to be honest…
Well, I for six am glad they can’t count. Seven.
Exactly my first thought when I saw the title was “oh man I hope it’s longer than 20 minutes.”
Clearly they’re using base 29.
Protip: You can hit use on the pop cans from vending machines to gain health, 1 HP at a time.
AFAIK there are no direct references to this game in HL2.
The ex-head writer at Valve (Marc Laidlaw) approveed of Black Mesa being nuked at the end however.
There are references to Blue Shift in HL2 outside of Barney’s last name. They make reference to the Xen relay you activate in that game, it is what makes Eli’s teleporter better then the Combine’s.
Blue shift wasnt really a full game.At least,not by then standards.By modern standards,it would probably be sold at full price.
I liked all the extra challenge from the very things Josh dislikes here. The game is so fast-paced that the added difficulty never felt unfair, and the extra challenge was fun. In addition, they did genuinely add new scenarios and challenges to the game to match.
1) Josh complains the game is too hard.
2) Plays on maximum difficulty anyway.
3) Dies 25 times in 56 minutes.
4) Damnit Josh.
It’s not just that he dies a lot, though. Anyone can die a lot. He sort of does that cool speedrunner thing where you take insane risks and come out on top, except instead he dies hilariously again and again.
Exactly this.If he wasnt trying to rush through a game he was so out of touch with,he wouldve done much better.
But who would want to watch that? :)
Well I enjoyed watching SoldierHawke go through half life 1 all careful and slow like.But that took more than 20 minutes.
She sounds a bit like Mumbles.
Hah! More than you know. The Donate button on her blog is labeled “Buy Hawk a beer.”
Now that I think about it, has anyone ever seen Hawk and Mumbles in a room together?
She doesnt swear though.So we know definitely that she is not Mumbles.
Who the fuck told you I don’t swear, asshole?
;)
(Much love <3)
Heehee I was wondering if you were going to show up. Were you’re ears burning?
I really loved that series too. Half life was one of the first games I played. Watching someone play it for the first time and react to it genuinely made for a great series.
*Hugs* Well, there’s another episode going up tomorrow I hope! I’m still debating if I should do Portal 2 or another HL2 installment, but. Either way, new video tomorrow.
Do them both.At the same time!
Woohoo! Made my day reading that!
This random shoutout completely made my day. I want you to know that <3
I started watching your vids when I was in high school. Your content has basically been a semi-permanent fixture of my entire adult life. I still keep checking back every once in a while to see if you’ve post a new video, and when you have, it’s some kind of major event, like a holiday.
Gotta say, it’s been one hell of a ride. You’re totally awesome!
Damn. I don’t know what to say to that. I know that there are certainly creators that are like that for me, who’ve been a fixture in my life as you said and who I’ve basically grown up with. The idea of being that for someone else is…odd. And wildly flattering.
Thank you. Truly.
I ended up watching, or mostly listening to your HL1 series. It was fun hearing your thoughts and reactions to things I already knew about. Hearing you complain about Controllers, I couldn’t wait for you to see the end boss. I went right into your HL2 series.
You expected otherwise?
I think Josh has spent so long playing Dark Souls that he has forgotten difficulty sliders exist.
Am I the first to mention? Were we just going to pretend not to notice to troll Josh? Well…
You know that secondary fire on weapons? For the starting pistol/magnum in OF… It activates the laser sight. And makes the gun super-accurate. They basically give you a seven shot magnum as the first gun, and keep you well stocked in ammo.
Exactly this! At 24:40 when Josh uses up all his ammo on a single headcrab…
Is there a reason to not have the gun in this mode at all times? Like, does it alert enemies with the laser or something? I feel like there’s no good reason to have the gun default into a suck-mode, where the only reason to keep using it, is that the game never tells you you can leave that mode. :S
I think you can’t see the laser in nightvision mode?
That doesn’t make any sense at all.
Not really.The reason why night vision looks green is that it enhances certain frequencies of light,not all the light.So a frequency outside those,for example red,would not be visible.
Except a target designator (laser sight) is specifically for use with night vision because you can’t use sights while wearing goggles.
In any case, I’m wrong. The alt mode increases accuracy but reduces firing speed, so that’s the tradeoff, according to the wiki.
To be fair,the game does tell you about alternate fire in the tutorial.
As for why you would want it,the same reason you can turn the reticle off.Some people actually prefer playing like that.
Alt-fire modes that help you aim more accurately typically get paired with a reduced move speed.
This would be great to be a SW series to watch if it didn’t go between making me want to puke and blinding me with green.
