A Thorough Look At Half-Life [Revised/Expanded/HD]

wouldn't you like to get away [Music] everybody knows your name [Applause] [Music] half-life is a classic in every possible sense it's won a whopping 50 game of the year awards every one of them deserve it because this throwback from 1998 tells a first-person action story more viscerally and competently than many shooters being released now a whole 22 years later from top to bottom half-life is a monumental tribute to the value of games as an entertainment medium onto themselves capable of relating wholly different experiences than books or film media its confidence and success helped launch 3d gaming as a whole help make it respectable and profitable in contrast to most other shooters around the time of its release half-life is told in a very naturalistic way no cut scenes each level connected to the previous one long continuous journey through realistic and realistically proportioned environments and it's that naturalism that made it so classic immersion in half-life even so many years later is effortless and total ultimately the game's design is so thoroughly excellent the game even transcends how chunkily dated its graphics have become in the seven years since i originally released this video half-life's presence in gaming culture has waned and waxed enormously it was missing in action for years only to return to deliver the single most impressive virtual reality title yet released by the end of 2020. the groundbreaking success of half-life alex and the way it repositions story elements in the franchise suggests that half-life as a franchise will continue to be less associated with regular releases than to be synonymous with breakthroughs and thresholds and first-person action storytelling to appreciate what comes next in gaming to prepare for the inevitable half-life 3 it's best to examine how half-life games have hit these milestones and broken these thresholds before and it all starts with the original 1998 adventure much of what's charismatic about half-life is built on the foundation of the game's opening levels a slow ratcheting of apprehension and red that invariably sticks with anyone who's played the game half-life is structured like old-school science fiction modernizing one of the best tropes of 1950s sci-fi the experiment gone wrong black mesa the massive facility you're introduced to on the lengthy tram ride to the sector c test labs is a contemporary version of the kind of big government secret labs you'd see in those stories it's a los alamos for the 90s and that's how it hooks you the game begins as just another day on the job for gordon freeman mild mannered lap assistant to the government's biggest boldest scientific pursuits you're running late the security staff's having minor problems the lab equipment seems like it's working slightly above capacity little things slowly bring the tensions to a boil as you don your hazardous environment suit and head into the test chamber all the signs the wonderfully and brilliantly placed signs point to something going catastrophically wrong but it's up to you to push the sample into the apparatus this was a first in science fiction media many many times you'd have seen other characters push too hard into the frontiers of the unknown this game was the first time ever in full 3d from a first person perspective that you got to be that scientist you not some nuanced other just you get to perform the experiment that dooms us all the change in perspective makes the whole cliche feel incredibly fresh again especially paired with black mesa's realistic design aesthetic with its focus on industrial detail and architectural cohesion you know exactly what it means when you step into the test chamber but the inevitable catastrophe is still vibrantly exciting full of a fresh and present tension other games might have opted for a cut scene taking you out of gordon's shoes and shown him doing it rather than letting the player and the temptation to do that to control the camera angles and present it just the way you as the developer want to present it to the player must have been there quite strongly valve didn't do that they figured the player would feel more connected with a gordon that couldn't react but whose perspective you never left than a gordon with a voice and a script and oddly enough they were right a player wears gordon like gordon wears glasses they're just transparent lenses at the end of your nose and so the story of half-life becomes the story of the player the game from this point on continues in the vein of classic disaster sci-fi but with a methodical pacing different than either books or movies could have ever presented you experience half-life on foot mostly one room after another after another after another in a book or a movie that would be a pacing disaster you have to shave off everything that isn't genuinely notable or relevant but since half-life is a game you can fill the game with game concerns like puzzles or things to shoot you can utilize an entirely different pacing structure where the emphasis is on the journey through the environment on the slow odyssey from sector c to the lambda facility from narrative perspective it's pretty thin are you alive excellent get from point a to point b they will know more but each area that you pass through has unique and wonderful challenges and by the time you arrive at the lambda facility you'll understand the scope and the stakes of the disasters well as gained genuine understanding and appreciation for the black mesa facility what it was how it was the extent of its inscrutable hugeness all of it delivered one footstep after another at the time most games had levels that were clearly marked as levels distinct from one another and while that school of level design has a lot of advantages like you'd see in duke nukem 3d it is bad at maintaining a consistent mood by chucking it the flow of play has a much greater thematic weight immersion of the game is made much deeper as well knowing that you've been personally responsible for every single solitary step of the journey so far the way valve handled it feels so effortless that it influenced game design permanently looking forward towards the kind of cinematic play that would become more and more in vogue as the audience for gaming at large widened another part of half-life success is that as forward thinking as it is it contains many older modes of gameplay like platforming while the modern response to these elements is almost universally who are you trying to [ __ ] kid with these goddamn jumping puzzles their inclusion was more familiar and more welcome back in 98. gamers of the time would have expected to see some kind of jumping sequence they're in most other shooters of the era but never before had they been presented so subtly half-life's arguably annoying jumping puzzles are still commendable for the way they blend seamlessly with the environment the solutions to them both reasonable and often difficult and as awkward as the crouch-jump mechanic is it serves as a further push towards realism itself they're making you mimic the actual movement with your keyboard not just assuming that you crouch to get inside small spaces in this way being gordon freeman is sometimes a bit onerous but in a way that makes you feel more connected to the game world in spite of the annoyance the game has plenty of regular puzzles as well again almost universally dependent on careful study of the environment to complete the puzzles are pretty quick most taking a couple minutes or less but they further contribute to the game's outrageously good pacing by breaking up the combat at just the moment when the player needs a break the most and forcing you to slow down and look at where you are from a different perspective your goal is simple and surprisingly compelling keep moving forward so all the puzzles have an implied solution of reaching whatever area is not familiar to you yet then it's just a matter of figuring out the specific steps needed to make that happen the puzzle variety runs the gamut from lock box puzzles where you have to get into rooms and hallways where the entrances are otherwise destroyed to switch-based puzzles to puzzles that show off the game's physics features where you move boxes across the environment by walking into them it's a little awkward and silly now but it's worthwhile to note how fully valve embraced technical novelty when designing the game in 1998 it could not be taken for granted that objects like boxes could be moved and stacked so it incorporated both the new like puzzles involving game physics and the old like traditional platforming it would simply mask both under the wallpaper of naturalism and applied to the whole of black mesa most modern shooters would never emphasize platforming the way that half-life does even its sequel would shift the emphasis from movement puzzles to physics puzzles but that's part of half-life 1's charm surviving black mesa requires a lot more clever agility than other games it requires a hell of a lot of bullets too and here's where half-life's most charming absurdity comes into play you gordon freeman mit graduate and lab assistant are about to outgun platoons of special op soldiers and the first wave of an alien invasion you have no special experience besides running an obstacle course in the training level that should let a physicist shoot his way out of an armed confrontation between dimensions half-life isn't about to let that stop you from doing it though and this essential leap of faith is so totally patently ridiculous that it seems at first hard to swallow except that the rest of the game plays it so straight using often very subtle audio and visual clues to draw you into the world of black mesa that before too long it doesn't sound wholly unreasonable for a man of science to be a man of action as well and the action is actually rather difficult especially on its higher settings and your vulnerability to danger makes the rogue physicist angle seem more reasonable it's not like you get through the game unscathed chances are unless you're playing on easy i guess that you'll die quite a few times but games like to go back and try again freeman might die a dozen times but those dozen deaths make the players eventual triumph seem that much more sensible half-life is about the player's craftiness the player's skills when the artifice of the game shows through like with dying and reloading it actually only serves to decrease the distance between the player and the experience it is preposterous that freeman would have ever survived and he would not have if you had not been playing him the other obvious game elements like the display in the menus are downplayed and designed to fade into the background a very smart hard to mimic balance of self-conscious ui design and naturalistic presentation and it's another instance where a character with a voice would not have worked as well gordon would have been expected to explain how he does the things he does if he had a voice by letting the question slide since you can't reply the obvious answer serves as the only legitimate one player one made him do it and don't doubt for a second that gordon's struggle for survival isn't an endlessly uphill battle especially for a game released in 1998 the enemy ai is just superb as the game progresses and the stakes get higher you'll have epic confrontations between the aliens the military and yourself the invaders from another dimension even have their own ecology many of the interloping creatures are just that simple creatures so they'll fight with each other as animals do the human enemies work together to outflank and outgun you flushing you out of cover and coming at you from multiple angles it takes work to outsmart half-life's enemies even 22 years later the enemies are quite memorable too less for their visual design which is still generally very good and more for their sound design each variety of enemy has certain characteristic sounds they'll make from the highly stylized radio chatter of the soldiers to the horse shattering of the vortigaunts you'll hear them before you see them too and knowing there's an enemy nearby but out of sight contributes a lot to the tense feeling you'll have throughout the game when you finally confront them the challenge of combat is as natural feeling as the rest of the game enemies are tough but the number of bullets you've got to fill them with before they go down seems about right and an early use of blood splatter helps make the combat feel messy and savage the sound effects for the weapons leading to the sensation of heavy deliberate brutality set against a backdrop of high scientific intentions it's balanced exactly right i can't stress how remarkable it is that a game that feels so thoroughly modern could come into being seemingly out of the blue so early in gaming's history in the beginning when the experiment goes wrong you're given a brief peek at the dimension that you're suddenly faced with an invasion from zen it's a tantalizing peak forward at the true scope of what's happened which the game will then build back up towards with a determined slowness in replaying half-life one of the primary things that makes it such an enduringly enjoyable experience is the progression of levels through the chapters how they ratchet the tension difficulty a couple clicks with each significant victory the long rail intro is incredible for establishing mood but the experience of going down into the sector see labs with them normal and coming up through them again when they're trashed and all you've got as a crowbar to defend yourself against the monsters and their newly monstrous colleagues with is better the monster situation gets worse and worse as you make your way to the surface and escape except the military then arrives and begins attacking everyone thank god we're saved the scientist cries but since it's not a cut scene you can either trust him and run into the fire or use caution and just let him take the bullet either way the scope has shifted widened again now it's monsters and soldiers both followed by bigger monsters followed by clever soldiers there are so many excellent diversions and chapters from the dim claustrophobia office complex to the high-tech labs of questionable ethics on a rail might stand out as a notoriously overlong chapter and i agree but it's interesting to look at it as a contrast to some of the other level design there is a lot of labyrinthine corridors in black mesa but they usually always feel sensical as part of the larger structure because they lead somewhere on a rail is extremely extremely recursive and dense while also trying to simulate covering miles of ground that's what makes it so frustrating the understanding that you are on a long long journey where every five seconds there's a checkpoint or a roadblock the essential impulse behind on a rail to try to extend the length and scope of your travels beyond what's possible on foot alone is something that creatively carries over to chapters of half-life 2 like highway 17. in revisiting the first game there are many motifs and set piece segments that are newly familiar that i recognize forward in time from the way they're reinterpreted and reimagined later on in other half-life games and not just nostalgically familiar from when i saw them the first time what makes half-life stand out from the games that follow it is its willingness to go far far beyond its own starting setting after enormous hardship and a innumerable setbacks you finally reach the lambda facility where you're given a chance to journey up through the enormous reactor powering the facility's portal technology then use that technology to take the fight directly to the enemy it seems like the climax of the game when you reach the portal but it's actually only about three quarters of the way through the last quarter takes place entirely in the alien dimension and it is more deliberately alien and strange than anything that the series has really attempted since after so much focus on realism it all gets thrown away to focus on a dimension where nothing about the environment makes sense and the puzzles you have to solve operate on a totally different sense of logical assumptions it is stunning to see how the design expectations that the game spends so much time and effort training the player to look for are so easily repurposed to underline how weird and foreign a place it is that you've come to for the very end of the game on the flip side a lot of the level design in zen particularly in regards to jumping puzzles is obtuse and aggravating the difficulty spike is deliberate and effective at its intended purpose but it also saps much of the fun from these last few hours of play certain parts of zen are brilliant but they're dragged down hard by the parts that are spitefully problematic however even if it's not that fun the challenge of it and the satisfaction of besting those challenges keeps the game compelling and carries it along to the game's boss fight one of the weirdest most complicated boss fights in video game history personally i think it's too complicated the fight is so long with so many different challenges like solving jumping puzzles while dodging teleporting attacks that reset your progress and make you solve yet more jumping puzzles that beating the game in its entirety is dependent on having an incredible amount of patience right at the very end of a very long experience and the ending is so good so weird and inventive that hiding the ending behind a battle as frustrating as the one they give you seems almost unfair the popularity of boss fights also waxes and wanes over time in game design when i originally did this video i noted that boss fights had largely given way to climactic sequences all or nothing battles against waves of regular enemies with extra conditions instead of pitting you against one weird massive enemy with a totally foreign set of vulnerability and strengths half-life 2 has a climactic sequence not a boss fight in the years since the popularity of dark souls and other high skill sealing action titles have completely reinvigorated enthusiasm for boss fights perhaps opinions on the nylinth will even change over time and his difficulty will eventually be seen as a positive but for me the encounter is too staccato with how he teleports you away all the time beating him is more a platforming solution than a combat one and that just irritates the hell out of me when the boss fight is finally over freeman is transported to a face-to-face meeting with one of the game's best mysteries the government man glimpsed only briefly but frequently throughout the game a man seemingly responsible for setting up the disaster and seeing the destruction through the minute he opens his mouth it's clear he's probably no man at all and everything that's happened has happened according to his plans but he's just an in-between for an even more mysterious interdimensional force and he wants you to work for him you're given a choice sort of you can accept the job offer and be put on ice indefinitely until called on again or you can defy the g-man and suffer the consequences it is fantastic that the game preserves player choice right up through the end even if a sequel is only possible if you accept the g-man's offer from the minute you step onto the first tram to sector c to the moment you step off the last tram to destinations on knowable a player understands that they have owned every step of freeman's incredible odyssey of science and blood half-life has two primary official add-ons developed by gearbox presenting different perspectives on the same disaster and both are excellent the first opposing force puts the player in the boots of one of the soldiers responding to the incident while the core game portrayed them as invariably remorseless killers and thugs opposing force pulls off the remarkable feat of making the brutality of the military response comprehensible even vaguely sympathetic as you find yourself in a situation more hostile and intractable than anything you could have reasonably been expected to face op4 kicks this off by taking a cue from the movie predator starting not with a tram ride but with the crass and playful banter of a squad being airlifted to a mission that by all accounts will be a total non-emergency no one knows anything about the situation on the ground expectations are low then just as you're about to be briefed your osprey is shot down by forces from another dimension most of your squad is dead the rest is scattered information is scarce and survival does not look likely brass says that the scientists are to blame and in the soldiers anger over being thrust into an unwittable confrontation the decision is made that the scientists will pay the shift into this new angle on the confrontation is handled incredibly well with new development team at gearbox emphasizing the new perspective through level design that feels slightly more ambitious and dramatic than the original progression subtle touches like the recoloring of the player display further reinforce the feeling of playing the same situation in a totally new way the changes go far beyond aesthetic details however opposing force is a true expansion pack adding whole new categories of weapons and enemies and providing a campaign about two-thirds the length of half-life and the age of dlc