T w e n t y S i d e d
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Things I noticed:
- At 4:20, when Josh put the crosshair right on the tripmine, and the auto-aim “helped” by bending the bullets into the soldier. I have to say this kind of thing drives me crazy. Boo.
- Am I the only one who did the see-saw puzzle the “right” way? I distinctly remember not having enough weight in the room to hold down that pipe, but apparently I’m the only member of the cast to solve it by supporting it. So… I have no idea.
- At 16:30, the title for this episode was nearly, “Alyx is so Metal”. So you were going to get a pun either way.
- At 19:30: I really agree. The antlion queens aren’t a very fun enemy. They’re pretty the bog-standard FPS damage sponge with a huge melee attack. I’ve never enjoyed fighting one. Maybe if their stun animation lasted longer, or if you could reliably sidestep them matador-style. But as it stands, these fights feel incredibly random and chaotic. (In a bad way.)
I really do love covering these games.
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Something I’ve been wondering about since the last episode: what’s the deal with antlions?
I played HL1 only once, a while back, so it’s only when watching Freeman’s mind that I realized to what extent the mechanics had faithfully transitioned from HL1 to HL2. Replace the jumping puzzles with gravity gun puzzles, but most everything else is unchanged: turrets, the occasional sniper, choppers, the way the environments are traversed… I’m sure we can quibble on some things, but there was a lot more visual changes than mechanical ones.
On the enemy side, though, things moved a little more. Still have barnacles, super soldiers and headcrabs and zombies, but now we have the manhacks, the zombie variants, and more that escapes me now.
But the biggest overhaul is on the purely alien side: the vorts are not enemies any more, and gone are a whole bestiary: the bullsquids, houndeyes, grunts, controllers, and more…
At first glance, I would say that those guys don’t really jive very well with the more serious HL2: they would look goofy in high def, and scream video game arbitrary enemy rather than an opposition that fits within a certain narrative framework. (In that regard, the headcrab shells are a genius move to legitimize their presence in HL2.)
But then, we have the antlions. Goofy as hell, and not super-interesting as enemies. And yet they keep popping up.
I was wondering if anyone had any sense of why they’re here. Valve doesn’t seem to do anything without a very good reason, so there must be some explanation. It just eludes me. Is it the endlessly re-spawning aspect?
I’d guess the team felt that the ant lions were serious enough to be folded in with the proper art direction. I actually felt like they worked well, but I don’t have the baggage from HL1 either, so maybe it’s that?
They are super interesting as allies though.Way better than the resistance fighters.I wish we had a return of the pheromone gland in the episodes.
I agree. Over time I realised I really liked playing summoner-type characters, so the pheromone gland was something I enjoy but don’t really get in any other FPS.
The antlions are my favourite enemy in half-life 2 – especially in episode 2, where they introduce the spitting antlions (they’re very similar to the bullsquids in that regard.)
I don’t really know why I like the antlions so much, though. (Maybe it’s because I like bugs?)
I guess they wanted a mobile, fast-moving hazard for the Highway 17 portion of the game. None of the other aliens really fit the bill. You could make a case for houndeyes or bullsquids, I guess. Maybe they just wanted to surprise HL1 veterans with a new alien.
Makes sense to me, at least from a narrative/world building perspective. Most of the holdovers from HL1 are treated in the subsequent games as infestations or vermin: dangerous, but not threatening to the goals of the Combine, so they wouldn’t see a need to try and eliminate them. For the rest, I’d just take for granted that some creatures would be able to adapt to Earth’s ecosystems and some wouldn’t, with the possiblitiy of Combine interference also being a reasonable explanation.
The story is that the invaders from Xen were actually fleeing the Combine, the Nihilanth’s kind had encountered the Combine prior and were annihilated in a long grueling war. All the other aliens on Xen were also refugees from Combine invasions of their worlds and the Nihilanth was mentally dominating and controlling them when it invaded Earth after Gordon accidentally opened a portal from Earth to Xen with the Resonance Cascade.
After the events of Half-Life the Combine found their way to Xen, took control of it and then followed the echoes of the Resonance Cascade to Earth resulting in the seven minute war.
The Antlions are feral Vortigaunt cattle; the Vortigaunts once farmed Antlions on their homeworld before they fled to Xen and because of their status as cattle none were sent to Earth by the Nihilanth. By the time the Combine got the Xen the Antlions had become feral and they ended up sneaking through portals to Earth and started destroying ecosystems.