I don’t recall ever thinking this was more difficult than Half-Life (although I did play on Normal difficulty).
There’s that section in the sewers with the big slug aliens, but otherwise I don’t recall it being particularly challenging / punishing / annoying.
On subsequent play-throughs though, I found the sewers not too bad, because I knew what to expect and so stockpiled all my ammo. I remember the 2nd and 3rd times through, getting to the end of that section and thinking “that was it?”.
I do remember having some trouble with the sewers on my first playthrough. I kinda like them now though. They give me an opportunity to actually use my tripmines.
Night vision is still used in modern shooters, or at least, in the only one I play, that resembles one – Insurgency. Half the maps in this game are night variants of regular maps anyhow
I liked this game.And it wasnt particularly hard.But then,I played it immediately after going through half life 1 on hard,so I was quite accustomed to the difficulty at that point.
It was fun exploring this place from the other side,experiencing some events from the first game,but at a different place.
Nope.Playing all three(and a half) games on hard,they all have about the same amount of resources.If you are careful with how you spend them(using precise magnum shots instead of wasting your inaccurate smg at long range,for example)you will have plenty of ammo at all times.If you are just spraying bullets like you are doing here,you will always be starving for ammo.
Gman may not have been established as alien,but he was definitely not just a regular human in hl1.Sure,up to the very end he did nothing weird,but once you finished xen,you were in that limbo train and he was acting rather weird.
This was my thought. yeah they reference a director, but I always just took that to mean some boss that you never see. It seemed pretty clear to me that the G-man was, well, a G-man. I.e. some guy in a suit sent from the government, who at the end is revealed to be more.
About eating all of these stuff,I wonder how would they taste.I dont think Ive eaten any carnivores.Not cats,not sharks*,not anything.So how does the carnivore meat differ from the herbivore meat?
*Though I think Ive eaten some other carnivore fish,but Im not that familiar with what various fishes eat to say for sure.
Rattlesnake tastes like chicken, but very dense. Alligator tail tastes like chicken, although it was fried and spiced…
Thats interesting,because thats how frogs taste like.It means that amphibians and reptiles are both closer to birds than to fish.
I also thought frog tasted like chicken, and I have a theory about this. If you ever eat a baked chicken breast that has just been baked with nothing added to it, it tastes pretty much like….nothing. Chicken mostly sucks up the flavor of whatever it is cooked in/with. Even when you make broth it’s done using the bones and fat of the chicken, not the meat. So my theory is that all these things don’t taste like chicken, they just all, including chicken, don’t have much flavor of their own. We just ascribe everything tasting like chicken because of all these flavorless meats, chicken is the one we encounter the most.
Or,the machines did not know how these things actually tasted like,so they made them all taste the same to us.
Chicken tastes like nothing because you’re eating water.
Are you sure about chicken having no flavour? I’ve had chicken raised in my friends garden and it had a very distinctive flavour. Similarly i’ve had plain supermarket chicken and its fairly tasteless but that’s battery farmed and artificially plumped up with water soooo yaah knowww, kinda to be expected really.
Although i’ve also never really thought anything tasted like chicken but chicken, the whole “everything tastes like chicken” thing is a bit of mystery to me.
Thing is, I don’t know who coined the expression tastes like chicken. And I can’t fathom why it’s so popular. I don’t know that other languages have equally popular expressions of the kind, whether comparing to chicken or anything else.
I don’t know if any one person coined it, I just think it became a cultural running gag because a lot of meats do seem to taste similar to chicken.
As you said that has to do more with the environment than the meat itself. Absent of those factor’s it’s still bland.
Ehhhh all meat becomes pretty tasteless if its raised in that manner. It prevents proper muscle development ect ect.
The problem is more that battery farming poultry is quite a lot easier than battery farming say, cows. So the chances of your supermarket beef being battery farmed is a lot smaller than your supermarket chicken being battery farmed.
I’d tell you to go seek out some good quality “free range” chicken to cook and try for yourself, but depending on what country you are in that definition could be almost entirely meaningless. You’d need to research it.
Also just, battery farming is obscene and should be illegal. But thats besides the point.
I second this. Actual chicken, from an actual farm, properly cooked, has a significant, distinctive and delicious flavour. Brown meat has a strong taste, white meat has a lighter taste, though.
Now, it seems to me that frog legs taste somehow between chicken and lean fish. Also, I find it repulsive.
Among fishes, anglers, herrings, rays, cods, salmonds and tunas are mainly carnivorous.
