Half Life - Broken yet Perfect | Trav Guy Reviews

as a wise man once said story in a game is like story in a band movie it's not that important and then another wise man crawled out of Microsoft and said no half-life is arguably as important to the video game industry as doom and quake were being the first fps of its kind to not only have a narrative but to take its narrative seriously with genuine execution in an industry full of doom guys Rangers Duke Nukem x' and blood guys one theoretical physicist stood out and truly made his mark in the world of PC gaming now don't get me wrong I love doom and quake just look at my youtube catalogue but half-life that's a different beast entirely the series has seen a bit of a long-awaited resurgence with the announcement of half-life Alex and at the time of this recording all of the games are currently free to play on Steam to promote the long-awaited in-between cool even if you've never played a half-life I have no doubt that you've run into memes for the series half-life 3 confirmed valve can't count to three and the list continues but one common misconception I see about the series is that people tend to think that we want half-life 3 for the meme because it's trendy or because we simply just like half-life 2 and think that it's time for another game and while the last one isn't technically wrong it goes much deeper than that but to explain why we're gonna have to jump back and take a look at where the series begin with the revolutionary and groundbreaking first-person shooter 1998 half-life [Music] okay let me just make a quick disclaimer half-life 1 & 2 are some of my favorite games of all time easily in my top 10 video games list and I have a lot to thank for this game half-life was the game that showed me that video games can be more than what I thought they were compared to my Mario's and Mega Man's if it wasn't for these gmod videos especially by the late Kitty O 706 rest in peace I would have never had this game on my radar buying gmod to see what the big deal was learning that it's a mod for a game called half-life 2 and eventually playing and falling in love with every minute of it but I'll be sure to talk about that when you get to the physics-based sequel it was the original that I somehow went many years of my life without ever really learning about it's weird it's really only a game that I learned about thanks to watching documentaries and reviews about half-life 2 now sure I could have put together that half-life 2 was a sequel of some kind but again I was a stupid teenager and unfortunately teenage me was too stupid to learn the difference between half-life and half-life source I ended up playing the latter first because I thought source sounded cooler this is before I knew the difference between source and gold source which we'll be talking about later at the time coming fresh off half-life 2 I didn't have any problem with it I didn't question the absurdly long load times between transitions I didn't think anything of the scientists having such immense cave strength I thought it was normal I pretended to be sick so I could stay home from school just to finish this game and it wasn't until later that I learned that for an optimal experience I should have been playing base gold source half-life but enough about me take a seat ladies and gentlemen grab your popcorn a cup of coffee or a beverage of choice and allow me to tell you the tale of everyone's favorite theoretical physicist well Gordon Freeman our story begins in Washington 1996 former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington found the studio named valve and in a pretty ballsy move at the time decided that their first project would be a sci-fi horror based shooter to compete with the likes of quake 2 which we'll be releasing in the next year so naturally like you do with all competition Gabe Newell went straight to the source in hopes that its software would license their it tech 2 engine the same engine used for quake and quake 2 if this was any other company you'd bet that Gabe Newell wouldn't even have gotten a response but because of John Carmack's generosity of giving out engines for its software's games valve ended up taking a massive step forward to their though there is one thing important to note here quakes engine was about a year out from going open source as Carmack typically released the source codes for their games roughly a year after release so I think this exchange had less to do with Carmack believing in the team and more than not having a problem licensing the engine a little bit early shortly after the project started production under the codename of quiver for the longest time I thought that this was a play on quake you know quake and quiver but supposedly this was based off of a military base from the Stephen King novel the mist which was a hit around the office at valve at a time over the next year a lot of progress was made renaming the project to half-life with gabe newell thinking that it felt less cliche and adopted the Greek letter lambda as the game's logo the letter being used to represent the decay constant in the half-life equation PC accelerator magazine went on to report that 70% of quakes engine had been rewritten during the production of half-life and it really shows the engine was now able to handle complex lighting complex scripted sequences more sophisticated artificial intelligence skeletal animations and way more while the engine didn't receive an official name during the time being referred to as the valve engine or the half-life engine midway through production when experimenting with the engine they did make some new tweaks to the engine while backing the engine up just in case that old backed up engine was dubbed SRC and the revised engine that was eventually used for half-life in its expansions was labeled gold SRC or gold source for short not to be confused with source though spelled out in its entirety that engine started in 2004 I know it's confusing gold source came before source but follow along I promise you'll get it and even today the engine still has some impressive wonders that