Warp wrote:

>   IMO Half-Life is greatly overhyped. The only thing which was more or less
> innovative at the time was the long, playable intro. However, other than
> that the game is a rather typical straightforward first-person shooter
> with minimal storytelling. IMO it wasn't even technically/graphically
> the most advanced game of the time. Rather average, really. The weapons
> were rather inventive, I grant you that (and something I miss from the
> sequels), but otherwise there isn't really anything special.

Well, I played Quake II from beginning to end. Not easy when you don't 
have a 3D card! (I wonder - are modern games even *playable* without 
one?) And then I played it all again on a machine that had 3D acceleration.

The next game I played was Halflife. Now, I don't know what other games 
existed at the time, but compared to Quake II, Halflife was a hell of a 
lot different.

- The locations were varied and interesting. Ordinary-looking office 
blocks, secret underground laboratories, giant industrial machinery, 
military bases, strange experimental test labs... and then if you 
somehow manage to battle through all that lot, Xen. Wow. I mean, just wow.

- I lose count of how many alien creatures you have to do battle with. 
Small blind headcrabs, huge gargantuas, the vortigaunts and technitions, 
bullsquids, zombies, troops of soldiers, the massive tenticle creatures, 
the little sound-horn wotsits... It would take an age just to catelogue 
them all!

- Unlike Quake, the environment was more reactive. Walking a few miles 
to get to the test chamber, and then walking all the way back out again 
seeing it smashed up was really vivid, for me. And the way stuff blows 
up or falls apart when you touch it... Man, some of that stuff really 
made me jump out of my skin! In Q2, the map is just a passive maze for 
you to run around, flicking the occasional switch, and the enemies are 
the thing that hounds you.

- The weapons. I mean, you've got everything from a crowbar to a rocket 
launcher. You've got pistols and machine guns, and then you've got the 
tau cannon (my favourit game weapon *ever*!), the gluon gun, the snarks, 
the tranquiliser gun, a sniper rifle, grenades, trip mines, a magnum...

All in all, I spent *months* playing through the game. I mean that! It 
took about 6 months for me to complete it. And I was loving every 
minute. There was a real spirit of adventure - like it was worth 
replying the same room 8 times just to see what on earth would be round 
the next corner. And it was always something new!

(And then I immatiately set about tacking Opposing Force, and then Blue 
Shift, and then Gunman...)

>   Half-Life 2, however, is a completely different story. Great writing
> and storytelling, great technology, great playability...

HL2 is technically superior in every imaginable way. (Well, you'd be 
kind of upset if it *wasn't*, right?? I mean, how many years later is it?)

I still remember running it for the first time, and being *stunned* that 
you could make characters like that just out of flat polygons painted to 
textured and hacked to look smooth. On the other hand, the last computer 
game I'd seen running was HL1...

The physics feature was also pretty neat - and, AFAIK, brand new in 
gaming at that time. (Of course, today seemingly *all* games in this 
class feature it.)

I could go on about how much superior the game technology is, but the 
fact remains... it was *boring*. They took out all the stuff that made 
HL1 fun. There's no interesting locations, no impressive weapons, no 
varied enemies... there's nothing interesting. (And we won't go into the 
ending. Everybody knows all about that!)

- The location is the same throughout: It looks like Luton town center 
on a bad day. There is a small amount of variation, but not much.

- Enemies? Well let's see now: Various human soldiers, headcrabs (which 
I hated in the first place), zombies (so... basically more semi-humans) 
and those annoying manhacks. And that's it.

- Weapons? Again, a pistol, an SMG, a shotgun, a rocket launcher, and 
that's about it. (Oh, and the very cool but mostly useless gravity gun.)

- You can drive things now. Unfortunately all the drivable craft handle 
*horribly* badly. But then, I guess controlling things like that with 
only a digital keyboard is never going to work that well...

HL2:EP1 was even more graphically amazing (particularly inside the 
citadel), but most of it just involved battling through a room in pitch 
blackness with no ammo while seemingly endless numbers of zombies run at 
you. Seriously, killing things in the dark using only a crowbar is *not* 
my idea of a good time.

HL2:EP2 at last is a step back in the right direction. The inside of the 
antlions' nest is... astonishing! (What can I say? I love caves!) The 
regular antlions are pretty boring, but they added now, more interesting 
ones too. The sequence with the guard is a little too intense for me, 
but overall it's really great stuff.

(I replayed this recently. I notice that they've turned the difficulty 
way down on many areas of the game since I played it the day it was 
released. Like, the guards now die *before* you've exhausted your entire 
ammo supply. Stuff like that.)

I'm interested to see what HL2:EP3 does...

Also, I wonder: Will games ever reach the stage where textures are 
sufficiently high resolution that you can actually read the writing on 
stuff?? Will we ever get believable character animation?

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