Practically all fish are carnivorous. They eat zooplankton, which count as animals, or other fish. Most of the creatures we think of as herbivores can eat meat as well, they’re just not adapted to hunting. Cows will eat carrion, as will pigs. Sheep too. Chickens can digest meat if it’s in small enough pieces for them to swallow.
Carnivore meat doesn’t differ all that much from herbivore meat. Because, when you get down to it, following digestion it’s all proteins, fat and carbohydrates either way. Carnivores do not convert the meat they eat into their own meat directly, they break it down and use it as fuel for their own cells. Whatever difference between their meats is mostly through lifestyle.
Well, sure, technically true.
However, when people refer to carnivorous fish, they’re generally referring to fish that eat other fish (predatory fish). And the distinction is really important if you eat fish.
This is because enviornmental toxins (most notably mercury, but also other environmental nasties that get dumped into the ocean) that fish (and humans) can’t metabolize get concentrated in fish that eat other fish. A plankton eater only contains as much mercury as it can eat in a lifetime. But a tuna that eats plankton eaters contains all the mercury that all those plankton eaters soaked up. This is called biomagnification.
Most dietary guidelines recommend limiting carnivorous fish to one serving a week or less. Also, pregnant women and people with certain health conditions are recommended to avoid them entirely.
I’ve seen our family chickens go after and eat (baby) mice. And if they ever get a taste of raw egg they’re pretty much hopeless because they’ll break eggs (including their own!) to get at the insides. Their favorite food on the farm is the chicken-flavored cat food. Chickens can be surprisingly vicious and opportunistic omnivorous cannibals.
Two words:
Former dinosaurs.
Tuna are carnivorous, so if you’ve eaten the world’s–or at least America’s–most ubiquitous canned fish, you’ve eaten a carnivorous fish. Congratulations!
I have eaten kangaroo (although kangaroos aren’t carnivorous). It does not taste like chicken. It’s a very lean and dark red meat, best served with obscene amounts of mustard. You can buy kangaroo in most Australian supermarkets, although it isn’t cheap. You can also get emu and crocodile if you go up to the Top End.
I imagine Kangaroo probably tastes a lot like venison, given the similarities of the two animals.
Wouldnt it be more like a bunny?
Not too far off but in my experience venison can vary a bit depending on whether it’s farmed or wild. Kangaroo is always wild (you can’t farm something that can jump any fence).
The most important thing about kangaroo is you have to like eating meat rare – there isn’t enough fat in it to allow it to be worth eating if cooked medium or beyond.
“there isn't enough fat in it”
Oh, that’s why. I ate some once, found it rather close to undercooked beef. Not bad, just not enough cooking for my taste.
‘COS WHAT THE HECK
You not killing the scientists isn’t exactly a retcon since you never got your orders. Your team/squad leader gets blown off the Osprey just as he’s about to tell you the mission and in fact the only time you get orders is when you get told to get to the extraction helicopter.
Full disclosure: This is my favourite Half-life game.
I cannot recall much of what you complain about Josh. If you know what you’re doing, you can get through the game fine. If you are having difficulty, then just turn it down. Half-life also had “gotcha” enemy spawns, though I cannot recall a situation in either game that would instantly kill you if you had decent health.
I enjoyed the exploration in this game. There were new areas, and you could teleport to and from xen almost at will. I enjoyed playing as a corporal, and being able to order grunts around. Like Daemian said, it was cool to see events from a different perspective.
Just play normal difficulty. I promise I won’t think less of you. No guarantee about laughter though.
This game doesn’t need the “normal” intro because it’s an expansion. You already know that everything is going to go to hell.
I hate Ravenholm but that’s because it’s so effective at what it’s doing, so I appreciate it. I do like Father Gregori. I think my favorite sections are actually driving the hover craft and the car. I love how they make you get out to break it up. I like the pulley puzzle and the dam, plus the fight with the helicopter on the hovercraft. I like having to stop at the town and throw the truck off the cliff when driving the car, and how that section ends with a fight to hold an outpost.
We used to have such weird ladders back in the 90s.
As floaty as the physics in this game can be, and as crazy-fast as the movement is, I still feel like 90s shooters play significantly better than most modern ones. The fast movement, air control and floaty jumping, without the game constantly throttling you or adding lots of animation to the camera or your characters’ arms, just feels so much better to me.
Also, acting like a lot of the goofiness or weaker elements in the game is all Gearbox seems a little unfair. Half-Life 1 had a lot of the same silly level design and situations/dialog that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Any expansion pack developer of the day would have said “more guns? more enemy types? same gameplay? sure!” because that is exactly what was expected at the time from a shooter expansion. In fact, Opposing Force was pretty innovative at the time, as it still had a pretty big focus on story and a clever twist on things in an age of “mission packs”.
