{"id":25854,"date":"2015-02-04T17:15:13","date_gmt":"2015-02-04T22:15:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=25854"},"modified":"2015-02-04T18:19:00","modified_gmt":"2015-02-04T23:19:00","slug":"half-life-2-episode-1-ep1-episode-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=25854","title":{"rendered":"Half Life 2 Episode 1 EP1: Episode 1"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/x_y_VWvWFtU\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=x_y_VWvWFtU'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re still debating about what game we should cover next. So we&#8217;re returning to our old standby, Half-Life 2. <\/p>\n<p>Since I didn&#8217;t talk about it in the episode, let&#8217;s talk about it now: This is probably the clearest example of what Valve was shooting for with their &#8220;Episode&#8221; idea. It&#8217;s probably around four hours long. It has minimal graphical enhancements. The end boss is just a single instance of a monster we&#8217;ve defeated a dozen times before. It basically takes the existing gameplay and adds a few variations on the existing ideas. A dark level. The zombine. A few new ambushes. Some three-way Gordon\/Combine\/Zombie fights. <\/p>\n<p>If this episodic idea had worked out I think I would have enjoyed it. Sure, nothing much happens in the story. But if we got something like this every couple of years, then the story doesn&#8217;t need to go through giant leaps. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) We&#8217;re still debating about what game we should cover next. So we&#8217;re returning to our old standby, Half-Life 2. Since I didn&#8217;t talk about it in the episode, let&#8217;s talk about it now: This is probably the clearest example of what Valve was shooting for with their &#8220;Episode&#8221; idea. It&#8217;s probably around four [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[265],"class_list":["post-25854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning","tag-half-life-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25854\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}