Antlions are basically feral alien pigs.
In terms of pure narrative, I think that the reason that the combine have introduced Antlions into the ecology is to discourage humans from living in the wilderness, away from combine oversight and authority. They want everyone pushed up into these huge population centers so that they can control them easier, and the antlions serve as a deterrent (and they also probably do a number on the local earth ecology, which further makes living “off the grid” difficult).
This comes back to how, in my opinion, the thing that makes the combine “work” as villains is their brutality, and the scale of that brutality. There’s a sort of horrifying efficiency to the logic of the combine – you get the sense that they’re not just trying to conquer the earth – they’re trying to do it as cheaply as possible. Why do the combine use trains? Doesn’t is seem like a weird, antiquated technology for this super-dimensional empire to use? It’s cheaper – after all, if the whole population is isolated to, like, 20 cities, then why do you need to build vehicles that can go anywhere?
Like, maybe this is just me filling in plotholes, but I get the impression that the combine just do. not. give a shit. about earth – this is just one of literally thousands of dimensions that they’ve conquered, stripped of it’s resources, and moved on. And when you think about it, they’ve kinda succeeded in destroying the earth – the damage they’ve done to the biosphere is probably irreparable. Even if at the end of the day, the combine beancounters decide that planet #2256447 just isn’t worth the expenditure and they all pull out, they’ve still destroyed earth.
Sorry, this got kinda rambly, but I just think all this stuff is a really cool take on the “evil space guys” trope.
When I first solved the see-saw puzzle by putting a crate under the pipes, I honestly half-expected for the physics engine to bug out and the crate to fly off and kill me walking over it.
The biggest issue I have with Episode 1 isn’t so much that nothing really happens. It’s more that it just feels so unmemorable. Even introducing new enemies with new AI of the Zombine, it doesn’t have any moments where you do something and feel good or cool about it. The most memorable moments of Ep. 1 are only the parts that frustrate the player; Dying over and over waiting for the elevator to finally show up, or having to block the antlions by pushing cars over their burrows. Compare these with the helicopter fight in the airboat in HL2 or the one in Ep. 2, defending Alyx in the caves while the antlions come at you in waves through tunnels in Ep. 2, or many other moments in the other Half Life 2 games. Episode 1 just falls short and ends up more “Do it again, stupid.” frustration than empowerment fantasy.
*facepalm* yeah i never even thought to put stuff under the pipe, I just loaded up the one end and ran for it, and I’ve played Ep 1 three times.
Those cars actually are pretty lightweight.Once you remove the motor from them,you can flip them by hand.And by you,I mean even Shamus could flip one of those empty oldies by hand.
The only unrealistic thing here is that all of these still have tires.Those shouldve rotten away long ago.
Are those of that plastic kind, about which there were stories about how pigs ate the exterior of one?
I still don’t get the crew’s incredulity re: radiators. It’s still the standard heating method in my country… Is this so nonexistant in the US?
Also they are heavy as fuck.
I still got a radiator and I live in the U.S.
I think it’s mostly older buildings in the eastern U.S. that still have them. Newer places will have central heat, and the bulk of the building in the west was done more recently.
I haven’t personally seen a radiator since I was a kid in military housing in Germany, and that was 25-30 years ago.
Yeah my house has radiators but I live in New England where most houses are 100+ years old.
It’s the standard heating method in the UK too (although maybe not so much for houses built right now I guess). I imagine it’s true of most of Europe
My house is fairly new (though still one of the council built ones from that era) and we use Radiators, having patched and bleed these buggers they are VERY heavy, and if you just yank them of the wall they will also still be full of water so Very Very Very Heavy. as well as being metal and having a solid sturdy matter, if it hits you at the speed a gravity gun fires things its going to kill you, or crush a few organs atleast.
Yeah, we never really had them all that much in N America. Up here in Canada, we basically only have buildings from the…I want to say 1930s-1970s, which used water radiators. So, very few buildings made with them (only about 50 years, really) and then a lot of the old buildings got rid of them when they were renovated.
I think it might have a lot to do with what peoples’ primary heat source was:
– lots of nuke plants for electricity -> you basically get hot water for free as a byproduct, and it’s impossible to have a nuke plant for each apartment building
– natural gas plants -> produce less waste heat (I think), plus it’s easy to have small gas burners in each building, for heating, producing hot air instead of hot water
Wait, what?