that seems like a tremendous amount of content but the thing about expansion packs is that they had to be big enough to sell on the retail market on store shelves usually for between 20 and 40 bucks living up to the original game was obviously a major goal partly out of an obvious affection gearbox has for the source material and partly because a major expansion like opposing force was great business sense at the time the weapons like a light machine gun a sniper rifle and a very curious portal gun are all great additions to the game and proved very useful in taking down the wide assortment of new and old enemies you'll face the great thing about opposing force is that as a trained soldier you immediately seem more qualified to handle an alien invasion and the threats you face are ramped up accordingly later in the expansion you'll fight alongside a full squad of soldiers over a several block all-out ground war against the new tougher aliens it is a totally different mechanical feeling than just scraping by as gordon freeman the inclusion of squad mechanics like having medics different varieties of soldiers and engineers to blow torch open doors just like they deployed against you in the core game makes the combat feel more robust and the stakes much higher you're the ones who are supposed to handle the situation after all but the situation is way beyond your capacity to manage the game also takes place deeper into the black mesa conflict letting the player actually catch up with freeman in the lambda teleportation chamber putting the first third of opposing force during the same time frame as the last quarter of half-life with freeman already out of the picture for the most part meanwhile you'll try and fail to evacuate you'll briefly visit zen and you'll attempt to foil a plot to destroy black mesa with a nuclear warhead gearbox's grasp of what works best about half-life's level design is very solid and the same kinds of industrial mazes that were so endearing in the core game are expanded on nicely gearbox isn't quite as good about realistically blending the puzzles and the combats however and the puzzle sequences seem obvious and abrupt much of the time they're usually a little more irritating a little less imaginative than the core games as well but it works and mostly it works wonderfully take the toxic garbage worm that replaces the three tentacle creature from the classic blast pit chapter the solution is far far more clearly telegraphed and more gamified forcing you to use a tamed barnacle to hop from wall to wall yet it's paced more tightly and comes across as much more colorful that's the difference you can see between valve and gearbox levels the naturalism giving way somewhat to bombast opposing force ends with another boss fight this one much less obtuse but equally irritating again requiring the use of a weaponized barnacle to pull yourself between turrets while exposing the weird worm things glowing vulnerable spot over and over again it's a setup so obvious and so influenced by arcade boss fights that it breaks the naturalistic tone that half-life games thrive on wide open beating opposing forces easier to figure out and easier to accomplish than half-life but it's so hem-fistedly done that it's hard to say that it's actually any better than the impossibly frustrating fight from the core experience but an uninspired victory is still a victory the g-man then comes to visit corporal shepard your character saving you from the nuclear blast you've been thwarted in preventing black mesa is completely destroyed then the g-man strands you in a void unable to share any information you've learned but on hand in case you prove useful that is the last you will ever hear about shepard in the whole franchise although a half-life 2 mod called awakening unofficially continues the journey it's kind of an anti-climax though it has made many people curious if corporal shepard has a role yet to play in unreleased installments of half-life the next expansion would come out mid-2001 quite a while after half-life's release it would include a free copy of opposing force under the high definition pack a minor makeover for the game's textures most notably weapons and enemies that would also retroactively change textures in the original half-life if you go back and play it as released in 1998 the game was noticeably a little blander and a little fuzzier than blue shift wanted to be the changes aren't major but they do make the game a whole lot crisper looking when i originally did this video i used the blue shift hd pack because i preferred it so strongly i changed my mind this time because i wanted to better reflect what the games would have looked like on release but i've left them on here to show the textures off in their natural habitat blueshift is the story of the black mesa disaster told through the eyes of the security guard you see stranded on the platform at the very beginning of the original game blue ship's development was a little screwy though it started out as an exclusive series of levels for an aborted part of the game to sega dreamcast retooled and expanded when the port fell flat the result was an expansion about half as long as opposing force with none of the new aliens and weapons even reducing your weapon selection down from what's available in the original and this is something you would have paid 40 bucks for the inherent lack of content for the money made most critics of the time inclined to rip blue shift a new one and drive down its critical score much lower than anything else in the franchise but looking back on it it is much easier to be forgiving what blue shift actually was in terms of format was dlc a short new story branching off the main campaign that should have been priced at like 10 bucks but dial-up was still the reality for most people in 2001 and digital distribution was not practical yet so the company had to make a profit with blueshift as a retail product even though it didn't remotely live up to content expectations set by opposing force now that so much time has passed blueshift can be looked at purely for what it is as a half-life experience as the tightest and the funnest of the three gearbox releases and one of the rare shooters that you can finish in a single sitting blue shift benefits a great deal from its shortness and the motivations of its character barney calhoun seeing black mesa from the perspective of a petty employee is great the scientists are dismissive of you you're not authorized to know anything about where you are what you're doing your job is difficult confusing and thankless as barney you get to see black mesa from the bottom of the pecking order freeman is a savior figure everyone pins their hopes on his success shepard is a professional soldier calhoun is just trying to collect his goddamn hourly pay and that is exactly the right approach for a final return to the setting as the game progresses you're not trying to save the base or the world you're trying to get out and save yourself the level design here is classic half-life absolutely on par with the core game although some sections like the coolant barrel puzzle do stand out as being notably poorer in quality than previous installments blueshift moves at a very fast pace however and that's it's saving grace even if one section might disappoint you you'll be moving on to the next before you know it blueshift also features the first time you'll consistently interact with another character rescuing dr rosenberg from the train yard and helping him reactivate a very early teleporter prototype that could potentially get all of you off base i'm a huge sucker for antiqued science fiction apparatus so i was pretty sold from the get-go but even if the flavor of the story isn't to your liking the gameplay is honed to a very sharp edge providing a tremendous amount of fun even the zen segments of blue shift are actually fun to play opposing force only had a very brief zen sequence in blue shift you get a much much larger one including a fantastic set-piece battle where you try to calibrate and defend a portal relay for the old equipment blue shift also eschews a boss fight entirely instead giving you a climactic defense sequence as you and dr rosenberg's cadre of scientists escape and escape you do blue shift has an actual happy ending where after an anxious portal malfunction you get to escape the facility with the scientists in a regular kind of way leaving by suv from a remote part of the base well before the nuclear blast at the end of opposing force it is nothing but a fond farewell to the official stories about the black mesa incident for seven years now i've been getting comments along the lines of how could you forget half-life decay so i'll tell you how i could have forgotten it because it is a co-op title released only with the playstation 2 version of half-life which can't even be completed in single player and has no impact on anything else that happens in the franchise a version for pc has been created by dedicated modders but it's really only functional over local area network if you're at the mercy of the two to four internet servers left available a server reset could invalidate your entire progress through the expansion it's also hot garbage in both level design and encounter design compared to even blue shift the co-op aspect has led gearbox to just dump enemies into bland arenas like never before the only story question it answers is who called the cops in the first place which turns out to be blue shift's dr rosenberg had i known i might have left him in that train car the jackass the thing is while decay might not be enjoyable or accessible to play in the modern era there's no denying that it's an intensely curious novelty for the franchise years and years before portal 2 we have the first major co-op experience in the half-life universe it features two women scientists cross and green and their own personalized hev suits as the protagonists it features the same voice actors as blue shift and a disabled scientist as a main character if it wasn't for the fact that it's awful to play and infinitely more awful to try to set up a dedicated server for it would be a much more meaningful part of the franchise canon after all it's one of the women in decay who canonically deliver the sample to gordon that day in the test chamber you can even watch her do it on a security monitor in blue shift as it is there are a lot of people who've been lifelong half-life fans who have never even heard of decay i was one i haven't improved myself as a fan for suffering through it but i think i have improved my understanding of the trajectory of the broader franchise by considering this early co-op prototype every bit as clunky and carefully obscured as rosenberg's original flavor portal device but the half-life experience is more extensive than the official titles alongside the game itself half-life was distributed with the tools that the modding community needed to craft the gold source engine into whatever the independent programmer envisioned at first this led to a proliferation of amazing multiplayer mods that expanded the standard offerings of deathmatch into highly specialized distinct game experiences the most popular and most enduring of these would be counter-strike a game focused primarily on reaction speed and map knowledge competitive cs matches would become incredibly popular in the emerging esports movement and there was actual money to be made by top players before too long team fortress classic a half-life update of a very popular quake 1 mod was both a fan favorite and a triumph of clever multiplayer design tfc is more complicated than counter-strike by far letting players choose between classes with different weapons and statistics will function collaboratively with one another in a variety of red team versus blue team conflicts like capture the flag report control map knowledge was also very important for tfc but not as important as understanding how to properly play the different classes the result is a game of freewheeling chaos channeled into tactical confrontations some of my favorite memories of multiplayer gaming back in my childhood are from tfc's heyday playing a match between two teams who really know what they were doing was a thrill that a single-player game sometimes struggles to match seeing as it comes entirely from emergent situations and random factors tfc wasn't the only class-based game in town however there's also day of defeat a phenomenal world war ii team mod david defeat was my personal favorite as it brought together the quick respawn rates of tfc with the realistic damage models of counter-strike all playing out across very cleverly designed maps with many twists turns and secret routes fought with class-specific weapons that are as fun as they are varied each and every one of these multiplayer mods was so good that valve would acquire them as its own releasing official retail versions of each one mostly on change alongside half-life 2. but as far as half-life 1 goes they're just mods which means they're free back in the day if you bought half-life you weren't just buying half-life you were getting a whole constellation of truly fantastic independent work as well some of half-life single-player mods are every bit as competent and extensive as the official expansions like opposing force so i'd like to briefly highlight one that i think really stands out as deserving special attention before turning discussion to half-life 2. that mod is they hunger nil monkey's zombie masterpiece a total conversion mod that replaces almost every texture in the game with custom game resources half-life used horror elements throughout its campaign but they hunger would mutate and fixate on those elements giving the player an experience totally different than how half-life 1 or half-life 2 would do their horror but similar in the rhythm of its combat and puzzles as well as the deliberate naturalism of its environments they hunger is notable for many reasons but map design is certainly the biggest it relies on a blend of indoor and large outdoor areas even more than half-life one did sending you an extremely long overland journey through woods swamps and train routes all overflowing with the living dead the mod's other great strength is atmosphere the half-life engine isn't that great with lighting or with shadow but beyhunger takes it to the limit one more time crafting environments that are genuinely creepy and strange but grounded of course in a realistic design aesthetic it's particularly noticeable in quality in the portions of the mod while you're in town the mod has everything it needs to hold up over time fun voice acting great custom sound effects and textures challenging and eerie environments it's even got primitive vehicle portions it is a triumph flat out the mod was developed by menke's small independent studio black widow games as a promotion for pc gamer magazine back then this kind of independent work was simple enough that small teams with limited resources could produce works of surprising length and competency and print magazines like pc gamer had the cash at the time to throw at projects like this most people myself included discovered they hunger through the demo cds that came with pc gamer back in those days manky's other half-life mod uss darkstar is an equally skilled work but they hunger provides the best compliment to the official games and best highlights what's so wonderful about this era of modding the things about it that are unpolished and amateur are what give it an enduring charm now it has a pulp 1950s aesthetic where the gold source engine's blockiness complements rather than detracts from it's like the difference between the original night of the living dead in world war z yes the more modern media surpasses the original envision execution and budget by massive margins but there's a quality to the older media that feels somehow cozier more personal they hunger exists because of a love of zombies and a love of pulp horror it is a pure expression of that enthusiasm even the sewer levels in part two can't fully diminish how powerful a thing that foundational love of genre is the way this tribute is blended with the mechanical pacing and game feel of the original half-life is deft bringing out the best of each other in a way that other half-life 1 horror mods never really even achieved for me i've provided links to download this and a couple other great half-life mods in the video description they work fine with newer versions of steam and windows 10 although you might have to google out a few minor problems to get them going at the time of its release half-life 1 felt almost completely peerless even games like quake 2 that would do similar things with linear level progression did so less believably less vividly so in making a sequel to a game that did so much right the first time what do you do as a developer just more of the same valve chose a different path instead of developing an easily identifiable sequel they wanted to make a game that would be equally novel and peerless for its 2004 release half-life 2 would have a revolutionary game engine a brand new highly inventive setting lively characters full of personality and a realistic physics system these are huge changes from the first executed with a kind of effortless ease that made half-life 1 so impressive yet half-life 1 feels less dated on replay than the second one does even where the second is improving on the first by leaps and bounds half-life 1's constellation of campaigns can be seen and played fully as their own universe and they feel more tightly bound to each other than what comes next still what does come next lays the foundation for an entirely new generation of gaming than the first helped pioneer where half-life 1 was a new perspective on the cliches of classic disaster sci-fi half-life 2 is a stylistically unique and visually imaginative take on the totalitarian dystopia as the game opens it's been an indeterminate number of years since black mesa but enough years for the world as you had known it to have been completely destroyed tearing down the borders between worlds is something that attracts attention apparently and in the aftermath of black mesa multi-dimensional empire called the combine invaded earth accepting the planet surrender in just seven hours combine control of earth is total and a suppression field of some sort prevents childbirth the sad downtrodden remnants of humanity you see will be the last generation ever a huge alien structure the citadel looms hundreds of stories above city 17 a non-specific metropolis somewhere in eastern europe the man responsible for their surrender dr breen was the administrator of black mesa mentioned so cryptically in the first game he serves as the face of the combine occupation of earth and the game's principal antagonist but if you think breen's going to be some sinister mysterious figure you're wrong the minute you step off the train and see his smiling face and hear his smiling words you know you're not dealing with a despot you're dealing with a sellout it's indicative of the whole new approach to story and script writing half-life 2 would revolve around a deeply human fallible strongly characterized casts of scientists soldiers monsters in the oppressed emotion was the biggest thing missing from half-life one and valve went out of their way to make sure that every major character was distinct memorable and motivated by real human concerns in the second game what's especially fun about it is that they use many of the same voice actors giving a wonderful feeling of continuity despite the massive shift and narrative approach you don't spend a huge amount of time with the characters but it's their concerns their needs your connection to the characters that sustains a player's motivation through the game breen is a fantastic example as the game begins he's just so damn comfortable up in his tower a fine persian rug covering the cold otherworldly steel of his office atop the citadel humanity was doomed anyway with submission at least there's a chance for survival in some capacity right and what harm is there if it works out a little better for numero uno than for the rest of the world breed's self-satisfaction makes the player so much more inclined to topple him from power than if he was portrayed as simply a blood and power-hungry dictator throughout the game you'll see how essentially powerless breen really is what a pathetic pretender he's been presiding over the end of the world in a turtleneck sweater the first game didn't even have a specific antagonist blackmace itself every part of it in every way was your principal opponent having someone to fight with instead of having just something to fight through is a great design shift there's a line of criticism about half-life 2 that's gained a lot of traction lately where the character interactions warm as the voice acting is are seen as fundamentally pandering and cloying i've been curious to see if that criticism would bear out for me playing it 16 years after its release and seven years after the last time i had at it and i have to say i do think it's much too harsh yes the savior protagonist elements are dialed up a great deal from what came before but it's important to consider the technology at play that set the stage for this debate to even occur the source engine was capable