many of you probably haven't even noticed but the most often talked about quirk of the engine being that AI can react to smells down here now this isn't like oh no Gordon Freeman's a stinky boy now everyone knows easier it's more that the NPC's can react to corpses shortly after they're killed security guards will mention how something stinks and other monsters will walk towards a freshly killed corpse and attempt to eat it lots of effort was put into making this game feel alive albeit a lot of it goes unnoticed the game was planned for release in early 1997 but shortly before release the team decided that the game just wasn't fun and scrapped nearly the entire campaign bringing on science fiction writer Mark Lane to help with the story while the team prototyped a map to be used to set the standard for what the rest of the game would end up resembling the map was praised and labeled by designer Ken Byrd well as diehard meets Evil Dead with the team dissecting what it was that made the experience fun to begin with into three important groups one having the game respond to the player's actions triggers not based on a timer and what not that the player can easily miss by being in the wrong place at the wrong time to letting the levels be interactable by the players whether it's buttons on an elevator healing at a medical station or levers for large industrial freezer doors and three making sure that the player is aware of nearby enemies whether it's sound cues scripted sequences whatever it takes to get the players attention to let them know that they need to be on edge so the player doesn't assume that they're the victim of a cheap death and though it isn't 100% perfect these three core design philosophies will be littered all around half-life's design plenty of characters were also redesigned as well the scientists and security guards going from there rather cartoony and stylized designs to a much more reserved look our protagonist went from looking like a grizzled space biker to just your average Joe and nearly a dozen fully modeled enemies were cut from the cast honestly there was so much cut from half-life one's cast of enemies and NPCs that I could do an entire video dedicated to it maybe I will someday we'll see half life's development also saw the beginning of Valve's infamous cabal system when the team couldn't find a hire for a proper game developer to help them out they created a system where every member could work on an aspect of the game that they were passionate about adding to in order to maintain productivity and reduce burnout if one day you wanted to work on save enemy design you can move your desk over to the AI section and if the next day you wanted to contribute to map designed you'd move your desk over there this was great for productivity but later in the company's history it did become a bit of a problem but we'll get to that later unfortunately the months leading into half-life's release seemed to have been lost according to employee eric johnson two months before we shipped half-life 1 we lost our entire history our VSS exploded so we had to put that all together off people's machines so yeah we don't have history going back to the very start we have the snapshots from that month but finally after two plus years of development half-life was shipped to the rest of the world to near universal praise winning mult Game of the Year awards November 19 1998 was the day that the FPS industry died and rose from its ashes there were two demos released for the game from half-life day one which featured roughly 1/5 of the game 2 half-life uplink which featured some unique content that wasn't present in the game itself you also have this bizarre short film in the UK that was hilariously awful meant to promote the game you never see anything happened but you hear sound effects from the game in the background and then this lady just starts quoting The Terminator yeah what the fuck is this though I do have a physical copy of the half-life 1 anthology I'm going to be looking at the steam part of the game since it's the easiest to get your hands on these days and it's been given full native 1080p support which I like a lot but without further ado ladies and gentlemen let's boot this thing up and try to figure out and wait all the donuts before you start the game I recommend starting up with the hazard course though I'm normally against the idea of dedicated tutorial areas like this you should really check this out so that you can get the hang of Crouch jumping you see when you jump and Crouch in a valve game your head stays in the same spot but your legs are pulled up towards your head so you're able to reach ledges that at a glance look too high for you to be able to jump on to does it feel a bit wonky and awkward yeah but eventually it'll become second nature aside from that the hazard course is a decent introduction to many of the mechanics the game throws at you from the gunplay to how often you'll have to dig yourself out of debris with the crowbar and lastly it gives you a taste of the environments teasing how poorly maintained the Black Mesa facility is all from the tutorial level I also found out that I had the HD texture pack on for this don't use the HD texture pack I'll just leave it at that until we talk about half-life blueshift half-life begins with its classic and iconic tram segments put yourself into the shoes of someone who's only played quake 1 and 2 it's amazing to see so much life put into such an old engine filled to the brim with scripted events though it does show us some unique NPCs that unfortunately we never get a clearer look at again from this dope stag beetle looking robot to ultrazoom forklift guy bro where are you even going the facility is just so full of charm the security guard tells us that we're late for work and then his cloned brother is talking about losing his files from a system crash it's a nice change of pace from all the high octane FPS as I've been playing it's so grounded and down-to-earth that it feels like a living breathing environment everyone has something to say even if it's just please leave me alone until