Are you saying that there are places in the world where they’re using excess heated water from nuclear reactors to heat homes? Like, directly piping the water to homes? That sounds crazy dangerous. Also, ridiculously impractical – how close to a nuke plant would a home need to be to pipe heated water in the winter and have it still be warm when it gets there?
No, nobody has ever (as far as I know) done this with a nuclear plant.
It’s actually not that dangerous an idea – the cooling fluid in nuclear plants never comes into contact with anything radioactive, they use heat exchangers. So the hot water that leaves the plant is just hot water, nothing more.
However, nuclear plants have a strong NIMBY effect, so they’re nowhere near anything that could use that waste heat productively.
Combined Heat and Power (CHP, or Trigen, or any number of other names) is popular in some industries which require a large heat source, and small systems (usually gas) are sometimes found in large residential or commercial buildings.
I recall hearing about doing it on nuclear submarines.
There’s a crocodile farm in northern Queensland that uses hot waste water from a sugarcane processing plant to heat their ponds. Pretty interesting read: http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2006/s2070374.htm
There are still radiators around, though fewer of them.
That said, people are still installing radiators. They’re just called ‘heated concrete floors’ now.
(I hate starting a post with “Actually…”)
That kind of radiator was invented in 1855, and quickly spread. It was relatively easy to retrofit them into older buildings, even. The trick, and the reason most people don’t remember them much, is that plenum heating (forced air or just plain draught heating) and radiators exist side-by-side. Plenum heating works pretty well for small building and spaces. You get heating effects almost instantly, so good control isn’t challenging. But it scales poorly. Air doesn’t retain heat well. If you’ve got more than a couple hundred square meters or thousand square feet, the air cools off before it gets to where it’s supposed to heat.
Steam and water have MASSIVE amount heat in them in comparison. If you’re trying to heat something more than a couple dozen feet from your heat source, it’s WAY better at actually delivering heat, to the point that you can supply multiple buildings with heat from a central boiler. (Remember the old saw about people playing D&D in the campus steam tunnels? That’s why there are steam tunnels.) And it can deliver it in many ways that aren’t even obvious. In addition to the big metal stand radiators, there’s also baseboard ones with a pipe or two with fins in a housing. There’s blower-backed ones in sideboard units that were very common in hotels and public buildings built in the 1950s and 1960s, and even today they’re used in commercial buildings with blowers in the overhead spaces. So apartment buildings and commercial and public buildings got steam and water heat, individual houses and tiny shops got plenum heating.
The reason that the stand radiators didn’t really last that long (50-60 years) is they do have some pretty serious down-sides. They get hot, from uncomfortably warm to “this will raise blisters if you lean on it” hot. They’re VERY particular about installation and slopes and planning, worse than plumbing drains. If you screw up a drain, you get a toilet that takes two flushes to clear. If you screw up a stand radiator installation or it goes bad because a building settled oddly, it can literally break itself by throwing slugs of condensed steam the the wrong way into valves and bends and break pipes.
(This is leaving out electric heat all together which has an entirely different, sordid history.)
I spent significant portions of my teenage years in the late nineties as grunt labor for my father’s home renovation projects as we completely gutted and rebuilt a house originally constructed somewhere around the turn of the 20th century, in Milwaukee. Old enough that there were still gas pipes, for lights, in the walls. The old heating was stand radiators.
… and when we re-did the system it was still stand radiators, but -new ones-. Or rather, refurbished different old ones. Getting a large unit up to the third floor attic along a narrow servants staircase is a special hell that I still remember whenever I bend to lift something. “Heavy as fuck” barely does it justice.
On the other hand, it meant that in the winter my little monastic cell up there was toasty warm. So, pros and cons.
The real issue with radiators (and why they’re no longer as common as they used to be) is that they’re unidirectional. They can make the temperature go up, but they can’t make it go down. They’re not a “full range” climate control solution.
In their earlier days, however, they were THE big advance in home climate management. They were the replacement for “Want to keep warm in the winter? Burn stuff in your living room!” They were installed where the only solution for being cooler was “open the windows” (or, if you were wealthier, “spend the summer in the mountains or at the seaside”) Radiators made winter more tolerable and considerably safer.