of rendering the most detailed and expressive faces yet seen in 2004 when the game was released as superior as the id tech engines were to source when it came to textures and to lighting they produced faces that were just pure plastic in comparison to source at the time replaying it i think about how acting changed from the silent movie era onwards without voices people acted in ways that seem alien and over the top to convey the emotion or to convey the plot half-life 2 is certainly more natural than silent movies but the cheers-ish quality of everyone knowing your name is often an excuse just to have characters smile at you which at the time was an incredible technological breakthrough take barney calhoun blue shift's protagonist and the first friendly face you'll encounter in half-life 2 working undercover with civil protection the lowest rank of the combine oppressors there is nothing special about his dialogue but even all this time later i'm swayed by his charm i believe fully that he is happy to see me and i find i'm very happy to see him in return this tactical technical reliance on over familiarity make great on some players and contributes to what feels dated about the title but i'm not at all inclined to call it a negative it's part of why i loved the game in the first place and i don't think i'll ever really be able to let that feeling go you may not remember dr kleiner and dr eli vance very well from the first game since they didn't have names at the time but these scientists from the sector c test labs also make a welcome return plus they add vance's daughter alex who serves as gordon's sidekick for portions of the game even the vortigaunts are allies now things having panned out that the creatures he defeated at the end of half-life was keeping their race in servitude should the vortigaunts have held the battle at black mesa against freeman it's much more fascinating that they choose not to that they become brothers in arms from a dimension conquered by the combine at a much earlier point in their history they have a stage presence that would have been difficult for the gold source engine of half-life 1 to convey the new source engine which valve developed for half-life 2 and which has powered over a decade of their subsequent releases can do incredibly complicated facial expressions beyond just grinning and do the transitions between these expressions in a way that does look natural convincingly natural half-life 2 was one of the very first games to have characters express an array of emotions and moods non-verbally in a cinematically passable way it had some of the first technology capable of producing that it is a perfect example of pushing technology forward in a way that lets artistry flow more easily one thing they did not update however was gordon the temptation to give gordon a voice must have been even stronger in developing the second game with how deep the interactions between characters would be but valve once again resisted and they did it in a way that's so quirky it actually contributes a lot to the game's charisma everyone acknowledges that gordon is unusually quiet but no one makes a big deal out of it you're included in what's being discussed but with a friendly understanding that you're just not much of a conversationalist when emotions run high this is a particularly solid choice and against expectations the game is actually a lot stronger for letting however the player feels and whatever the player thinks be the way it is with any expectation of feedback on gordon's part removed so with the new setting and no voice how do you make the player feel like they're playing the same gordon freeman as the first game again an understated approach one out it's the hev suit that puts the most work into providing continuity and its symphony of sound effects all of them back again and sounding a little smoother but otherwise unchanged that does the trick old sound effects in a new setting seems like such a simple element it wouldn't be the principle way to tie the experience of being the same gordon in different games together but it is it's part of what makes half-life so specifically indelibly half-life the environment wasn't given any less of a role on account of this new focus on character narrative however in nearly every way city 17 and its environs are even more impressive and majestic than black mesa ever was like the first game the great strength of half-life 2 is its impressively naturalistic presentation and pacing the entire game told in first person with no cutscenes every mile of your journey told continuously every step you really feel like you're gunning your way through earth's final days the oceans are being drained the invasive ecosystems of other dimensions have slipped through turning the wilderness into something more strange and more savage than ever before humanity lies cooped up in its crumbling useless cities stripped of their names and stripped of their purpose this combination of a realistic totally deadpan presentation with these amazing fantastical world building elements results in experience that is almost effortlessly immersive much more so than even the first game was on replaying it so many years later it is a little visually sparser than i remember in many ways the source engine was modified and advanced so many times in the interval since half-life 2 half-life 2's release that i had simply gotten used to the source engine being used to present more baroque and lush environments if you play the black mesa remake instead of half-life one you end up swapping from just about the most impressive rendering the source engine can do to the most stock standard and basic things as you move from that story into this one it doesn't detract from what's visually impressive about half-life 2 for me because i remember how groundbreaking it was and how blown away i was personally in 2004 but if you're new to the franchise it might be a little startling how undecorated the environments look by modern standards at the time what was such an achievement with the source engine was the fidelity and sharpness of the textures to accommodate that sharpness of form extravagance of detail was removed it feels natural enough to navigate despite the spare quality of environments with some by design friction thrown in for novelty and fun picking your way through the city still requires some good old jumping puzzle acumen but most of the environmental puzzles are now geared to be solved using the game's physics engine instead like weighing down one end of a board so it stays at the correct angle when you jump off of it it often blends in much more naturally with the environment and with the rhythm of play than the original's platforming focus but there are a number of puzzles that seem to be there for novelty alone a gimmick-driven mechanic that ends up being every bit as tedious as pushing boxes around with your shins in the first game still even if their artificiality interferes with the sense of naturalism somewhat it's nice to use a different kind of navigational thinking than the standard fps impulses the world of half-life 2 is sometimes playfully obtuse about where you're supposed to go next and how you're supposed to do it but in a way that is fun and really reinforces the rogue physicist in over his head angle that the game has for the player you cover a tremendous amount of distance comparative to the first game as well thanks to an overall very long game length for linear fps and a couple of vehicle sequences that last for a while and span many miles water hazard where you pilot a small air boat through city 17's canal system to a dam on the outskirts of the metropolis is a little too long and often a little too vague in some of the puzzles they'll need to solve to continue on later playthroughs when you're already familiar with the route it's a lot more fun but the first time through the fan boat sequence is a real drag on the early games pacing the next vehicle sequence has you piloting a buggy up the coast from city 17 to the prison of nova prospect along the decaying highway leading north this sequence highway 17 is by contrast one of the best in the entire game putting you against great exploration challenges tremendously fun set-piece battles in small towns and amazing artistic direction there is not a single flavor of half-life 2's gameplay that he won't sample during the highway 17 chapter plus the sheer length of the journey makes reaching the prison unexpectedly rewarding its use of space is the exact opposite of on a rail highly decompressed and blown out across many maps instead of securitiesly winding through compressed areas that are smaller than they suggest highway 17 also highlights just how many modes of gameplay valve included over the course of the campaign puzzles platforming stunt driving area defense stronghold assault survival horror optional exploration it's all in there many game designers choose a handful of these elements to focus on and get exactly so but valve breaks out small area appropriate versions of all of them not trying to perfect the moment but using them as tools to make sure the game never feels repetitious and they get the mix close to perfect much of the time half-life 2 is especially remarkable in how it continually shifts from one mode of play into another in a way that never feels obvious and always feels welcome a mode of engagement that half-life 2 dabbles in more deeply than others is survival horror with the famous we don't go to ravenholm chapter it's set up ever so briefly just a throwaway line about a dark and locked quarter in black mesa east a kernel of curiosity that then immediately blossoms into greater grotesquery than the series had yet leaned towards all the half-life games are gory but in a kind of strategic way pops of blood and guts here and there for emphasis ravenholm takes the headcrab concept and expands on it in the creepiest possible ways earlier the player witnesses the combine using artillery shells filled with creatures a kind of biological weapon a rural population suppression strategy meant to flood the earth with the awful little parasites and force the survivors to take refuge in the numbered cities that the combine controls as punishment for rebellious activity this town was shelled months ago enough time for everything to fester and to rot new varieties of head crabs are introduced with equally mutant zombie counterparts ravenholm's cleverness stems from how it combines environment tools and enemies and the most satisfying possible configurations when it's introducing them take the shotgun just a standard fps tool nothing noteworthy about it on its own unless you introduce it at the same time as the fasthead crabs and their skinless running on all four zombie variant while the player is up on a series of rooftop platforms so you get the ideal weapon to defeat the new enemy in a circumstance where you can blast them right off the side of the building they're on onto the streets below alone these elements are pretty basic together in the way they're staggered and clustered across the ravenholm experience they create a sense of real spectacle real danger ravenholm is somewhere that the rules of the half-life universe shift a bit the mood and feel of the progression changes in interval where the player's arsenal and expectations expand at the same time it's also helped along by the inversion of the trap dynamic now it's less you and more the zombies who need to watch out for environmental dangers you're suddenly largely in charge of these environmental traps and can use them to your advantage in what's basically an ammunition desert a place with more enemies than you really have bullets for this is typical for survival horror but atypical for half-life it is a deliberate choice to try to get you to acknowledge and use the traps otherwise you just shoot your way through and all that clever design would be secondary and optional as it stands if you're not squashing at least a few zombies with a rusted outlyka you're going to be [ __ ] out of luck real quick the final headcrab variant is one that i think is kind of genius too an ultra toxic all black extra spiny guy who takes you down to exactly one hit point if it lands an attack this is different than a one hit kill because your hev suit administers an antidote that takes you back up to what you had before minus just basic headcrab damage of like 5 to 10 or so so these new head crabs give an incredibly deadly impression and are in that early moment of getting hit more dangerous than any other enemy in the franchise but they mostly serve to make you extremely vulnerable to other enemies even as you regain those lost points one or two hits from someone else will wreck you the black widow variant changes the rhythm and prioritization of large encounters as well as providing excellent jump scare material for otherwise quiet exploration segments plus it's zombie variant is a hive of like four of the little guys which it throws at you like grenades of all the zombies it looks like the most painful and unpleasant to turn into and that is saying something ravenholm takes an hour or less and within that very short time frame it experiments wildly with many new mechanics and modes of engagement all of them tied to survival horror its compactness makes it memorable i remembered each room and hallway playing it through this time in a way that i rarely do with long fps titles besides being excellent on its own it also introduces a new theme into the half-life formula an eagerness to lean completely away from the main dynamic for a chapter or two to pursue an experimental tangent ravenholm is just as different from regular half-life 2 as zen is from regular half-life 1 but it fits in so seamlessly that by the time we get to half-life alex these survival horror elements will end up being incorporated into the main loop half-life 2 already begins to merge elements from the ravenholm chapter with the rest of itself together when you finally reach the prison of nova prospect as you get deeper into the complex the resistance you face becomes overwhelming until you reach the core of the facility where it peaks in these areas no one who saw them was supposed to live to tell about it so the alien corruption of the combine begins to come into greater narrative focus ammunition scarcity gives way to coordinated fierce opposition so the oppressive feeling of having your back to the wall shifts into something slightly different without ever relenting it dials up all this tension past to the point of sustainability reaching a crescendo as you attempt a daring escape into a combine portal hoping to end up in the lab from the beginning of the game your teleporter malfunctions slightly though hardly unexpectedly and you arrive several weeks later instead in the meantime armed revolution has begun the new chapter of half-life your destruction of no for prospect inspiring the city to go for bro can take back humanity's destiny it is a clever efficient story beat hiding freeman in the quantum foam for a few weeks while the plot develops was in the ideal way to let the whole situation change without sacrificing the one foot after another pacing that is so critical to half-life the last third of the game is predominantly a block-by-block battle towards the citadel during the armed revolution of city seventeen's populace it's one of the best extended action sequences from that era in gaming history a kind of war of the world stalingrad with fully automatic weapons delightful in other words while the sequence is fun and wonderful on its own it's the way it adjusts the scale of combat and the stakes of freeman's endeavors in relation to the rest of the game that makes it so great you've gone from fugitive hiding in the margins of city 17's decaying infrastructure haunted constantly to rescue her speeding through a dying world to save an old colleague meeting the enemy on their own terms and now it is your turn to be revolutionary a bright orange cog and the great machine of human liberation the stakes are greater in terms of gameplay as well a standoff against striders and combine soldiers and a half-destroyed apartment block serves as a tremendously difficult though cleverly designed to climax to half-life 2's gun play when you reach the citadel at long last it's one of those game moments that can just stay with you always partly because of the length of build up to the moment and partly because it is an artistically brilliant structure with a hugely unique aesthetic quality and architecture i'd like to take a moment and single out what an artistic achievement the combine and the citadel are as classic as half-life one is nothing in it approaches the unique look and feel of the combine and half-life 2. the industrial designs are brutal but flowing in engineering aesthetic that really is alien-looking while still being absolutely believable at the same time and how confident and cohesive its presentation is the way humanity has been accommodated to meet only its most basic physical needs and then only very clinically and uncaringly the way the blue steel of the combine consumes both the cities and the people of earth it all adds up to an antagonist whose vastness seems as incomprehensible as its motivations so the moments of victory you pry from the combine seem like truly meaningful victories when you reach the citadel you feel that moment of victory is so tantalizingly close but there's a beefy chunk of game left to go that expands the scope of the game world in a way similar to how zen recontextualize your world world and half-life one except instead of a long tangential feeling trip through the border world you get an inversion of the black mesa inbound transit opener of the first game a tour of the alien facility not so unlike black mesa revealing at every turn some kind of display of power that makes the human situation seem more dire than it was before you get your all is lost moment too with dr breen you get a supercharged gravity gun instead of regular weapons you get a tremendously well-crafted climactic sequence trying to shut down a massive interdimensional portal you get a hell of a lot in the last hour of half-life 2. many games struggle with maintaining their quality through to the very end either getting so wrapped up in plot as to ignore gameplay or making the player so overpowered that the rhythm of the game is adversely affected half-life 2 not only maintains its rhythms it's improved with the exotic level architecture and gameplay shifts it is such an improvement over zen in the fight of the first games climax it is like night and day the only downside is that as charismatic and wonderful as half-life 2 is it answers very few of the questions that it asks and ends on a hell of a cliffhanger you've inadvertently done exactly what the g-man wanted once again and now he's pulling you for a new job while leaving alex to die in the portal explosion that you've caused cliffhangers are a dicey proposition for most games usually since they rely entirely on how invested the player is in the experience for their success half-life 2 went to incredible lengths to make not just the journey seem real and meaningful to the player but also the world and its inhabitants creating that investment for most the way half-life 2 is constructed is so cleverly all-encompassing that playing it enjoying it believing in its vision is really just as easy as breathing for me half-life 2's cliffhanger ending was more intense than the cliffhanger of half-life 1 and more emotionally charged by far which made waiting all the way for a half-life 3 seem less tenable than it otherwise might have so instead of a half-life 3 of equal length to the earlier games valve planned to release three episodic expansion packs directly continuing gordon's story instead of telling the same story from different perspectives like half-life 1's expansions only two episodes would actually come out yet both would be of the same tremendous production value as the main game and more especially the second episode episode 1 updates the source engine a bit and while the game does look crisper there is very little in episode one that's truly new it's mostly just refined beefy versions of the kinds of encounters you've had through the duration of the half-life 2 primary campaign episode 1 is little like blue shift this way it's more of the same and it was released as a standalone retail product while being very short episode 1 does have certain important shifts in gameplay focus however that make the experience distinct from other half-life titles the guiding principle of episode 1 is that the core half-life 2 experience was epic in scope but not as personal as it could have been so episode 1 gives you alex as a sidekick throughout almost its entire length letting her offer the kind of emotional interpretation of events and complex reactions to the setting that gordon as a silent protagonist whose face you never see cannot in an early scene where you and alex are involved in a train crash this is especially obvious the stalkers people modified into machines by the combine as punishment were strange but not truly terrifying in the core game yet seeing alex be so badly shaken by an encounter with one really drives home how truly horrifying the creatures are how evil the combine is games struggle with implementing believable and fun