after the experiment you could fuck with their computers you could fuck with their casseroles fuck with well yeah you could bother a lot of people in this game and I love the simple yet complex layout of the place you could take all of the time you want just exploring the open parts of the facility or just rush over and get your HEV suit you can approach this however you like ah the HEV suit a theoretical physicist shining armor I love it the voice the beeps and Boop's it really gives this game a feel that I can't exactly put into words but I love it the suit will audibly tell you how much armor you're picking up which I actually really appreciate especially when I'm in the heat of combat and I can't check my health and armor at the moment I guess this is a problem with playing half-life on a modern PC the HUD is just a bit too small and I find it really difficult to check out a glance but yeah relic of the past I guess Gordon has his armor on and makes his way down to the test chamber or more specifically the anti-mass spectrometer ok so mass spectrometers those are a real thing but I'm 99% confident that anti mass spectrometers was something made up for the game but once you see it oh man I can't explain it just something about its design just feels so powerful yet alien which is kind of poetic considering what's about to happen dr. Gordon Freeman at your service PhD in theoretical physics and pushing things into holes this is a ground zero for the entire series whatever the specimen is it really doesn't like being bombarded with whatever this is this ends up creating a resonance cascade a term the series is going to be throwing around a lot it's a theoretical term for when a hole is ripped into the fabric of reality and on the other side of that hole is an alien world full of exotic squid monsters the black Mesa facility is left in ruins and Gordon survives the Cascade thanks to his hazard suit and is forced to traverse back through the Black Mesa compound nothing surrounding him except for the death and destruction that you've been directly caused so it doesn't take too long before you finally meet Gordon Freeman's Excalibur the holy crowbar a champion of zombie slaying with its mystical chainsaw qualities I have no idea why it does that after accidentally sending an elevator full of scientists to their doom Gordon meets up with another Barney and okay I'm gonna be calling the security guards Barney's from now on just so that we're on the same page I see a lot of people kill this Barney early so that they can get the pistol early which is to me is kind of absurd Barney's have unlimited ammo and they can be really helpful which is why I haven't kill every zombie nearby and then I kill him but you also get introduced to several of the new enemy types here from the headcrabs the houndeyes and bull squids all kind of adorable in their own right and part of me feels kind of bad for killing them though less so for the bull squids to fuck the bull squids you get plenty of chances to reflect on whatever's going on in the game which is really nice and really helps the pacing whether it's watching a million headcrabs fall to their death off of an elevator or scouring through some air vents because a bull squid teleported in and destroyed the bridge no one really knows what's going on in the Black Mesa facility aliens are teleporting in out of nowhere scientists and security guards left and right are dying and as far as you're concerned you just got to make it out alive the office complex makes you get intimate with three key ingredients in the half-life formula barnacles air vents and flashlights I'll be honest I don't care for the flashlight in this game but in this engine I'm not entirely sure how else they could have done it what I believe is happening here is that it puts a large sphere around whatever you're looking at which eliminates the area but it also likes to snap to whichever entity you might be looking at which can be incredibly annoying when you're dealing with headcrabs in these small environments especially since you can't pass through their collision until their death animation is finished which was also a problem in the quake game so it's not exclusive here break these boxes off to the side and get the early shotgun which is fucking awesome left-click for single barrel right-click for double barrel it packs a punch with it's nice and crunchy sound design the game will also open up many ways to let Barney's follow you through the labyrinth of Black Mesa but the AI is revolutionary wait are the Barney's teeth in backwards goodbye that was one of the few times the game actually crashed on me but don't worry I got plenty of soft locks plenty of soft locks you'll also meet the vortigaunts here they might not seem too interesting now but trust me they'll be important later though more so in the sequel they have a hit scanning attack which can be annoying but it's telegraphed enough to notice ahead of time though they do run away if they take near lethal damage which again kind of makes me feel bad for killing them ah apathy is over word spreads that the military is coming to save members of the Black Mesa facility but remember Black Mesa is basically area 51 and assuming that area 51 is housing aliens do you really think that the military is going to let anyone out no of course the military is actually here to cover it up they're gonna make sure that everyone who knows about Black Mesa will never see the light of day but what about the soldier said to kill us do they need to get killed too hmm your first shown this when a scientist runs into the welcoming arms of an hecu soldier just four well I'm not sure if it's cuz this grunt is scripted or not but this fucker took like four shotgun blasts to take out scripted enemies tend to have more health likely as a fail-safe to make sure that the scripting doesn't break into a million pieces you do get the SMG from this first grunt you kill and it's pretty good however for the remainder of a chapter and a good chunk of the rest of the game you're up against a lot of these hits scanning soldiers they have some pretty unique