It was only really after air conditioning (and central air) became popular and you already had forced air ducting running all around the house that it made sense to do forced air heating, giving you one climate control system that handled all seasons.
Anything built in the last 30 years in the US is almost certainly built for central HVAC. Older buildings often still have radiators.
I think one of the main US/EU differences is that (in my experience) home air conditioning is less of an “everyone has it” than in the US. (This is based on a sample of my friends in London and Amsterdam). If you’re NOT installing AC, radiators are cheaper to install and as efficient (possibly more efficient) to operate.
Yep, over here in the UK radiators are normal and AC is pretty rare outside of offices. I think the main reason is that our weather usually ranges from “a bit cold and miserable” to “just about comfortable,” occasionally reaching “nicely warm” during the summer. There’s just not much reason for AC :)
It’s a combo of age (most buildings in the USA from the age of radiators are rather old by our standards) and also climate. I vaguely remember seeing radiators in a old building (early 1900s) here in Atlanta, but almost everything around here was built after that time. Might also have something to do with AC being more common/necessary so if you’re going to put in central AC might as well do central heat instead of radiators.
I lived in dorms with radiators (and no AC) in MA (all the dorms had radiators as did the classroom buildings and there was an entire steam system that was kinda cool), and while they were lovely for warmth, your settings were basically no heat or OMG hot open a damn window. Nothing like coming in from 10F to almost 90, that I really really don’t miss.
One thing Ive noticed about the suit recently that is really weird is:Why does your hazardous environment suit have ammunition tracking?I mean I know black mesa made weapons,and kept everyone of the staff fit,but why the hell were they equipping their scientists with suits that were designed for combat?
cause they were sending ppl to xen
Either that, or it’s another military project. Or maybe like Youtube they have programmers who need to be given something to do.
True,forgot about that.Though that just makes me wonder why the hell were they sending scientists into xen without actual combatants?Heck,since they were with the military,why didnt they send a bunch of hecu grunts to protect the scientists?
I mean seriously,black mesa is the worst.Though not by much,aperture science is very close.If combine didnt kill everyone in the world,Im confident glados would.
From what I remember Glados is still suck deep in her hole doing her dumb stuff alone. I’m more scared of the government that tried to cover up black mesa or the higher of the facility itself like Freeman minds is saying.
True, but given the both subsequent bombing of Black Mesa and the takeover by the Combine, I suspect both of those no longer exist… unless either (or both) are related to G-Man’s employers…
G-man’s employers are actually Aperture Science. He’s a new robot model inhabited by a successor of Cave’s.
/headcanon ;)
It would explain how he’s able to travel around Black Mesa faster than you, and access apparently inaccessible areas.
The G-Man likes to have fun. With Science!
combat is a hazardous environment
That’s probably more Freeman being super OCD and having to keep count of how much ammo he has at all times.
There isn’t a voice in the HEV suit. It’s just Gordon Freeman narrating his adventures in a weird third person /as though/ he had a talking HEV suit.
His soothing effeminate voice got him mocked even in MIT, so he doesn’t talk to other people much.
Poor dope was a heavy smoker who needed a tracheotomy. He got the wrong electronic voicebox in the mail and was going to send it back as soon as he got off his next shift.
It’s why he was running late…
This is the retrofitted combat version he got from Dr. Kleiner, right? I mean, did it count ammunition in HL1?
Yes.It had both the “Defensive weapon selection system activated” and “Ammunition level monitoring activated” when you put it on from the start.Check out any walkthrough video and youll hear it.
Those gas cans actually are metal.
I certainly assumed they were metal jerry cans. Plastic ones do exist, and look pretty similar, but the metal ones are pretty much the platonic ideal of a generic gas can.
Awwww,you guys didnt see alyx mount the turret.That was the best moment.
“At 4:20, when”, there’s a stoner joke in there somewhere I’m sure.
Wow, the puns were on top form today. This was one of the funniest episodes in a while :3
I dont know,It felt like they were going all over the place.
I do appreciate Valve’s physics puzzles. Sure, they’re supposed to be done in a certain way, but if you figure out another solution that should work then it works.
I feel like that particular puzzle could have been improved. In it we see some stuff stuck under it(presumably to give the player the idea that stuff goes under it), but immediately they try to cross, and the stuff under there didn’t prevent that.