sidekick characters but in episode one valve has crafted alex to be engaging both as a gameplay device and as an emotional tether to the game world it is unexpectedly well handled regarding plot valve back pedals out of the cliffhanger by having vortigaunts intervene on freeman's behalf keeping the g-man at bay as they whisk you and alex to the bottom of the citadel before the portal explosion you caused at the end of half-life 2 kills you both but the explosion has left the citadel unstable if you don't get back inside and calm down the terrible maelstrom of theoretical physics brewing there you and everyone else still trying to evacuate the city are dead this kicks off what seems like the biggest theme of the half-life 2 episodes unforeseen consequences the blow you struck against the combine was heroic and necessary but you've endangered so many by landing it episode 1 is much more insistent about the morally grey quality of freeman's journey how the domino effect when you topple something as tremendous as the citadel is far from straightforward after re-stabilizing your goal for the rest of episode 1 is simple escape city 17 with a mysterious data packet you'll experience this fight for flight underground block by block alongside the revolution inside an infected hospital and finally in a protective role as you help refugees evacuate at a train station the pacing and progression of these encounters is tremendous ramping up to the fully automatic street battles of the later expansion by first leaning into limited weapons and ammunition scarcity for some raven hole mask segments underground ant lions and zombies at once have invaded the city and taking control of its hidden infrastructure having alex there to help is useful but having her as a distraction means that the game can now ask you to solve puzzles while you simultaneously engage in combat so you're not getting let off any easier early encounters feel tense claustrophobic as you flee the city the sense of chaos gets ratcheted slowly upwards some later sequences like the pitched battle in the hospital between overwhelmed combine soldiers and the endless horde of headcrab zombies have a sense of really savage chaos to them that tops even the core game finally after arriving at the train station and evacuating a group of refugees including barney calhoun you'll face episode 1 cinematic interpretation of a boss battle against a single strider that doesn't sound complicated or exciting you've faced writers before but the battle relies on an ever-shifting use of the train yard itself is an arena and a scarcity of explosives to keep up the tension which works just like they intended you get the triumphant experience of a more obvious boss battle without the cloying artifice of it episode one's climax feels both natural and hard-won you and alex board the last train out of city 17 just as the citadel begins to collapse the advisors the true power overseeing earth's domination flee like rats from a ship and it becomes clear as the blast's otherworldly shock wave advances toward your speeding train that you are in for another goddamn cliffhanger it took from late 2004 to mid 2006 for episode one to come out episode two would not be released until late 2007. when it was finally released however episode 2 blew episode 1 out of the water completely drawing on pacing and design elements pioneered during the ravenholm and highway 17 chapters the core game and then elaborating on those elements heavily introducing new areas and new gameplay concerns that fit in perfectly with the serious aesthetics and style of presentation it also features an even further upgraded version of the source engine now capable of rendering structural collapse in multifaceted realistic detail that is a useful thing for episode 2 which revolves around a wild wonderful sojourn from the outskirts of what used to be city 17 to the white forest missile facility where dr vance dr kleiner and the rest of the cast that had been absent in episode 1 have been holed up where episode 1 didn't have much more ambition than to offer a sharper version of the half-life 2 core experience episode 2 is decidedly committed to making that experience richer and grander it does this in typical half-life fashion from several directions at once first is that episode 2 tries very hard to make the player's emotional investment of the series deeper in a few respects like by playing up alex's vulnerability and mortality in a way that had not been strongly emphasized in the series so far and also by expanding the cast of secondary characters with the introduction of dr magnuson who fills the jackass vacancy left by dr breen when you blew him up magnuson acts as a kind of foil for the kindness and warmth of the other scientists he is an intolerable windbag who hinders your progress repeatedly and has no patience for everyone constantly patting gordon on the back it's a little awkward to have an important character suddenly appear out of nowhere like he does but his presence in the ensemble rounds it out perfectly his pomposity has a lot of comedic value all on its own but more importantly his unfriendliness makes the rest of the cast seem much more alive and real with a contrasting personality around regarding alex herself after spending a short period at the beginning of the expansion traveling together she's mortally wounded by a new type of combine threat the hunter verdigon step in to save her but you've got to venture through a system of mines infested by ant lions to harvest the royal jelly from another dimension to facilitate her healing it's kind of ridiculous and the mines and this subplot comprise one of the weakest sequences in the entire half-life catalog in my opinion there's not much enjoyable about it besides some new enemies and a couple clever puzzles for the most part the first hour or two of episode two is a badly paced slog through uninspired and underlit labyrinths as a way of connecting me to the game world i'm not moved by it at all it has a regressive quality to the design that seems like it's moving back to corridor shooting from the open spaces it had hinted at it feels like episode 2 really begins when you finally step outside the mines with a restored alex i wasn't much persuaded by its attempts to connect me with alex this way either because while the scene of her wounding is shocking and well handled the whole sleeping beauty bug hunt that the game is about to throw at you is cliche enough to undo the tension built by it episode two after the minds has some of the best gameplay and set-piece storytelling that half-life as a franchise has to offer the mines themselves are kind of interminable slogs through puzzle and encounter design that feels lesser than what came before even if episode 1 was not as impressive visually and had less complexity in the map design it did do a better job of connecting the player to alex one misfiring chapter is hardly enough to drag down the totality of the episode 2 experience though soon enough the expansion shifts into a broader range of modes and moods your first step after a surprise confrontation with enormous hand lines is to make your way down through a headcrab infested outpost with survival horror mechanics across a toxic river and up a broken highway overpass to retrieve the car you'll need for episode 2's lengthy amazing vehicle sequence and it's no dune buggy this time while it still has the torn apart and re-engineered look that is so characteristic of half-life 2 this time you are very recognizably going to be driving a 69 dodge charger and it's surprising what a difference having a real world object like a dodge and half-life's fantastical universe makes saving the world is just more fun with mopar no two ways about it the driving sequence with the charger is not nearly as complicated as highway 17 nor does it have as many varieties of gameplay but the environmental design is much stronger the route better integrated into the landscape and more scenic the several checkpoints and ambushes you'll have to work through are well paced and cleverly crafted as they escalate and challenge you'll also come face to face with one of the game's true villains an advisor hiding in a barn of all things now that the citadel is destroyed if you couldn't get a solid glimpse of one inside an alien skyscraper what are the chances you'll run into one just traveling along a byway quite low and that's what's so effective about the scene it's weird and brutal right at the moment when the game was seeming more grounded and less dangerous than usual when you reach the fight forest facility you deliver the data and get a long reunion with all of your old favorite characters as well as dr magnuson then it's up to you to defend the silo while a satellite is ready for launch you're introduced to a brand new game device explosives that you toss with the gravity gun and stick to striders which you'll need because you're about to experience the largest most feverish battle in the whole of half-life episode 2's action rolls to a close with an incredible climactic defense sequence against waves of striders with hunter escorts up to three at once who slowly work their way from many different directions towards the silo destroying buildings in their path removing an access point to your explosive supply with every building they destroy it is a whole new mode of play for the series you're taught the new mode very quickly then the sequence cranks up the difficulty steadily for a very long large scale action sequence the pacing is ridiculously good and the payoff profoundly satisfying it is a great climax but it's only a climax of gameplay not the game episode 2 continues for a bid to allow you to personally launch the satellite and destroy the newly forming combine portal far above what remains of the citadel an echo of the satellite launch from honor rail in half-life 1. then you alex and dr vance head off to the helicopter that will shuttle you to episode 3. the player's comfort level generally is at an all-time high at this point so it is the perfect moment to slip in the death of a major character for maximum emotional impact and valve isn't afraid to pull the trigger on it writing in an ambush from the two advisors who incapacitate all three of you and rather brutally murder dr vaynes dog alex's robot saves the two of you but it's too late for dr vance and that's the end of episode two with alex tearfully mourning her dead father what's worse news is that as far as the half-life franchise goes that was the last thing we ever saw of the official story for over 12 years i don't think they would have chosen an ending like that if they didn't think that they'd have the opportunity to continue the story relatively promptly but valve ultimately decided to prioritize business over storytelling [ __ ] canning the narrative right as it reached its most vivid cliffhanger yet for more than a decade while they figured out what to do with the franchise it wasn't episode three and all these years later it's not even half-life 3 quite yet valve's willingness to play the long con and sit on such a powder keg of community sentiment is in some ways shrewd i had to wait 13 years for this scene to resolve and when it did it was through an entirely new medium of interaction than i had left off on blowing my mind open as strongly as half-life 1 blew my mind when i played it the first time in my childhood chances are high that if you bought episode 2 retail you bought it as part of the orange box and if you did then at least you got some consolation prizes to really get the expansion selling it was packaged with team fortress 2 tfc's source engine update and a short first person puzzle game also using the source engine called portal episode two was supposed to be the big deal in the orange box portal was supposed to be something you played afterwards when you were frustrated that there wasn't an episode three but portal ended up being the best of the bunch a true underdog success for a game that is built on as strange a premise as portal is you see in portal you're not a scientist anymore as much as gordon freeman ever really was you're an experiment you're asked to solve puzzles revolving around navigating an environment with orange and blue portal doors doorways whose entrances and exits you can place and then pass through at will it's a very complicated mechanic in practice but portal teaches itself to the player at a leisurely and fun pace the early experiments or test chambers as portal would have it are built around relatively easy puzzles that can only be solved by figuring out one of the principal mechanics of how to use the portal system when the test chambers start getting really crazy starting at about chamber 11 you have to apply what you've been taught in increasingly complicated ways even incorporating platforming and timing components to the puzzles just like in the classic half-life experience it is very surprising how old-school portals design is actually its focus on platforming and particularly the industrial platforming in the last third of the game connects it very strongly with the original half-life the puzzles themselves are flatly genius at first with obvious solutions that are instructive in a very subtle way and then with increasingly hard to parse and intimidating solutions there's no real guide to understanding the mechanics of the portal system but the game is structured to teach you piece by piece until you've got to apply your lessons in increasingly complex and perilously interactive ways the way the game challenges a player to use their brain in a spatially creative manner feels amazing and its cleverness and instructing the player at how to do it is what is the most spectacular thing but these are not the reasons why portal is the best game in the orange box portal is the best game because of its presentation portal is an ingenious dark comedy told in the margins of the puzzles relayed through messages from the computer overseeing your tests it offers helpful information and inane observations at first in a cheerful but clinical tone seeming at first to be just some pre-recorded digital proctor but as the puzzles get more complicated the messages become more sinister it isn't entirely clear that you had a choice to participate in the tests then the tests become deadly and the same cheerful clinical tone of the messages you've been receiving persists at first actively lying about the deadliness of the environment then later gleefully impressing on the player how many ways there are to die as the game continues you get a glimpse into the industrial crawl spaces behind the test walls some of them showing signs of long-term occupation which is hugely unsettling against the extremely sterile luck of the test chambers in portal's early production the environments weren't as severely minimalist as they are in the final version but early game testers kept trying to use decorative objects to solve puzzles so the designers shaved out all the excess the result only heightens the uncomfortable strangeness of the experience with its starkness in the final test chamber your reward is a fiery death you're given just seconds to figure out an escape and nothing tells you to escape just your instincts as a human and as player one not to be thrown into a pit of fire this opens up portal's last hour of play taking place in the spaces between test chambers in the industrial spaces and small offices desolate corridors that look to have been abandoned for quite some time and it turns out that the messages you've been receiving aren't recordings the whole facility is being administrated by an artificial intelligence glados and she is less than thrilled with you for not being dead she insults harasses and belittles the player continuously throughout your escape and your escape attempt is a mixed success you end up right inside glados's central chamber where you defeat the computer in a weaponless boss fight forcing you to juggle many of the puzzle mechanics that the games taught you in an unconventional arena while missiles are being shot at you it's wonderful it's a boss fight classically totally but it's constructed like the puzzles you've spent portal's entire duration learning like the rest of portal this last sequence is a fantastically original take on some very old school game design then escape or not originally it was left open-ended whether your escape was a true success but when portal 2 was in development a patch retconned portal's ending to have the player hauled back down inside the labs for certain at a short three to four hours in length with a minimalist approach to visual design and a new perspective on old half-life tropes portal plays more like an incredibly professional mod than a standalone product yet it would go on to spawn a full sequel well after eli lied dead in the ground team fortress 2 is the last product in the orange box and one of the few original multiplayer source titles with a large remaining player base in 2021 in the beginning it was a cartoonish high definition version of team fortress classic all the maps and all the classes were essentially unchanged from the gold source era but the art style was made much more highly stylized a clean cartoonish brightly colored aesthetic of visual design came to characterize the game instead of the muddied colors that tfc leaned towards because of its quake lineage gameplay was always wild and exuberant so the new art style suited well as time went on team fortress 2 went through many major updates and revisions adding weapons and decorative clothing and armor you had to unlock through chance or by meeting certain conditions over time team fortress 2 would become less and less accessible to casual and new players because of these layers of rewards for players who have invested huge quantities of time playing it for those players it's wonderful they get gameplay that rewards their dedication in a player pool that self-selects for a high level of skill but it's pretty brutal to the inexperienced or the in sober seemingly more concerned with grinding for funny hats than pitting players against each other while other games of this era waxed and waned within their own franchises the true inheritor to team fortress 2 is blizzard's overwatch taking visual design and tonal cues and then wrapping them all up with moba-esque map mechanics team fortress 2 with its hat obsession and dwindling match availability today feels caught between the casual and straightforward mod that it came from and the highly corporate character shooters that would come after as dissimilar as team fortress 2 became team fortress classic the source versions of counter-strike and day of defeat stayed relatively true to their roots counter-strike source would stay so wildly popular that it would even get a second retail release global offensive in late 2012 also using the source engine counter-strike rewards long-term players even more than team fortress 2 does and in a less gimmicky way players who are really good at counter-strike are so good that players with less skill are just completely [ __ ] over time a process of attrition has eliminated a middle ground of average players a round of cs lasts about 90 seconds and if you die 25 seconds in you have to wait until the round is over if you die five times in a row like that without getting a kill you've spent most of your time just waiting around to die again it's alienating and so cs matches are only truly played between the experienced the others are those who just haven't yet lost patience day of defeat source was and still is friendlier to average players than both team fortress and counter-strike but it was never nearly as popular the source version of deo defeat looks wonderful and is a hell of a lot of fun to play but there's nothing new about it it's just a prettier version of the original mod and no attempt was ever made to keep it relevant like with major updates or new retail versions returning to it the map design is what still stands out the most even after having left the game to collect dust for years i found myself remembering all the little tertiary routes and secret flanks built into the more obvious battle flow between the control points it is my favorite of all the multiplayer titles that half-life 1 and 2 spawned but the player base is almost unusably small nowadays destined to keep shrinking down to nobody as the years go by the source generation of half-life development yielded one more multiplayer classic one that would make up for the vacancy of zombie content left by the hunger never getting a source sequel the new game left 4 dead would center around a cooperative struggle for survival as four players make a long continuous journey in classic half-life style through a chapter and fend off literally hundreds of computer-controlled zombies it's the player versus computer battle that the broader franchise always needed half-life had a mod that allowed cooperative play sven co-op and there's always decay i guess but nothing on par with a refined absurdly fast-paced experience of left 4 dead each of the four player characters has a distinct personality and the game is very clever with how it encourages cooperation and trust based play a wonderful change of pace from the competitive challenges of other source multiplayer titles left 4 dead does have competitive modes as well of