and complex AI that actually attempts to flush you out and coordinate with each other which is really impressive but there's something about throwing caffeine buzz hit scanners at you in such a large capacity that gives the game a bit of a steep learning curve I think this could have been balanced a bit better to ease you into this new enemy type a bit more organically because sometimes dying to hit scanners just never really feels fair however once you've got the hang of their combat they're not too much of a problem just remember to stick behind cover you also have several of these stealth moments around the military turrets which will wake up if you touch them or trigger these trip wires they will add grow on to enemies as well so use that to your advantage to the best that you can personally I like to take them out with a grenade behind cover which really familiarizes you with the bizarre physics of grenades gravity who gives a crap about gravity ah blast pit one of the most iconic chapters in the game why is it iconic most of this chapter is centered around these tentacles which you can't kill with conventional weapons but oh look at that it's directly under a fucking space rocket so a lot of this chapter is you rerouting fuel and power so you can ignite it you don't run into any hit scanners here just houndeyes zombies bull squids so this chapter isn't very combat heavy which is a really nice change of pace after dealing with wave after wave of if there's one thing that half-life does really well it's the pacing every chapter has its own distinct feature or gimmick introducing mechanics that don't overstay their welcome so the game rarely gets boring even if all you're doing is pushing buttons and turning on power Oh someone alright you can kill scientists in this game I don't really like to play this way cuz I often get immersed in the world and realistically I wouldn't want to kill someone just for being in my way but the fact it's implemented so you can play how you want is pretty neat but hear me out I don't think that this was implemented so that you could live out your fantasy as a benevolent crowbar god I think that this is to make sure the player is more careful in combat so that they don't accidentally kill these guys but at the same time there's no consequence for doing so to most of them there are select NPCs that are essential and if you kill them the game forces a game over to prevent you from soft walking so soft walking does still happen time to time especially if you have low health like look at this fall you can't survive this if you have low health you need to land right on this med pack here I appreciate the crutch just in case you have low health but this just feels kind of lazy I don't like navigating around these tentacles I've been told that this is supposed to be stealth related and I'm sure it is but the fuckers pattern seems to be completely random sometimes he's attracted to sound which is nice because they give you a fuck ton of grenades to use but there's plenty of times where I'm just stuffing around and he does a love taps me on the head but with the power restored to the rocket Gordon flips the switch and watches as the shuttle burns the tentacles to a crisp yeah better strafing was pretty cool wasn't it completely just regard that it took me eight fucking tries to get it once to send it deeper into the bowels of Black Mesa we Oh God welcome to power up another environmental boss fight but instead of being focused around houndeyes and bull squids we've got Voort sand soldiers most of them will be distracted by the gargantuan though a mean motherfucker with flamethrower hands you're not intended to kill this thing with conventional weaponry but you can and we'll be talking about that later Wow you really get the revolver here maybe I've been playing a bit too much black Mesa I'm used to that being the second weapon you get oh wait that joke stated now because they went back to the old weapon placement and a new update god dammit I didn't expect to get the revolver so late into the game this thing's basically a handheld sniper rifle perfectly accurate with scarce ammo just be sure that every shot counts you get it from the spoon did Barney hear that tells you to go down to turn the power back on for the rail system but big surprise the military is waiting for you down there to make your life a living hell though the Magnum can easily one-shot them with a well-placed headshot you also find some trip lines down here too these are the same ones that the grunts used against you a lot at the time and now you could set up traps for them because they're too stupid to see the laser okay so what you're supposed to do here is destroy some boxes that are blocking the generator so you can turn it back on and that's supposed to open this door here I know that much but for some reason the trigger here likes to break a lot I thought that maybe it was something I missed but this chapter just likes to break easily I tried restarting the chapter I validated my files but nothing seemed to work so I just no clipped in I did replay this chapter on half-life source where I did everything the same as I did before and the boss fight worked fine the only problem here is that I'm playing half-life source this isn't the last time I'll be seeing this part unfortunately this is what it's supposed to look like oh that's cool with the gargantuan destroyed and the power back on we use this little tram here to get down to the abandoned railways where a Barney tells us that the lambda team wants us to reactivate a satellite rocket that the military shut down we're not told why though what are they the Illuminati on a rail is possibly my least favorite chapter in the game it's slow its repetitive M Stein just spoiled by Black Mesa which cut down a lot of filler in this chapter you're constantly using these cards to shoot science to swap the path which seems really impractical as a mechanical design often being stopped by soldiers who just really want your head though a nice silver lining here is that we do get a clearer look into the soldiers minds finding out