The answer to every question that is about why a science facility would need these death traps:
These guys were competing with cave johnson.What else would you expect from them?
Chris,you liked that level where you are firing rockets at the tripods?Are you talking about that level in the ruins,before you storm the town hall?Because Ive played that one on hard,and its so tedious.
When Mumbles mentioned that Bioshock took the wrench as it’s iconic melee weapon I swear I could the distant voice of Shamus in my head yelling something inane about Systems and Shocks.
Also ~nine years of following this blog and this is the first comment I’ve posted. Huh.
Nononono….you see, System Shock 2 had a crescent wrench, Bioshock was the one with the pipe wrench.
It makes all the difference, trust me.
System Shock 2 has several melee weapons, so nothing really ‘iconic’. Ditch that wrench and pick up the crystal shard.
Don’t think I made it that far, but wouldn’t that require a bit of training to use at the same level as the wrench? :P
I’m pretty sure that at max standard weapons and max exotic weapons the crystal shard is superior against organics, while at max energy weapons the laser rapier is superior against robotics. The wrench is more balanced, though.
That being said, due to how increasing a weapon skill increases weapon damage, the wrench stays good throughout the game if you level up your standard weapon skill.
Oh man I had a creepy crawler oven too. The best ever was when they came out with molds so you could make the characters from the gargoyles cartoon.
In the grocery store, I once got some off-brand Gushers called “Juicy Squirt Berries”. They were actually pretty good, but… that name…
Just a thought, since it looks like these one-offs won’t all be “20 minutes” and I don’t want them to be that short, what about calling these “Minor Spoilers” as your mini-series?
Spoilerettes?
Quick looks!
OMFG! I forgot how nausea-inducing Half-Life was for me, even back in the day, on a 17″-monitor. Now my monitor is a modest 6 inches larger and I’m over a decade older, and that goes not well… Even my personal problems aside, this is so much worse than any other modern FPS.
So I am not the only one who got a headache from it? I don’t usually get these when playing or watching someone play something, and so I blamed it on the same thing I got a little stomachache from about at the same time.
Definitely not the only one. I attempted re-playing the original Half-Life game earlier this year and I couldn’t do it. The controls are too floaty and awkward, combined with movement which feels like I’m skating around wildly, and it’s a horrendously nausea inducing experience.
…Which is extra weird because I remember playing these games when they came out and being just fine with them. I think since then my brain has adapted to expect modern FPS game tempo and movement, so going back to the 90s formula just doesn’t work out so great.
Sadly,its not that simple.For example,I never have a problem replaying the original half life,but when I was replaying the original deus ex I had to do it in limited bursts because that one gave me headache.
You know, if you want to think about eating all the different enemies around you in a game Mumbles, you might enjoy Pikmin 2? Beating the game adds a second set of notes to the bestiary, where your hungry hungry sidekick debates how best to cook and eat the aliens that’ve plagued you all game long.
Where is the candy discussion thread?
I’ll start. Shark Bites were real and awesome, and Chris is completely right that the Great Whites were the best.
People thought I was daft to fight a monster on a grating, but I fought him just the same. The first time, I fell off the grating. The second time, I fell off the grating. The third time the monster killed me and pushed me off the grating. But the fourth time I stayed up long enough to kill the monster. And then immediately jumped off the grating for no reason.
Fruit Longs? Gushers? Soakers? Is this like porn candy or something? 80s and 90s marketing guys where weird.
I know with Gushers the idea was to say “it’s so full of fruity flavor, it literally gushes out.”
Someone was probably thinking of sex during that boardroom meeting and came up with something random. XD
Could be weirder. There was the Chicken Dinner candy bar,
And the Baby Lobster, the Fat Emma, and the Prairie Schooner.
“Fruit-O-Long” is actually the name of Fruit by the Foot in French Canada: http://i5.walmartimages.ca/images/Large/110/144/999999-65633110144.jpg
I liked this episode. I enjoyed both Blue Shift and Opposing Force as “more of Half Life” and, tbh, they were around the same level of difficulty as the original.
One thing I will point out because the members of the podcast kept talking about it – the shaders and colours etc didn’t look like this. A combination of new hardware, LCD monitors and valve adding stuff back in to their games makes it look different.
Unfortunately, I don’t have my CD copies of the games handy to go back and post a video of how it looked… and my CRT and 2004 rig are in another country. :)