course but the campaign was front and center from the beginning environmental design and map layout are such standouts that even though the game received a retail sequel left 4 dead 1's original maps were ported over to the newer version the game still looks great and plays great even without the sequel's enhancements but most fans have long moved on to the second because of its greater weapon and enemy variety even across the legacy maps even if there was never a source version of they hunger half-life 2 has had its share of amazing single-player mods as well one of which was so good that valve hired the man behind it to work on half-life in an official capacity that mod was minerva metastasis and while it mostly only uses game resources and art from the core half-life 2 experience it is very easy to see why adam foster minerva's creator got a job offer out of it foster's contention as a game designer is that half-life 2's level design was too driven by gameplay concerns further contending that making the player conform to the map architecture's demands provides a more meaningful and memorable experience than making the map architecture conform to the player's demands the result is an experience that does feel overall more realistic and denser than half-life 2 and that is a feat minerva was made to complement the main half-life experience in plot design and pacing and it is a testament to foster's creativity and vision that he does so with such obvious skill this one-man show presents a side of half-life that is a little darker and a little more challenging than you might have seen before done with every bit as much competency as an official release it's on the short side at around two hours but it is so tightly packed and so satisfying to play that it feels like a much bigger experience and lingers in the memory that way half-life map says have always had a certain amount of filler content while minerva has almost none nearly every inch of every map is utilized for something there's much more backtracking in the puzzles than valve's design would usually incorporate in service to foster's insistence on architectural cohesion over convenience the facility that you traverse in the mod is every bit as large as the citadel and five times as complicated using the underground inversion to create an escalating sense of hopelessness minerva is a great way to experience the fight against the combine again as a bridge before the next official half-life title plus it is still possible that playing minerva might give insight into some of the design values we might see represented in the franchise's ongoing future more clues come from examining portal 2 the big budget sequel to that minimalist comedy puzzler from the orange box portal 2 was for years the last aaa single-player game that valve released a vague kind of ellipsis on the whole half-life franchise and the source era at large portal 2 is an amazing game one of the best of the whole lot we've covered in this video yet it is always a little bittersweet to play through because of its position as harbinger of the end for the valve of yesteryear before they were known more as a sales platform known more for steam than they were regarded as a developer half-life 2 episode 2 hinged its transition into the episode 3 that never happened on a crossover connection with portal with the data that alex and gordon steal from the citadel having been found to contain a clue to follow turn code physicist judith mossman to the relic of the borealis a philadelphia experiment type ship that disappeared from aperture labs many years ago in portal 2 you can even find a little flotation device from the ship and more there's a suggestion very slight but definitely there that there is some kind of connection between glados and the combines feminine voiced ai who you hear all throughout half-life 2. portal 2 is ultimately insular within its sub-franchise and does not tie itself to half-life in any meaningful way besides these light teasers what you can see instead and what's valuable in including it with the broader arc of half-life titles is valve growing their repertoire of skills and tricks as a development house portal 2 marries the warm and friendly approach to supporting characters that valve had been pursuing since half-life 2 with even more clever and complex puzzle design than portal 1 melding them together across a backdrop of environments more grand and more alien than anything yet portrayed in a half-life game rivaling the citadel and rivaling zen in fantastical scale where black mesa the institution relied on a sense of naturalism to come across the way it wanted as a secret lab with government funding and a serious mandate aperture science laboratories works on a cartoon logic only slightly more presentable than what you might see on pinky and the brain sometimes exactly on that wavelength like when you fall down an infinite pit or the villain is turned into a potato or you see a sign that says in case of implosion stare directly at implosion it's easy to congratulate portal 2 for continuing to iterate on the puzzle mechanics and expanding them with such winning variety but on replaying the game that's not what i loved the most what i truly looked forward to what i found myself most excited for was to be told the aperture science story again to have the history of the place unfold in time with the puzzles and one of the most deftly fascinating uses of environmental storytelling that i've ever seen if you play portal 1 and portal 2 back to back the sequel gets off to a very slow start by having you essentially run through the whole first game again real quick before launching into the new mechanics the sameness of the puzzle chambers is disguised behind a thick layer of decay and a bunch of jokes glados is gone has been for anywhere between centuries to millennia and an emergency mode automated proctor has taken her place his whole new vibe is great but what i think is most interesting about this replication of puzzles is that the developers seem to feel like in terms of teaching a new player the ropes that the first game's progression of concepts in teaching reinforcement could not be improved on i agree portal 2 is designed to be a completely standalone experience if it needs to be no matter how many threads trace back to earlier or potentially later titles part of establishing this identity is pulling a move similar to what half-life 2 did over half-life 1 to refocus on strong relationships with highly expressive primary characters over a lonelier journey correct for the everyone's or friend vibe of the base half-life 2 campaign half-life 2 added dr magnuson a caddy and critical voice who provided a lot of value to the ensemble portal 2 pivots on the concept to arrive at everyone's your frenemy instead each voice you hear dangerous and callous in many ways but extremely personal and warm in others sometimes this shifts along a character arc sometimes like with glados it's a constant churn of familiarity and contempt these relationships are literally reflected in the environments the emergency proctor at the beginning was just a warm up when glados comes back online and the gang's back together she repairs the facility before your very eyes each test you complete and the complexity introduced by the next one going hand in hand with a return to gleaming metal and bright diodes when the rolls are reversed and wheatley an ai designed specifically to generate bad ideas is in control of the facility his tests are correspondingly nonsensical and simple the challenge in navigating wheatley's tests is the way he's broken the chambers you don't arrive at the ideal solution you arrive at any solution you can it's a synthesis of present tense purpose ambient storytelling and detailed character development all done while preserving a mean sense of comedic timing and intent the best illustration of this by far are the sealed legacy chambers way way down in the forgotten parts of the facility that even glados has no awareness of after your cartoon fall down the bottomless pit you arrive in the oldest parts of the labs just a broken tangle of nothing at first that eventually resolves into a grand foyer unlike anything in the labs above something designed not for pure science but for strong impressions designed for salesmanship in this way we introduce the character of cave johnson founder and ceo of aputure science before we ever hear his voice or learn his name you soon find a cabinet filled with curios and trophies from his life showing the cave was a shower curtain salesman who ended up accidentally financing the world's first successful interdimensional portal device black mesa would bother with the theoretical frontiers of the technology cave johnson would use it to build an empire of mad science for the express purpose of making a quick buck in the 1940s and 50s when these first chambers were first built this grand entrance hall was used to welcome astronauts athletes the elite crusts of society testing was chic it was the heyday of that kind of goofy anything goes science in pop culture as much as in the fiction of portal 2. as you climb the chambers time goes on anything goes science killed a lot of people a lot of folks got cancer there were quite a few lawsuits so we arrived at a 1970s styled welcome facility cheaper more corporate where the homeless and destitute and foolish could sign up to test in the test chambers and be compensated a whole 60 dollars like in a poster of a man waving the check in front of a big yacht with a 60 price tag cave johnson's proctor narration changes from congratulatory to disdainful bitter irritated by the class of people running through his once grand experiments in the shambles of his former reputation then the climb goes higher time moves on an hour in the mid to late 80s cave johnson has cancer from his own experiments he's trying everything lashing out pulling people down with him it is now a mandate at aperture science that all employees must test or be fired no one on the outside world should be involved [ __ ] them all cave johnson needs is computers and if he has his way he'll be put inside a computer to live for eternity if he dies before that happens put his always loyal secretary in the machine no matter if she says no so now we know the story of glados that she used to be carolyn that she loved and admired johnson that both her mania for testing and her resentment against humanity are echoes of her old crusades of staying by her boss's side as everyone else abandoned him and then in the end being betrayed by him too makes a machine feel a little vengeful perhaps if the temptation of copious supplies of deadly neurotoxin are just sitting around all the time going through this with glados shifts her perspective enough that she lets chell the player character leave at the end ejected into a field of blowing grass so different from the game world you can almost feel the sun and hear the wind of course there's the matter of civilization being completely gone portal 2 takes place long long after the dust has settled on the events of half-life we've moved past the interdimensional war to an interval of quiet wheat there's a whole other campaign in portal 2 longer actually than even the main single-player one that is exclusive to the co-op mode decay and left 4 dead both filled their role as co-op for half-life for their respective generations plus mods like sven co-op but those are all combat focused the portal 2 co-op campaign is cool because it eschews the storytelling of the primary campaign to refocus on making much much trickier and more obtuse puzzles with a new pair of portals for player 2 to add into the mix puzzle mechanics from the main campaign can be twisted into way way more complex configurations it's meant for people who have finished the base game and understand all of those ideas it's an expert level bonus mode you can play online with strangers but i ignored the co-op campaign for years because that never appealed to me much i almost forgot that it existed until i roped a friend into helping me gather footage for decay and we moved on to the portal 2 co-op campaign when we got frustrated with keeping decay's dedicated server going it is some of the most fun that i've ever had with co-op simply because of the portal format solve puzzle receive joke that's the bargain and it's worth it every time the co-op campaign is basically an epilogue on the main story where glados tries to find happiness and testing without a human subject she sarcastically pits the bots against each other as you go on moving beyond the base insults from before to a hilariously manipulative dynamic where she overpraises one player and savagely burns another it flip-flops all the time who's getting the compliment and who's getting the insult but the insult is always the greater honor the only downside is that it shows how creatively limited the portal narrative is going forward it was always less about lore than it was about chell and glados with shell gone the puzzles are all that's left portal spin-offs would continue to be released like glados appearing in poker night 2 or the little bridge builder mobile game but the insularity of portal 2 kept it safely out of orbit from the bubbling resentment over there not being a half-life 3 and increasingly in its own little category of aaa comedy puzzler 2020 wasn't a good year for much of anybody but it was an incredible year for half-life the year with the dam broke and the franchise got hours of new content on both the front and back ends of the story arc before talking about half-life alex all its retcons what it means for the future of the franchise it's important to acknowledge the amazing work done by crowbar collective on reviving the franchise's past their remake of the original game retitled black mesa has been around so long that i briefly touched on it in the version of this video i did seven years ago it wasn't until 2020 that it was officially considered finished with a version of the zen sequence that was completely torn down and rebuilt from scratch as basically an entirely new back half of the game the work as played start to finish is one of the most loving acts of artistic tribute that i've ever seen in the medium each corridor puzzle and encounter has been reproduced in a way that not only recreates it but enhances it coloring in the details that my imagination had always colored in for me when i thought back on the first game what makes it so amazing isn't that it's a one-for-one recreation it's that what black mesa ends up being is a distinct version of the experience where those instances that i remembered something being grander or smoother or more scenic than it actually was on replaying the classic version black mesa pulls the original apart and crafts an aftermarket replacement that makes the same kind of nostalgic corrections that my brain wanted to make in misremembering there's a number of instances where an area is made much larger than it was before so on account of that many more enemies are added just to utilize the arena-like quality the added space gives or instances where a few extra rooms are added just to give extra texture to the environment to fill the space and preserve the sense of visual naturalism the original had by adding more detail to the more detailed game engine the game feels different to control than the original the movement feels a little faster the combat definitely moves at a faster and more frenetic pace there are some modernizations that are in there in service of the expanded scale of the maps and the expanded scope of the combat encounters some people don't like it because that difficult to describe game feel of the original is a critical part of their personal nostalgia but i came to respect black mesa more because of these differences because of the confidence needed to say the game needs these changes to feel right and to be right about that these changes are significant enough to say pretty categorically that this is a different game than the original half-life even deliberately discounting that zen takes 6 to 10 hours now making it fully half the experience it is meaningfully different on the front end of the game too it feels more modern more connected to the half-life 2 generation than to opposing force or blue shift i think this is a healthy difference but it does affect how each player will place it within the canon if you're interested in half-life as a historical object and the arc of design changes evolving through the years by all means begin with the original game it holds up perfectly well without anyone's help at all if you're interested in half-life as the first chapter in the wide interconnected story i want to recommend starting with black mesa instead alongside the environmental tweaks is a push to bring the experience more in line with some of the retcons that half-life 2 made like who's who when the sector see test labs on the day of the experiment eli vance after all had to explain which dude he was when he reintroduced and dr kleiner was interchangeably several scientists with the same voice and face in the original release black mesa clears it up by using slightly younger looking versions of exactly as they appear in half-life 2. although i'm sorry to say that the voice actor for you eli vance is the worst part of the whole remake it's just an oddly self-conscious imitation like the scientist who overemphasizes test chamber but in a way where it's much too enthusiastic and fawning compared to the line he's imitating beyond that the voice acting is excellent for kleiner barney and the g-man particularly the science team and the security staff have many new voices and many new faces with new conversations to overhear all throughout sector c before it all goes wrong and even later on in the rare quiet moments they've even included the episode 2 retconned where it's dr magnusson's casserole where you ruin in the break room microwave setting up in advance a joke you won't get to for dozens of hours of gameplay the only real inconsistency and this is hardly fair is that black mesa does special effects so much more impressively than half-life 2 using a version of the source engine that's a decade more advanced so that when you do follow the game's narrative sequence there's such a noticeable reduction in detail and lighting quality when you move on to the sequel half-life 2 then becomes the most antiquated part of the experience in this play order which is slightly jarring for someone who remembers how incredible a leap forward it was at the time i didn't appreciate back in 2013 what a remarkable tribute black mesa was of course back in 2013 it wasn't even finished yet either the massively expanded zen sequence is an offshoot of the two core design principles that black mesa is fixated on the drive to modernize and smooth out the parts that aren't actually that much fun about the original and the drive to bring the first chapter of the story into narrative cohesion with the seconds and its episodes the first of these narrative retcons comes the first time that you see a vortigaunt during the residence cascade it's explained that the nylon the boss of the game held the vortigaunts in slavery when he was defeated they were free and no longer an enemy of humanity but an ally against the combine who were the ones who made the nylenth so monstrous in the first place here the green armor they wore in the original textures is clearly portrayed as shackles marking them as thralls when you reach zen the majority of the new levels are oriented around expanding your understanding of that dynamic vertigons and zen are never hostile to you by choice the big alien controllers with the round heads and the amber lightning balls have their attack repertoire expanded to include telekinesis to throw things at you and also telepathic domination to force two vortigaunt spur controller to fight for them against you kill the controller quickly though and you don't have to kill any vortigaunts at all this dynamic has an amazing set piece battle just to illustrate it about a third of the way through you reach a bortigant village and what seems to be their native architecture you can choose to be a different kind of interdimensional traveler than you were before something better than a crowbar sprinting at them through darkness you reach the top level of the village and then the controllers show up on mass to oppose you will you choose the easy fight and kill everything opposing you or choose the harder fight and honor the vortigaunt's peaceful intentions you'll be forgiven by the vortigaunts come half-life 2 anyway it assumes the violent path because that's the original one but knowing what you know about them and having an option to demonstrate that narrative sympathy through gameplay choices is amazing plus the environmental design is still just as grounded in jumping puzzles as it ever was more so even because the levels are able to utilize so much more physical space i had thought that the effort to modernize the game would basically cut out all the antiquated platforming but i was dead wrong what it did instead was unify it with a portal-like flourish where the ability to long jump and all the jump pads everywhere creates spatial puzzles with clearly defined rules a limited set of verbs to navigate a set of obstacles paired to those verbs exclusively