why they're taking this operation so personally against you you're killing all their friends but also that they weren't really told what's going on here which again makes sense because Black Mesa is basically area 50 fucking one you can spend upwards of an hour just trying to make your way up to the mission control room and launch the rocket blasting away any soldier or vordigan you see it's not a favorite I think this chapter kind of hurts the pacing of the game a bit apprehension is very much a reflection chapter there's not a lot of combat and most of it is to break up the pacing a bit most of the action is in the intro to this chapter where this industrial cart malfunctions and you get shot at under water though some of the combat here is Jesus a scientist tells us that there's a tranquilizer in the cage that we could use to stop this thing but of course the shark cage malfunctions and oh god that's actually terrifying I think there's something wrong with its AI that's making it bug out but that genuinely spooked me for a moment also man what is what the voice acting in this game it's a decent in some parts often coming off as so bad it's good but some of the line sounds like it was their first take on the line and forced them to record it at 6:00 in the morning there's a tranquilizer ah the tranquilizer crossbow this thing is sweet it can one-shot most enemies in the game though because there's no way to distinguish lethal and non-lethal attacks it comes off as the most terrifying tranquilizer dart in the history of men okay my suits full of trackers I guess that's why the military keeps showing up at the most coincidental times you know what that's actually a good explanation I'll give them that make sure you don't Oh God not the assassins anything but the assassins there's oh fucking annoying often hiding out of sight and when you spot them they just got running to hide you only encounter them a couple times in the game thank God but when they do show up they're really going to test your patience someone please just put me out of my misery thank you Gordon is ambushed again by a group of soldiers who finally get the drop on him somehow and since they took it personally that were killing all of their friends they decide to get some cold hard revenge stripping Gordon of all of his weapons and dropping him into an industrial crusher he conveniently regains consciousness just before turning into a Gordon sandwich you've got plenty of time to escape the crusher but you've lost all of your weapons I see this as the start of a new episode like you wouldn't doom or quake something that really helps out the pacing restarting your combat effectiveness to near zero and having a fresh new go with it ah residue processing it's not the worst chapter in the game but it's up there most of it is just puzzles and platforming another reflection chapter and it does a good job at that it's kind of hard to explain though I feel like it goes on for way too long and the layout of the map is just confusing at times the conveyor belt puzzle is cool in theory but again I think it goes on for way too long so once you have the route memorized I think that it is pretty fun to speed run through you get the revolver back here and earlier you get the pistol back as well you get it after a Barney headfirst into some barnacles but uh I think I broke them no yeah I forgot to talk about barnacles they're mostly harmless assuming you're paying attention and even if you get caught just relax look straight up and feed them some bullets NPCs though just sort of died on contact okay somehow Gordon ends up at the advanced biological research lab wait a second are those kennels are we really keeping aliens as pets now how long was I asleep for oh god what the fuck is Oh God questionable ethics is a really fun chapter as something you can get it to work out you learned that the Black Mesa facilities has been doing experiments on a lot of these aliens keeping them in cages and kennels and creating machines that just turn them into giblets you get most of your arsenal back in this chapter including a few extra goodies the snarks are fun but I rarely use them they run around dealing damage and distracting enemies but they also will add grow unto you if you're not careful so just be sure to use them when there's enough enemies for them to target go get em buddy or chaos it ah the towel cannon now it's getting interesting I've really underappreciated this weapon for most of my life this thing is basically the plasma rifle from doom or the hyper blaster from quake - but boasting an old fire that lets it charge like a goddamn Mega Buster this thing is super powerful but because of how scarce the ammo is I find myself hoarding it and sometimes forgetting I even have it but damn this thing is powerful enough to take down helicopters and passes through armor don't fuck with this thing the military and the aliens aren't a full-on war with each other often being overpowered by the alien grunts with the military setting up bullshit minefields and snipers all over the place snipers need to be taken out with explosives just tossing a grenade into their hidey hole is usually enough to take them out fuck the mind sections I don't care I'm gonna abuse quicksaves here it's bullshit that you can't see where the mines are and you have to rely on memory thankfully this area doesn't last too long though but oh man afterwards you got a pull full spy action hero and go through some laser mines you can't blow any of these up because they're all rigged to this nuke here like what was the military even thinking like oh yeah that room with the nuke you know what'd be really cool is if we rigged it with explosives fucking great a plan one wrong move in the facility turns into him massive crater this wasn't nearly as bad as I remember though I remember there being trip wires everywhere I guess nostalgia is a powerful thing wait did I break the trigger again now you were cusack --is-- have you ever wanted to weaponize a beehive well now you can the same weapons those grunts have been using on you is now in your possession it homes in on