I would have all the items available stacked on the end like the typical see-saw puzzle, but not being enough to hold the player up(the excuse being that somebody not wearing a giant metal suit did it before). A visual highlight of the space directly in front of the fulcrum would be a good idea, too.
It helps if you play the episode immediately after the original game and have those puzzles with buoyant barrels propping stuff from bellow.
I just know you’re trolling for a comment about Valve’s release schedule here. Not gonna do it, however. Rising above.
Im not trolling actually.When the episode came out,Ive played just it,and I had some problems with the occasional puzzle.But much later when I decided to play through all the half lives,meaning I went through hl2 and then immediately through episode 1,I had a much easier time with it.
I’ve played through Episode 1 countless times, and I never thought of solving the seesaw puzzle like that.
Also, funny note – if you jump on top of Alyx’s head, it makes the cardboard box sound.
12:00 – wait, you can BLOW these boards away to give Alyx a clear shot? Oh. I didn’t know that, and had to lead most of the zombies in the building all the way to the courtyard.
Fun fact: Alyx can actually die when the combine breach the room a 17:20.
She can die at all times, it’s just that she’s got a massive regenerating hp pool that makes it only likely during big battles :P (My most common place for her to die on hard was the antlion garage battle)
Man, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it happen. Maybe once or twice in barrel-related accidents.
You’re not alone Shamus – I wandered the room looking for heavy stuff, before shoving one or two crates under the pipe thinking “Is this really the right solution?”, but clearly it was!
I actually thought I had a bug when I encountered this puzzle.
There’s a big pile of concrete rubble near the door (you can see it at 4:35 in the video). It’s CLEARLY enough weight for the seesaw. Also, there’s one small chunk of concrete you CAN pick up (Josh picks it up at 5:41 in the video). But you apparently can’t pick any of the “great big pile.” I thought the pile was bugged – who builds a pile of rocks, presents you a puzzle where you need a bunch of rocks, and then lets you pick up ONE rock but for no good reason can’t pick up the others?
If you want me to realize “ah! this solves differently!” the solution is to NOT HAVE the big pile of rocks, not to just say “Nuh uh! You can’t have any more because I said so.”
I’m giving them a “sort of pass” that for some reason something strong enough to flip cars in the street can’t be used to move the broken counters (clearly heavy enough) to solve the puzzle, nor can we move the stoves. That’s at least consistent with how the gravity gun works elsewhere in the game (even if not entirely consistent with physics). But having one “you can use it” rock and 20 “you can’t” rocks is being a dick, not clever puzzle design.
Yes, ant lions are annoying.
I don’t use headphones, and I’ve got a small child. Any chance you guys could tone down the cussing or something? I won’t be able to watch many more Spoiler Warnings before he is old enough to start picking up words, and I don’t want him learning an excited sounding f-bomb or anything like that.
I imagine doing amusing steam-of-conciousness commentary is hard enough without trying to watch your language.
Surely it’s easier to use headphones than to avoid all media that doesn’t come with a G rating?
I can read much faster than I listen. Aside from music (1 hour X on Youtube, Winamp), the only video or audio media I normally consume are Spoiler Warnings that I’m interested in and permaculture videos. The most the latter will have are references to animal manure for soil-building.
I don’t play any multiplayer games that have voice chat.
You know I had forgotten the antlion fight even happened here, and I suspect I will fail to remember it the next time I think about Episode one, its just not particularly engaging. I mean antlions fighting combine is something they have already done.
Re: antlion guards, I don’t quite agree. I think you can reliably sidestep everything they do as long as you use the sprint function at the right time and conserve your energy. (And don’t grab objects at the wrong time or get backed into a corner.)
Imo, Valve realized that – that’s why they are reluctant to let you fight a guard one on one, so that the small antlions distract you from the patterns big ones’ patterns.
They may have overcompensated a little.
Wait, HL has auto-aim?
A game that’s meant to be played with mouse and keyboard (and I hope that’s how you play?!)
I sort of get that FPS games on consoles will have auto-aim (one reason why I never got why FPS games would be on consoles in the first place). But on a PC? The last shooter with auto-aim on the PC that I remember playing was Jedy Knight in 1997, and that’s because I was using a Joystick (what a crazy time…), and aiming with that was hard. But…
… is the current Counterstrike incarnation using auto-aim too? *shakes head*
I think its an option you can toggle because it was ported on consoles.