besides being kind of overwhelmed by just how long the new levels are and how much they cram into them i got the sense that i was playing through a game that had become equally a puzzler as it is a shooter even the puzzles begin to tie into the lore in the original an impressive looking portal took you to the gonarks lair for boss fight here that same portal is turned into a complicated multi-part puzzle where you have to turn on a portal device that's a direct echo of the one at the top of the citadel in half-life 2 or more critically in episode 1 where you use the three beams to stabilize the reactive core it's difficult to really convey how much the original run of levels have been adapted into sprawling new versions gornark's lair was just a short detour in half-life one in black mesa it's a whole hour or more of fleeing from the thing with staggered arena fights where you're given a chance to damage it it's both the thing you remember and 45 minutes of new thematically appropriate gameplay iterated on top of it and that is just one chapter of four for zen the others are all much longer the only one i really didn't care for honestly was interloper the factory sequence was always my least favorite in the original zen and the new version it just goes on and on and on and on and on and on maybe the path through the levels has cleaned up a great deal a lot of work was done to make it that way but the oppressive seemingly endless length of the facility and the chapter's obsession with platforming made it kind of miserable for me it felt in that way exactly like the original frustrating in the same way but bigger and more and in hd the rest of zen is just so incredible with how it presents its aesthetics and weaves in the lore it caught me off guard to be trapped in a mire of retrograde platforming black mesa returns to form with how it changed the boss fight with an island though it takes a firm no teleporting stance and sticks to it instead they've given a much more dangerous area of effect attacks that increase in spectacle and severity as he takes damage you're killing an ancient nigh omnipotent psychic being from a different dimension after all as he dies crazy energies spill out from his ruptured body it eliminates all the annoying elements of the fight and replaces them with a more straightforward enjoyable lore driven experience when in half-life 2 the combine promised dr breen he'll be re-homed in a new body this is the kind of creature generally that they were threatening to turn him into twisted and sewn together in a cybernetic agony having this fight and the broader zen experience reconfigured to foreshadow the combine helps immeasurably with series continuity it is the number one reason why i think black mesa should be played in preference to classic half-life 1 as part of a narrative sequence the transition from half-life 1 to 2 was never smooth yet this new zen does the impossible and bridges them in a way that's both coherent and natural it even retools the climactic sequence with the g-man to be presentationally consistent with the sequel fading his face in and out and freezing time the signature flourishes that would come to characterize his rare but critical appearances in the following titles this is what makes black mesa such a remarkable act of devotion it has a fan's nose for connecting the dots merged with the confidence of design choices that made half-life 1 so singular on its release it has an enthusiasm in energy that remakes sometimes lack like the call of duty modern warfare remasters and how the changes they make shrink the game from what it used to be instead of growing it it's best to begin at the beginning with a thing as big as half-life i'm grateful to crowbar collective for spending so many years crafting a new beginning as fine as this one steam success is an online marketplace and itunes for games as the old folks might say allowed valve to decouple with its reputation as a development house it no longer made any business sense to release short episodic content on an aging engine especially not so many long years after gabe newell valve's big man on campus has generally been as tight-lipped about half-life 3 as the rest of valve but some years back when i originally did this video he gave a complex answer to a willfully stupid question someone asked him when ricochet 2 was coming out ricochet was another half-life 1 mod acquired by valve but it was a total total flop there is no way there would ever be a ricochet 2. newell answered the question like this quote in terms of ricochet 2 we always have this problem that when we talk about things too far in advance we end up changing our minds as we're going through and developing stuff so as we're thinking through the giant story arc which is ricochet 2 you might get to a point where you're saying something is surprising us in a positive way and something is surprising us in a negative way and you know we like to be super transparent about the future of ricochet too the problem is we think that the twists and turns that we're going through would probably drive people more crazy than just being silent about it until we can be very crisp about what's happening next end quote it's obvious that this intentionally ridiculous question gave newell a golden opportunity to obliquely address why there was so little news on half-life 3 this is one of the highest rated top-grossing industry-defining franchises in gaming it's unfortunate that the wait had stretched on for so long with such a downer of a cliffhanger just sitting there collecting dust but i'm happy to say now and with a surprising degree of finality that the cliffhanger is resolved a new half-life game is out and that half-life 3 is no longer so much the world's most famous vaporware as it is a market certainty while the way we play games transitions from one era and to the next i'd seen headlines to the effect of half-life 3 is already out but i didn't take them too hard because i didn't ever hear many people talking about half-life alex at all this is because half-life alex is probably the most expensive and inaccessible aaa game on the market to play requiring thousands of dollars in hardware investment to get past the main menu according to an early 2021 survey only two percent of steam accounts use steamvr and of that two percent not all of them will have the desktop power needed to render the game on the extremely high resolution double screens of a vr headset this ultimately is why alex is not half-life 3. it's a game made with that exclusivity in mind half-life alex is an experiment it's an attempt to troubleshoot what modes of gameplay can translate from traditional shooters to the vr format with grace and which ones present friction it's an attempt to retcon the source generation the way the second game did the first to re-clarify its intentions and its narrative direction and it's able to experiment so effectively because the world of half-life is so familiar so essentially comforting to a gamer from older generations that it eliminates the discomfort of learning an entirely new system of engagement the sound effects the props the cast we already understand all these things they don't have to be re-taught instead they provide a foundation for new learning both as player and as developer as alex throws everything at the wall and valve makes notes about what sticks it is not half-life 3 because it's so experimental because there aren't enough people who could even play the game to make it a true super hit like its predecessors there won't be a half-life 3 until most people you know own a vr headset we're still in the phase of 800 vcrs and thousand dollar microwaves where an object that seems pretty much destined to become commonplace is still struggling to get over the hurdle of how the price of production won't let the price fall to a level where demand might rise myself i had invested in a new gaming desktop but could not justify adding a vr headset on top of that with how few games i actually wanted to play with vr my friend nate bought a headset but spent his money on that so he was stuck with a pc that struggled to run half-life alex it was only his coming to my house for a week and combining our purchases that we were both able to get a satisfactory experience out of half-life alex and that's not counting all the crashes and reboots necessary to keep the equipment in sync neither of us knew what half-life alex was exactly we knew it wasn't half-life 3 which is why we were taken by such surprise by the fact that the game is equally as long equally as complicated and equally as varied as half-life 2 while also being twice as technically groundbreaking all of this effort which certainly deserves in many ways to be called a true numbered sequel was just a trial run a test a prototype it's this effort that makes half-life 3 such a certain eventuality now valve has created a game that pushes innumerable boundaries just to probe the dimensions of the new design modality so that when half-life 3 is made all this research into what's good and what's not is already done this is millions on millions of dollars being spent mostly just in preparation to make greater millions on millions later it's comforting in all that business that the game itself is everything i've loved and everything i've missed about the franchise and the gulf of years since i last visited city 17. looking at this footage will confirm the half-lifeiness of the game but it doesn't really remotely convey the experience of it alex comes with a spectator mode which takes what the headset is doing and adds a hud to it smoothing out the player's movements and glances making it engaging to watch as footage or being in the same room with someone who's wearing the headset my friend introduced me to superhot and beatsaber beforehand which were certainly cool titles but they fell into my understanding of vr games being short duration novelty experiences i honestly did not understand and tell playing alex that it was possible to create a fully equivalent vr experience to a single-player story-driven fps a traditional one one like half-life 2. i'd written in my original script seven years ago that in half-life 1 the player wore gordon like gordon wears glasses i had never in my life expected this to become literally true to wear the game as a hat and hallucinate into it to be fooled by it somehow somewhere much deeper in my brain than traditional games projected into both of my eyeballs using the brand new third generation source engine capable of rendering not only great detail but to finally let the technical term texture live up to its name to create surfaces that appear convincingly damp or shiny or dusty to convey the world and a kind of visual naturalism that the first game only hinted at any single frame of alex surpasses in quality and detail the pre-rendered adventure games i grew up with like riven or mist though the footage struggles to convey this too tightening the frame to 1920 by 1080p eliminates the feeling of being utterly surrounded by the image so key to the beauty of the game obviously a lot of this is the technology of vr and not just alex but i want to stress how completely overwhelming of a sensory experience it is compared to a traditional computer game my office wasn't even large enough to draw out a movable play area and we used the fixed player position mode where you have a little sphere of interactive space around you but if you really invest in a setup with the free space to use it in it could be even more of an interactive experience than i found it to be in the 1990s pop culture jumped the gun on vr the way it looked in movies was goofy stupid and completely speculative i've been reflexively skeptical of the technology ever since not anymore alex demonstrated to me that it can be done to port to the new hardware all the creative expression that i loved about the old and knowing that it can be done makes it just a matter of time until it will be done on a wider scale the fact that 98 of steam users can't play it protects alex from having too much consumer pressure it can be a messy and straightforward prototype without the scrutiny of being half-life 3. to release half-life 3 as a traditional fps as i've always understood them now seems to me as backwards looking an idea as releasing episode 3 a decade and a half after episode 2. virtual reality is a technology that can be used to craft living dreams and i don't mean that just in the superlative sense it takes my brain up to a minute to feel comfortable transitioning from one version of the room i'm in to the other version when i put the helmet on and take it off again it fools the self in a way that i just wasn't prepared for it's not like your own dreams at least not yet but the technology is already there to stand on the threshold of another's dream and push against it like aquarium glass i almost broke nate's headset playing this game because once i clumsily dropped a grenade and my brain said run so i did face first straight into the actual wall of my actual office which i had completely forgotten would be there i thought that there would be a lot more friction with feeling comfortable in vr than i experienced running into the wall like that is a mistake of being too comfortable and having so little friction that i forgot the room behind the room it helps that like portal in order for alex to shine as a game it has to first present itself as a teaching tool portal 1 and portal 2 really because the early sequence is mostly the same don't start to get truly complicated until the 12th or 14th chamber or so they start simple playfully so to ease you in so half-life alex starts with the same kind of gimmicky stuff i had kind of thought vr games were still mired in there's markers for you to doodle on stuff sets for you to explore with fun props to pick up and mess around with the whole first hour of play is basically teaching you how to walk how to talk what your physical limitations are playing as a voiced character actually makes this more comfortable for me than if i were a voiceless protagonist if i was playing as myself in the more traditional approach to video game immersion here having alex be her own person who i was more or less possessing helped me to sort out quickly in my mind who was who and layers of context this is important because i've always been worried about what it would be like to shoot someone in the head in fully immersive vr as just myself with less artistic distance isn't there less moral distance as well does violence mean something different something more personal in a more personally expressive environment i'm certain the game will come along that stresses these moral boundaries or even fractures them but half-life alex isn't that game it's the iconography of half-life that lets it get away with it so easily first there's head crabs then there's zombies both incredibly creepy to feel as if you're actually in the same room with yet comfortably fictional enough not to provoke these moral questions then the combine show up the moment of truth and i found i had no trouble trying to wreck these [ __ ] they're the bad guys we've met i know this story i have already shot these guys before elsewhere and now now i'm just being all fancy about it plus they've been redesigned to be more physically intimidating and larger provoking a real deep animal response flight or fight which usually turns out to be both as you scramble for cover and peek out to deliver a volley of shots the animal element of the response was what stuck out to me the most where in a computer game i'm often acting with some degree of detachment i know very well i'm sitting in my chair here i was reacting to things with much stronger immediate emotions fear surprise the thrill of victory the frustration of defeat i'm having difficulty in sorting out whether half-life alex is just especially deft to eliciting these things or whether the physicality of vr interaction just lets the id have more input than it even had before over the process i still worry about what this means more broadly for the culture for the future and then i remember my friend nate doing bit comedy while wagging around a burnt corpse and i crack myself up too much to keep focused on the morality of cyber narcissism while horror is actually the most consistent mood that the game touches on half-life alex is extremely warm and very funny in a way completely in tune with episode 2 and portal 2 a continuation of valve's tradition of expressive familiarity having alex be a voiced character and having a voice guiding you on the radio for so much of its length allows for a lot of fleshing out of half-life lore and character a significant portion of alex is rifling through drawers for supplies so these ambient conversations make those moments useful to the narrative there's a vortigaunt cook and some other vortigaunt friends who make appearances and when they do it's almost disney-esque the way they're able to emote it is the closest i've ever felt to having had a meaningful conversation with a muppet which is only half joking when your brain is perceiving them to actually be in front of you it's hard to know whether to think of them as actors or puppets only that it would be naive and counterproductive to think of them as people it also leads to moments of almost inevitable trollishness part of the fun of vr is pushing its boundaries and since your only actionable anchor in the world is your hands it's hard to resist picking up and messing with everything russell i know you're a good guy with a serious mission to give me but please understand that i am poking you with this fork for scientific purposes and lo you respond amazing data here russell you know i appreciate it even the more tense and serious moments my friend and i found it hard not to slip into slapstick from time to time sometimes corpses have stuff in their pockets if you roll them over it's only an extra couple of steps to start doing a ventriloquist bit maybe throw in a show tune or two as you shake them around the only caveat is that you can't harm enemies with physical objects i had heard they emitted the crowbar because playtesters kept confusing the protagonist for gordon but i didn't think there would be no such thing as a melee attack within the game i had read that it was hard to create melee mechanics that didn't lead to the crowbar or what have you getting stuck on objects and geometry as you're going along which would be trickier than you might expect to deal with because all vr objects are weightless and imaginary there's no way to create physical oh this is stuck on that feedback without just looking at it and wiggling things around it's also a defense for the design against player digressions early on i tried to use a big industrial pot lid as a shield and a brick to try and fight the headcrabs medieval style and if they had let me do that i'd never get off my [ __ ] about it comedy deaths would be all i would care about from that point out keeping it strictly within the arsenal for combat also keeps the focus on why you're here once you start letting the player do whatever they please you might not ever talk them back into doing what they're supposed to do again figuring out exactly what it is you're supposed to do is harder in vr than it is from a traditional mouse and keyboard perspective it feels like there are more possibilities and it's harder to know where to start this seems just as true from the development side of things as from a player's perspective a sign of this struggle is the way that alex has incorporated a looting loop something the franchise has never bothered with before because of the simplicity of the fps format alex takes just as long as half-life too but the amount of distance you cover is much more dense in winding some chapters are absolutely enormous over two hours in some cases and in these chapters you won't advance more than two or three city blocks you can even see where you'll end up in the opening minute of the game the big floating prison out yonder that's it that's the game right there mark that building and make your way towards it this doesn't sound impressive but when you factor in the half-life formula of not using any cut scenes or any other contrivance to let you skip time or distance you can appreciate what a massive space this is to ask the player to move through as if they were there there has never been so slow paced a half-life game as alex there has never been a half-life game that didn't let you use the keyboard to move either and that is the key difference fast movement and fast combat has a lot to do with all the things you can ignore you ignore your physicality you ignore potential actions you know aren't supported by the controls you ignore the artificiality of what you're doing to focus in on what can be done to be fully in the present within the game vr is utterly distracting in comparison and alex's design leaned into that impulse of distraction instead of leaning away insisting that you keep going forward as fast as you might have in previous traditional games it skips that so all your weapons are upgradeable but it takes heaps of points per upgrade similar to the number of scrap and weapon upgrades in the last of his franchise like between 15 to 50 with three or four options per weapon the points themselves are small hockey puck looking things called