targets and it's ammo recharges meaning you never have to reload the damn thing it's pretty weak but I think that's fair for having unlimited homing ammo it's great for camping behind cover from grunts that are giving you a hard time and from this point on it's my preferred weapon for enemies like headcrabs and barnacles surface tension involves a lot of environmental puzzle solving and it's pretty fucking awesome now but as a kid I was way too stupid to figure a lot of this out use the turrets above this wall open use this other turret to break this other wall open and then have a fucking rocket launcher duel at the helicopter fucking awesome I swear to fucking god actually this time though oh my god I'm not crazy it did kill itself I love this rocket launcher it's strong powerful and has a toggleable laser guide the laser is great for moving targets like helicopters but turning it off is also great for stationary threats such as tanks and armored trucks there's also these quake like bounce pads that are super finicky come at them from the wrong angle and they just break oh god not another one I swear to God if you break my gammit god damn it of course the bounce pad decides to break on me Wow finally fuck you use this really dated airstrike map to destroy this gargantuan with the radio telling this poor soul that the military is backing out and they're not kidding after this chapter they're gone for good they're clearly losing this fight against the aliens so I really can't blame them you have one final belt with the hecu grunts while the aliens show that they're the ones in charge now alien grunts litter the place barnacles are nearly everywhere to be seen and they have these little snark traps laid out around the place little sacs that burst open letting a ton of these little fuckers chase you fucking hate fighting snarks for a while I just ran around until they explode because they do that for some reason they're just too frantic to take out with traditional weapons I think that it's best to fight bugs with bees the lambda Corps is where shit really starts to hit the and I know I was in for something really cool when this massive elevator took off without me a scientist finally meets you telling you that you're almost to the fabled lambda labs which up until this point might as well be fucking Atlantis given its secretive nature and that he drew the short straw and had to come meet you in person cuz once they saw that Gordon might actually make it to the labs they started gearing up for your arrival and to make your venture a bit easier this guy made you a new experimental gun because the guy's too much of a wimp to try it out on some of the aliens he built it to destroy trace your fears black mesa has secretly been developing teleportation technology and these aliens and those crystals are nothing new to them only covered up in secret you're informed that something massive on the other side has been keeping the portal open for the aliens to come through something they've dubbed Xen and they need Gordon to cross to the newfound border world and kill whatever's holding the portal open and they hype this moment up for you pretty hard filling you to the brim with ammo and another scientist giving you this okay I know that's the long term module from the hazard course but do you want me to take it I'm not sure cuz you're not saying anything the long jump is really awkward it's activated by pressing Crouch and then jump in quick succession launching you forward like a certain Italian plumber if a portal process takes some time to open and apparently the xeni ins on the other side got word that you're trying to break into their world and they sent a bunch of new kakko demon-like enemies called controllers they're literally just kakko demons they fly they shoot projectiles that's really all you need you must go Zen is a bit of a mixed bag I love the aesthetic for it and I don't mind the platforming but it's just so damn short the chapter titled Zen literally takes about five minutes if even just get inside the floating island press a few switches boom next chapter ah is that the sound of broken triggers I hear away no it's just this is the gun arc gone arc gone arch whatever a mean living ball sack and the mother of the headcrabs do already can't do that on YouTube oh crap oh crap ball crap this is supposed to be a three phase boss fight where you pump it sack full of rockets and other high damaging weapons the only thing I'm wondering is this the only one do they work like bees is there only one Queen at a time I don't know if I want to know if there's more of these things running around over there it's a really simple fight though just still enough damage and it runs away preparing for the next phase but the third phase broke for me just like the gargantuan fight I'm beginning to sense a pattern here if you use nearly all of your explosives in this one spot you could just skip the boss fight entirely if I had to guess this trigger is activated when a certain amount of damage is done to it which is supposed to be triggered by the gun arc exploding but you could just activate it yourself by sacrificing nearly all of your explosive Arsenal just like the gargantuan fight this worked just fine when I played it in half-life source but again this sucks because I'm playing half-life fucking source a highlight of Zen for me was interloper not this bit with the sphincters that launched you out of them assuming they even work and when they do work more often than not you're gonna plummet to your death because there's still Paul damaged in this low gravity section great but you get this really cool stealth segment with another gargantuan that doesn't soft block your game just hide in these crevices until it leaves turn these guards around with an explosion it's fun stuff I actually learned about this from Martha Thomas black and mrs. channel he does these really cool deep dives in the half-life's game design that you probably didn't know about it's worth a watch if you're curious the factory kind of brings interloper to a crawl though the Voort stone attack you which is a pretty cool world building this platforming puzzle can really suck it though combined with Zen's low gravity and these controllers screaming at you the whole time it's a mess there's this really beautiful room right before the final boss though a pitch-black skybox with the super sinister portal at the end the closer you get to it you hear scientists from earlier in the game it really makes you wonder how long Black Mesa has been meddling in this border world or perhaps the other way around who knows ah an island it's cool in concept it's the fucker who's been sending aliens to our realm for some fucking reason and lore why's this thing is pretty to read but as a boss fight it's just so fucking boring there's two things that come out of a player's mouth when they finish a boss fight either fucking finally or fuck that was awesome and the Niland is a fucking finally type of boss fight it has two main attacks plasma balls and a big green portal that literally just exists to pad out the fight for some reason though you could stop it with projectiles like bees but I have a feeling that was an oversight and I shouldn't sigh in relief just because I can exploit a boss above it are these three healing crystals that you got a destroyed I guess Zen is really into alternative medicine I didn't know about these the first time I played in fact as a kid when I beat this wooden half-life source I just jumped into his head and beat him with a crowbar somehow that worked there's this little cliff over here that you can hide behind none of the projectiles will hit you and there's this little healing pond off to the side so if you run out of Health that's really your fault you can get hit by it's portal if you need to stock up on ammo which is a good reason to be caught in his portal but aside from that avoid this area like the plague you could barely see the platforms and the controllers at the top are really ear grating once this giant babies taken enough damage the folds at the top of its heads will open exposing the juicy center I couldn't really find out if I was doing sufficient damage to it but I finally got it after flicking some grenades into its brain just sit back and enjoy the light show fellas oh no you will not kill me during the ending oh hey g-man this is normally where I'd explain what this guy is but honestly this guy's a fucking enigma search g-man online and I promise you'll find a million forums and videos just theorizing on who the fuck this guy is supposed to be little is known about him and that's fucking awesome he's been watching over you throughout the course of the entire game all the way from the beginning tram segment and now with the nihilanth destroyed the border world is now under his employer's control after a rather trippy ending sequence we end up right back where we started on that old black mesa tram where the g-man offers us a partnership step through the portal and become business associates or sit in the Train and accept a challenge that you have no chance of winning it's time to Jews it looks like we won't be working together no mr. Bremen wait that's it I could totally take those guys wait what are those sprites over there Gabe Gabe both endings are pretty short and kind of satisfying in a way standing where you accept his offer is the cannon ending by the way just in case you care about that sort of thing leading directly into the events of half-life 2 but again we'll talk about that later wisely done mr. Freeman I will see you up ahead personally I would have loved a bit more mind fuckery really hammer home that this guy is some kind of deity or a demigod or something that just shifts time and space between his foreskin or something but this is probably the best way he could have handled it with the engine at the time I like this ending there's something so cool and mysterious about it and if you're a kid playing this in the late 90s before half-life 2 came out your imagination could really go ballistic with creative ideas of where Gordon Freeman would end up honestly this game just mesmerizes me to this day it's not perfect of course it has a lot of problems from bugs to broken triggers to just questionable level design but the rest of the adventure just makes up for it for the sake of recording and writing notes I had to force myself to stop playing the game just so I could jot down notes and after then I immediately started up a new game just so that I could play the game without feeling the need to report on it aside from simple key notes well yes I did start with half-life 2 and I do still consider it the superior game which again is subject to change once I review it I still can barely fathom how amazing this game is mechanics rarely overstay their welcome the combat is constantly flowing and evolving all the way to the final chapters of the game the narrative is just so engaging and well-written and doesn't feel like it's solely made to patch the combat sections of the game together the combat is so much more than combat that just feels good it matters to the story and the context of Gordon Freeman and his venture to get out alive and uncovering a deep conspiracy though yes this game is an FPS first and the stories second the action never gets in the way of the narrative and vice-versa and it's only helped by the game's streamlined weapons system half-life's weapon wheel if you can call it that is one of the best in the industry you know how in doom 2 how pressing 3 on your keyboard would pull out the shotgun but also swap between the super shotgun half-life expands on that idea tenfold with 5 weapon categories what is your melee which is just your crowbar but - is your handguns like the Glock and revolver 3 is your more active combat sort of weapons like the SMG shotgun and crossbow 4 is your more intense and novelty weapons like the rocket launcher and tau cannon and 5 is your throwables like grenades and snarks just tap 3 twice to pull up the shotgun and left-click to select it it's fast and convenient I understand that people would just like to press a button and pull out the weapon they want but honestly I'd rather just tap 3 twice on