resin which are little enough to be hidden inside drawers and buckets and such but large enough to be perceptible on a shelf from a medium distance the system basically monetizes into the player economy the player's impulse to rifle through all the drawers in a kitchen to investigate everything around them and satisfy a player's impulse to do what there is to be done in the space surrounding them the thing is gamifying that impulse and hinging rewards on it makes it mandatory in situations that i might have preferred to just move on from not every abandoned apartment and supply closet is interesting to me in traditional games it takes seconds to loot them but in vr it takes a much longer while as much time as actually rifling through a desk or overturning a trash can since upgrade points only matter in high aggregate it makes a huge mechanical difference whether you're taking the extra time to acquire these points or if you're being more casual the resin loop is a fascinating example of the challenges presented by adapting known fps features to virtual reality do you try to design the game in anticipation of player comfort or do you try to ask the players to learn something foreign to them will a standard fps feature remain standard when you account for the physicality of the new hardware the challenges to player navigation it has to overcome that mouse and keyboard can just ignore not being half-life 3 frees alex to be graded on a curve to give messy and incomplete answers to questions that don't have any established wisdom yet to guide them i think part of the fun of half-life alex is a sense of creator and player learning these things together seeing half-life alex work through its various approaches to horror is where the experimental feeling comes through the most it's almost clinical how the different chapters are divided into modes of engagement the first mode pistols versus head crabs and zombies feels the most classically half-life the way they move and the sound effects they make are so familiar on a kind of deep lizard brain level after basically growing up with the monsters that i know instantly what to do in response and they're easier to manage in vr than with traditional controls you can dodge a headcrab more easily than ever before you can outmaneuver a zombie by actually being more nimble or just quick projecting yourself away and giving yourself time to line up some shots i found aiming to be very very difficult at first but a lot of that is that i'm nearsighted but too much nearsighted to use the headset without glasses my glasses got all smushed up under the headset and my vision was kind of off a lot of the time if i ever wanted to seriously get into vr prescription lenses for the headset are available but that just drives up the cost of participation even more still i figured it all out eventually and there are scopes that you can add later on to some of your guns that make determining the hitbox much easier early on ammunition is rare which adds tension but having to adapt to the system at the same time as balancing survival horror scarcity meant that i was reloading saves more than i was learning as i went the early zones are creepy but they seem to understand that the true purpose is establishing nostalgic comfort as a kind of baseline to teach itself to you with all of this was done in 1998 the head crabs the zombies the flickering lights and the loud snapping pistol it was horror then now it's more adventure it's lost its discordant unsettling quality to instead become the known factor that i am deliberately seeking out so once phase one of horror has taught you all it has to teach you it begins to seek out new ways to reintroduce that sense of fear of the unknown and the anxiety of lurking danger to return to horror as a mood and not just as a mode it does this in a lengthy chapter where you're trapped in an infected hotel it crescendos in the sequence where you make your way all the way to the top of the building only to find yourself blocked by a combine force field you have to cut the power to disable it so you go all the way down to the basement you've now been taunt this route twice once the lights are off it spawns well over two dozen ultra-toxic black widow headcrabs along that route if you've left barnacles alive this helps you now as they eat the headcrabs when they leap towards you meanwhile you've just been given a new fully automatic weapon so do what you just did twice but under extreme duress with the lights out it's goddamn terrifying it's the single most handshakingly anxious i've ever been made by a game any game i could never have gotten through it had it not been for the hours already spent becoming comfortable with moving through the environment and shooting things the difficulty sometimes feels unforgiving except for a story mode which is nice when you've been binging it and get mentally exhausted this lack of forgiveness functions like a proctor however grading your progress so that you can only advance to the next lesson having learned the lessons of the first like portal progression the third mode of horror has proven the most controversial a chapter called jeff where the title character is an ultra-powerful fast-moving zombie who hears by sound and vomits acid on you if he gets remotely close the mechanics that you need to navigate the segment aren't familiar to the half-life franchise at all they're running height of mechanics that games like outlast have turned to as a primary loop here more broadly it's just kind of a novelty aside another experiment into what does and doesn't work but for the duration of this chapter it's the only loop you've got it's a vodka distillery so there's bottles everywhere that are both distractions to throw and traps to mess you up i kind of hated the jeff segment because the outlast dynamic is a pass-fail mechanic and not open-ended like half-life usually is with the headcrab sequence there was room for error in fact error was encouraged because what they really wanted to throw at you was terrifying chaos the more chaotically you respond the more in sync you are with the moment jeff requires specific puzzle solutions and particular orders of operations which you either complete correctly or you get vomited on and have to reload the checkpoint is jeff scary yes is the distillery chapter effective maybe if you do it well enough the first time like outlast once you reload enough times and focus in on the order of actions to be performed there's little emotion left to be had horror has been replaced with repetition nearly every other boss type creature in half-life from the blast pit creature to the big old blue cyclops to the striders and the gunships have been dangerous but not instantly lethal in contrast fighting an outlast never works and is never an option death is an aggressively binary possibility the result just doesn't much feel like half-life when it expresses it in jeff like other chapters jeff asks what's fun in vr unlike other chapters my response is in emphatic not this in a progression similar to half-life 2 alex transitions its horror themes into a generalized feeling of extreme pressure from the opposition to let being outnumbered and outgunned in the daylight replace creeping around corners in the dark underground getting close to the prison mimics the feeling of getting close to the citadel the fighting becomes more pitched the resistance more militarized and fierce getting past the jeff chapter is a big hassle but once you do the pacing suddenly picks up noticeably and you're making demonstrable physical progress with each combat encounter block stacks on top of block more perceptibly than in half-life 2 because of how slowly you're picking through them how this reinforces the memory and significance of the places that you've been i've gone basically this entire segment of the video without talking about how the plot develops but that's largely because it doesn't until the last couple hours of play alex's script is so much more about the little details about getting to know alex and getting to know city 17 better than we ever have before that it's content to just keep everything big in its back pocket for the reveal if you don't hear any of that now would be the place to stop but for me i didn't have a whole lot of curiosity about half-life alex until i heard the ending and how it repositions the timeline that's when i got an inkling about alex's purpose as a transitional prototype that its purpose is in laying intricate and expensive groundwork for a half-life 3 to bloom from about two-thirds of the way through you overhear judith mossman face not shown but obviously her arguing with an advisor they seem to be talking about probabilities the probability of you're succeeding and freeing the black mesa survivor gordon freeman right of course except that's an awful lot of prison for a man with a crowbar take the crowbar away and all he's got is a college degree the sense that it must be freeman in the prison gives a kind of adventurous momentum to the journey one protagonist looking out for another across time and across titles the twist is much better and like with cave johnson the environment tells you the twist long before the villain is named inside the vault combat doesn't begin for a good long while the prison seems to have been built around an entire chunk of a city 17 apartment block snatched out from the landscape below and preserved in a bubble it's eerily reminiscent of the apartment block in half-life 2 where the combine first forces you out onto the rooftops when they raid the building except for increasingly weird impossibilities as you go on reality breaks down the building fragments into impossible and mirrored versions of itself there is energy here but all of it feels stagnant potential a bubbling volcano not yet erupted i'd seen impossible architecture like this in games before notably control but in vr it sure is something different because after a while the brain regards the visual input as trustworthy you act within it it responds accordingly this is functional sensory data so the brain signs off on it all being confronted with all of this stuff in full vr after having already gotten used to his kind of normalcy within that vr is unforgettable later vr titles i'm sure will surpass it and surpass it soon enough if i was going to bet but like how i remember what a huge leap forward half-life 2 was even though it's so spare by modern standards i will never forget the power of this first encounter with the future for me half-life one was the first game that i ever played with mouse look the hazard course there had to explain to me how to navigate that way each primary half-life game has had an impact on me as a threshold title as a game that augurs what's to come before it arrives that lingers with me as that future transitions into the past each game largely representing to me a generational leap alex is no different it's not nearly as skillful or smooth as half-life 1 or half-life 2 but it is as impressive and it's trying even more novel things than those older games it embraces its experimental nature it understands its own messiness an experiment to be shared between developer and player it is not half-life 3 yet it includes the explicit promise of one after the impossible architecture portion you get to the prison core where your gloves are transformed into lightning weapons and the climax mimics the supercharged gravity gun portions of the citadel it's all right but i never did quite get the gesture correct i just kind of madly gesticulated at enemies and often they dived just obstacles in the way really the final chamber then the one actual object of the game to reach this exact place and free what's within you know him he was on the other train during black mesa inbound the government man the old enemy so he offers alex the kind of reward that only a godlike figure can offer altering the future and the present at the same time as to him the two are really interchangeable alex doesn't yet know to ask for what she wants the most but he does alex will want to save dr eli vance at the end of episode two so the g-man shows her then gives her the power to make that change just one little thing a tiny request she works for him like the deal he gave gordon the deal that eli and the vortigaunts tried so hard to protect her from the g-man schemes across time to cross space canonically only he has the power to undo the franchise's biggest cliffhanger with narrative authority the power to retcon from within the fiction instead of artificially from without that's what half-life alex's hidden agenda always was then it's roll to credits when that's accomplished and then credit's up on gordon you is gordon back in that hangar from episode two instantly returning us from the prequel timeline to the revised current timeline eli vance understands immediately how he's been played how the g-man uses his death to manipulate his daughter there's only one thing for it continue the work find the borealis save alex dr vance hands you your crowbar and i could not believe how emotional a moment it was for me it's surface level storytelling certainly but symbols are powerful and this imaginary crowbar is nothing if not pure symbology i never wanted eli to die the story could be might be stronger if he didn't so now he doesn't the story is now positioned exactly how i wanted episode 3 to be positioned when the satellite was launched from white forest before the shocking death i only expected to wait a couple years to resolve when i was much younger myself who knows how long half-life 3 will take likely not even valve this last moment however i take as a promise maybe it'll be another 12 years but i'll see gordon again i'll be gordon again and when i do it'll be with my whole hands and my whole field of vision it is not simply that i'm being offered the crowbar it's that i'm now capable of grasping it this is the leap forward a cliffhanger demands you come back to it it's an inherently withholding creative flourish alex ends instead and retcons episode two to end with an invitation an invitation to meet again when the future is closer i can wait the future always gets here eventually and often it is a half-life game that lets me know when that future has arrived thanks for watching this video and all the videos i do are only made possible through the crowdfunding website patreon i'd like to take a moment to thank my name some of the people who are currently donating ten dollars a month or more through patreon people like alex hansen leo neil connor mclaude eli bergmass john paul queller james sullivan aaron williams zach millington soy sheikh eddie burton carol henderson kelly buffalo jason meckemer caleb brennan marcelo ferrara bk hogue daniel phillips salah tyler robinson corey beaufil jack dawson dennis clark steven garrett day jake mays you are my favorite youtuber sam burkland simon murray mr mush kumaran vision nobody world war ii freak alexander leicester igor babiuk argus morgan maul brian hill julian renault again dean t kelly jared meyer hannah parker aryan adair jeremy kirby snuffalophagus blue bishop shane dave s nolan pete blaise j craig farrell pascal moser jake mcwilliams david s michael zattilni anna philaxis l.l ross dexter claire gilliam brendan buchanan dylan cabeau scott dick lockhee aaron hendricks marius labonsche angus monroe the roadie451 alec barcelos simon littleburn lucas reslick timothy cole james stevenson alex chris harink stuart jackson jeremy hillier eric strickland nick corosett magnus k avraha tavares kirk fury joe joyce rich to the rdo jack holmes frogfoot great gabriel bernsen hunter rasmussen yarrow 12 skye swanson jonathan harrison ethan david stapley c soldier hawk jimbo michael hasani sean hansen willer willem niekerk dr crime even garvind joseph smith alastair strook beth levenberger luenberger i'm sorry daniel cerrusi smite me now alexi r adc 400 mj dorian sanchez eamonn mcneely julius janice cavicius saab also known as dukkha wjl austin alioso recommission dylan scott izgar blind of fighting evil bread spot ted lattis jacob sindelar melody redacted pharah satala martin peterson stephen thompson angus cunningham louis larotti tilts lucas stantoland preston preston michaelisio ushi kenda olendorf james hull brandon martin cincus philip wooley sam zeitlin timothy lee peterson commissar colin mcrae noops matt donahue raven rises christopher clark martin s enzyme dave kassan joe freund peyton helix harrison price aiden henzell avery thorpe andy gershonne texas damn jack cronin snow hole jay mackery brett brothers jonathan feyerty adventure top merrick james jones merrick jones cato bailey de jaco de dejko sean murphy tech daniel mccarthy james brandon i'm sorry about that matthew dominic hickman augustine castro kylo parliament adam findlay matt lefler william klein jake s tip aldo curtis jim mcgeehan stickman grit finley m jeremy harris haitian 95 gethin ris bins benjamin blover ryan francom samuel murphy gamp daario steve belligaard even barnett armuta chris dobbs gaspard fleury hurtubisi kate stock nicolet nikolai vladimirov liam pearce justin michael darius rudominer the drunken manatee thomas watkins jake shawn matthew allen kelsey jarrod k mathis vandenbosch michael dimichel need icr7 thomas colin culligan brian barrow roberticus 1995 greg chris pickington evan vodka blitz kirk battle riley bozarth jeff sang stephen plovan eric goose levi thomas stephen haste guy sean soby doomed sheridan sophia naylor alexander smith epitome 22 jed constantine ivanov logan hickman danston tyson cox jrg123 liam white april mahan zachary leonard roper wolf and white bank sergeant qq trinet matthew burns symmetry master aaron demski bowden mattheus campbell rogue thrax keone warby thomas fielding eli youngs space wizard 63 arnie hd maxwell bowm thomas vavassur jake holder tyler r smith patrick morrison alec alex mcdonald kevin morris allison sugar briana manassa dave alexander clattworthy ron gervais nicholas pie face ottavio albanissi ethan hayes howard knutson peter h rhys fiddleson grogan eric jensen phil harding elijah king imran mamori max barros patrick galmond tyler lambert patrick mills miesco zaha callum tm brynn gilbert dralox 789 deeb the rambling bard highland fox well-tempered clavier william hovered quenan matthew schreirock vivek rogeron dragon asgore vol vialbin owen tierla cold beans bob mitchum tyler king stephen loved dance charlotte m3 ivan echeverria cobra adam nh lord galax alex williams william j gorman leighton cardin james henderson zachary ziemba jujubeens john ceclovsky matthew richard twydner austin matheson scott mock sg response tiernan garcis james gray kell kale perrian vitor tumuli jared a hicks garrett johnson han ji ping jacob wanish max cohen shield wall leo peril marcolath tyler f william conceited axis bryn davies james mosca victor felton s engball jeffrey mcintyre marcin zurot levi whitney dakin delamast nikolai elijah nelson sam bellmeyer byron khan noah kantrowitz tinfoil pancakes maurice desuro menu edmond greg rucka lo beyonder yelosin vance jordan falls ralph rainwater alexander romanov kazra fedousafar patrick mcgranahan robot ghost jeremy saunders stephen heim ryan snyder april jacob macmillan eric joyner edward clayton andrews angelo sarcaras ian glascock c.e keene shiny wolf el weasel vernal herzog daniel owens orton christensen thomas lee me nemo vandenbrink the nikka four offs ben willard j s greg merlis jordan klein skye jansen daniel floyd mark phillips andrew tapp kevin chao matthew sutton tysar vicarion david carlson kisit avery holmes david harpstreit matthew mason simon sean josh obelisk art history matthew cassidy will dobbins clay harrington tom rowarding quitch devin vernon kyle zeyner nk jemisin john fry gustav lindstadt michael atwell evangel andrew oplinger i cannot fly nick cole hamilton oscar sangenberg colin adam howard dewey comfy hat or ellie adam andrew boisseno pascal murray alexander sunden zac b lasselus thomas woody never 1093 the soul james fergus foley dijon juan kh maker d argus swift ranger ridiculous cybot d kim winston andreas larson anthony bardell sean phillip a coffee bryan cluckleman jesse wilkinson devin fitzpatrick tim marsh colin bassnet jeanette moon carl gleeson yazan barghouti dios ricardo guinda rich stewart adrian kamalay nate tenzar tom painter jared oszewski eric jackson kyrie x alex zalata the bloke sasha aya lucas marcondis de moray peter flank andy bennett cringey schwa peps anonymous yarn boy kathy cool wardell daniel a roots nuan sonar patricio garcia damiana hayes levi chase baker logan sailors max angel ortiz christopher bolson kirby monger paddy christian frata emily snow michael guerin alex baker andrew battenberg john cooper aidan seidman the spade sergio proxy savannah jones aragorn quicken reber g mini david cryer hannah henry maletto warren d dusty cass connor duigan jonathan gill rob diehl josh waters dirt person smith 745 riley peters sean thompson mihai nitu jason lee edward d heap jacentes13 christian planck emily julstrom noah baldwin tyler collins daniel drexler toy highlander dan tdp curtis cook jake tracy jerry lorenzo lf adam legisterio matthew flowers robert conley and mr b pig along with anyone else who's donated to my channel over the last seven years has been since i originally did this video it's only because of you guys that any of this was even possible so thank you again

Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Views: 303,155

Rating: 4.9415603 out of 5

Keywords: Half-Life, Alyx, Steam, Valve, MINERVA, Portal, Gordon Freeman, They Hunger

Id: _bsIXA8lNZc

Length: 140min 9sec (8409 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 31 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Lightguardianjack]

The Alyx section is an excellent explanation of the appeal of Virtual Reality in general. Even as someone who's been using VR for almost a year now I found he found the words to express concepts that are extremely difficult to understand if you only know traditional flatscreen gaming.

[u/tony-mke]

This guy does some fantastic, super-comprehensive video essays. I highly recommend giving his videos a watch.

[u/ZeUberSandvitch]

One of the best gaming essayists on YouTube imo, glad he's making another half life video! I love how he explains why Gordon Freeman works as a silent protagonist, I recommend anyone to watch this if you have the time and interest for it.

[u/JKCodeComplete]

Watching this video made me appreciate how Valve has changed and adapted their form of conveying to the player the feeling of a long, continuous journey. In the first game, there’s the On a Rail chapter, which had to feel kind of cramped due to hardware limitations. In Half-Life 2 and Episode 2, the vehicle-centric chapters let Valve spread encounters out and more successfully give the player the sensation of traveling a long distance, even if occasionally too long. Then in Alyx, the entire journey encompass just a few blocks, but due to how vulnerable the player is, you explore those environments much more methodically and you really feel distance more strongly than you did in the other games.

[u/bethevoid]

Noah is the most insightful games writer on youtube in my opinion, and his travel content is incredibly good too. He seems like a super honest guy based on his Patreon updates. I would love to have a beer with the guy, I can't imagine you could have a dull conversation.

[u/blackmes489]

Excellent essay as always - really glad he did a new version of this.

I was shocked however that he didn't think the Jeff chapter worked. I honestly feel like its gonna go down in levels history as one of the best.

[u/jamayonaiz]

As always, incredible analysis and full of eye openers. Noah's always had a way with words. Was not expecting to watch the whole thing in one sitting when I started it two hours ago. Wasn't expecting it to encompass titles like Portal or Counter-Strike either.

[u/The_MAZZTer]

The shadowy scientist character in Alyx was confirmed to be a new character... not Mossman. Presumably Valve will reuse her in a future title, probably where Alyx will meet her and not realize she's a foe. I think this is a subtle confirmation Valve has future titles planned for Alyx... I wouldn't be surprised if she becomes their go-to for Half-Life VR titles while Gordon is traditional desktop gaming.

Also based in some things said it sounds like the author may assume HL3 will be a VR title. Valve has said they intend to do VR and traditional titles going forward. My guess is HL3 would be one of the traditional ones to maximize the accessibility of the title. But of course there's nothing official announced yet. Just that Valve is eager to continue doing HL titles going forward, IIRC, and of course Alyx's ending providing a huge suggestion that things are back on track.

Probably a good move to not try and explain how Alyx fits into the timeline. That still isn't really clear, other than HL3 would definitely continue with Eli alive.

[u/HollywooStarsNCelebs]

I hope Noah ultimately realizes that the love for him out there is much stronger than the hate. Every time he posts a video now there's an inevitable and sad twitter post a few hours later where he says the whole thing was worthless and a failure because a few internet randos leave hateful/nitpicking comments on his work. I'm sure it's much harder to be on the receiving end of that than I can imagine, but I wish he'd learn that it's okay to disregard some of the hate, instead of taking it all to heart as some form of "customer responsibility."