my keyboard which is already in reach of my left hand over WASD instead of contorting my hand to reach the 7 key and lose control over my character for a moment I'd love to see more games adopt the style of weapon switching each of the weapons like doom and quake our tools meant to be used for a specific situation and though there's some harmless overlap like the shotgun and SMG I don't think that there's quite enough to warrant such a large Arsenal with so many novelty weapons sure there are a lot of fun but I think half-life 2 did the right thing by simplifying the are small down at the cost of some cool experimental weapons and oh man the sound design it all has this charming yet consistent style to it yes it is a bit cartoony in some places but it's at least consistent with the game's bizarre yet stylistic art design half-life is home to several of my favorite sound effects in all of videogames especially the gybing sound I love it so much it's just so the soundtrack isn't the most amazing thing ever mostly because well there isn't really much of a soundtrack to begin with it's not like ambience I mean that 90% of the game is completely lacking in music where the environment is creating your background noise the music that is there though is pretty fucking solid and does a great job at setting the tone like pumping you up or invoking a sense of dread I'll never forget the first time I heard nuclear emissions Jim a song so great they brought it back for the sequel and didn't change a damn thing about it though the credit song does feel a little bit unfitting it's a great track and I enjoy listening to it but I feel like it doesn't reflect the bizarre alien feeling that the game was going for this sounds like something I'd hear in the background of a 90's dance club [Music] half life was a surprise hit selling way above its projected 180,000 units and dominated sales charts staying on various top 10 games of all time lists for several years to come being cited as one of the best shooters since the original doom and launching a new era of for his person video games half-life later received three official expansions though only two of those expansions are easily available on Steam today half-life blueshift where you take on the role of Barney Calhoun a security guard during the Black Mesa incident and half-life opposing force putting you in the shoes of one of the hecu grunts meant to clean up the incident often regarded as one of the best FPS expansions of all time the third lesser-known expansion was only available on the ps2 part of half-life a full two-player co-op experience it has been ported to PC in the form of a mod though so don't worry too much about missing out oddly enough though blue shift almost suffered the same fate it was intended to only be available on the now cancelled Sega Dreamcast port of half-life a port that was almost finished and yet cancelled due to the poor sales of the Dreamcast though in terms of community half-life is still receiving full campaign expansions even to this day a great example being half-life echos releasing a 20-19 attempting to tell another perspective of the Black Mesa incident half-life went on to spawn several well-known franchises from its DNA such as half-life counter-strike later renamed to simply counter-strike and Team Fortress you might know that Team Fortress started it as a quake multiplayer mod well after the release of half-life 1 valve hired the original team who made the mud and ported it to their gold source engine launching it into the timeless yet neglected franchise we know today and hell at the time of recording this half-life 1 is still receiving plenty of love today especially in the form of black mesa source running off of half-life 2 source engine a full ground-up remake of the first game and is nearing a 1.0 release i played the beta for this all the way back in 2012 and it's amazing to see how far it's come and I cannot wait to play the finished build half-life did receive its own official source engine buff though it was just a simple port to the Source engine and that was it I honestly can't believe this is the same price as the base game half-life source is just such a terrible port the flashlight actually feels like a flashlight in the crowbar has double damage meaning it can one-shot headcrabs which is great but aside from that it's just some really terrible weapon changes and completely broken AI again this is the way that I first played half-life I didn't know the difference between half-life and half-life source and I don't know how I beat this as a kid the load times are just atrocious especially with these smaller maps the mp5 has this absurd reverse recoil and so many of the triggers are just broken I know I needed this port to fix some of the broken triggers in the base game but the cons here severely outweigh the pros halflife went on to receive several sequels such as the half-life 2 trilogy which i know sounds really weird to say but that's how it is half-life 2 half-life 2 episode 1 and half-life 2 episode 2 as many of you know by now half-life 2 episode 3 or half-life 3 has become a bit of a meme and for over a decade us half-life fans were truly left in the dark however I think that only helped the community bring you together so many people to celebrate this once forgotten franchise but with half-life Alex just over the horizon the first half-life game in nearly 13 years may be the future of our crowbar wielding Savior isn't as grim as we thought [Music]

Channel: That Trav Guy

Views: 393,821

Keywords: That Trav Guy, Trav, Trav Guy Reviews, Video Game Review, boomer shooter, goldsrc engine, half life, half life iceberg, half life meme, half life mods on steam, half life ost klaxon beat, half life review 2020, half life source, half life source vs half life original, retro shooters, source engine, source engine games, source engine games list, valve games intro, valve index gameplay, valve interview, valve intro half life, valve intro half life 1, valve intro head turn

Id: uwcRAOASmps

Length: 43min 55sec (2635 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 18 2020