Research and Development | Gravity Fun

as I've said before modding is incredibly important to any game single player in particular modders can look at a game they love retrospectively and make an experience that represents everything that their favorite games do the best when I think of half-life 2 I don't think of the gunplay I think of the physics puzzle driven combat and chord progression while I think a lot of people see this stuff is half-life 2 showing off physics technology that we've all gotten used to years later I still get excited about stacking bricks on a seesaw to reach a Ledge the creator of research and development seems to have made a similar Association this mod is jam-packed with fun and unique ideas that represent the half-life to experience as I remember it surviving by being quick and outsmarting the competition is the name of the game with this mod however it does an ape off of half-life 2's puzzles whatsoever it just takes inspiration from the design philosophy behind them almost all of these puzzles feel like they could be in half-life 2 and for its link that's up there with my favorite hour-long chunks of half-life content official or otherwise you don't even get a gun throughout the entire game but it feels more like half-life 2 than any other modoch blade it's got exciting action puzzles calm puzzles where you can take your time and a mix of the two all tied together with some brilliant pacing with rising tension and payoff in between the sub climaxes in case I've already piqued your interest then I'll quickly go over how to install this mod as it doesn't work like it's supposed to anymore at least for me following the mod DB link in the description you'll see an installer for the mod run that reboots steam and it should show up in your games list you can try running it from here like a normal Steam game but it doesn't work for me anymore I had to do this installation then go to my Steam app source mods research & development maps folder and then copy all the maps and the steam apps common half-life 2 EPS then it's as simple as going into half-life 2 episode 2 and typing level 1a into the command console which you can enable from the advanced control settings screen it's not 100% perfect but this is one of the only glitches I could spot unfortunately it's a pretty annoying one I assume this is a steam pipe issue anyways I'm going to be giving away a lot of the puzzle solutions here so I suggest you give them out a shot and come back if you have an hour or so to spare all you need is half-life 2 episode 2 which let's be honest you probably already have alright back to the video really it's just a fantastically put together mod and no matter how many times I play it it keeps my interest throughout so let's look at how it does that other than good pacing which is more or less self-explanatory the very first puzzle sort of sets the tone for the entire mod you're stuck in a room with a fire blocking your progress and you notice two signs on the walls in front of the cages radiation testing on antlions that resulted in two different mutations one of the antlions is resistant to bullets but energy weapons haven't been tested and the other antlion is fire retardant however the fire retardant one is dead so the solution to the first puzzle is to put the fire retardant at Lyon's body on top of the fire to choke the flame what's so great about this is that it tells the player that they're going to need to pay attention to the environment more than usual and above all else think outside the box like half-life 2 this is a game of gimmicks which again isn't a bad thing each chapter has one theme or a single puzzle concept that it expands on throughout which is more or less exactly what you want from a single chapter in a puzzle game firstly it's those antlions as you escape the first room you find some antlion pheromone glands and you have to lead an airline through a maze using them it's a bit finicky and completely ramshackle both aesthetically and mechanically but that just fits the rebellion research facility theme perfectly so after the sand lion maze we get another strong hint for something this game is completely full of combat puzzles this stuff is grave it's throwing Roller mines at the hunter chopper in episode 2 brought to its logical conclusion there are a ton of combat encounters in this game and not one of them is fought with traditional half-life combat with the exception of a couple choppers you have to take down by throwing mines at them which is pretty much always fun seriously a bit of a tangent ahead but these hunter chopper fights are the perfect mix of empowerment and disempowerment the way you have to take cover behind the smallest things and watch as a hundred bullets come rushing down around you before getting a chance to do some real damage by throwing its own mines back at it I love these encounters so much good job valve if I had to pick one type of fight - more or less directly copy from the half-life games this would be it and I guess mod creator Matt bore Delino agrees pretty much any FPS could have one or two of these fights spliced in and I wanted minded a bit but I'm getting ahead of myself the reason I bring these up is because they're the one exception to the role of not taking combat solutions from half-life anyways we have to use our bulletproof and line that the scientist cooked up to take out a couple of combines so and distract him long enough to solve a quick little puzzle to start this elevator to slightly amend something I said earlier here's an example of a puzzle that you could argue is taken from a pipe to episode 1 but it's completely recontextualized by the fact that we have to do it quickly enough that we don't get overrun by combine and that we only have a single landline to defend ourselves with what's cooler about this section though is that we get to see a bit of foreshadowing to one of the climaxes later on and there's even a little bit of subtext here if you want to look at it that way our character isn't using weapons they were smart enough that they don't need any so we see this rebel using a rocket launcher to fight off a combine gunship but sure enough he doesn't have a gravity gun so we see him get killed in a pretty funny way by Minds his burning body is launched probably 80 feet and lands right next to us and when we're in this situation later on we use the gravity gun to survive the encounter brain beats brawn very half life as a side note there's a half-life modding site called run think shoot live comm and I think that's just an incredibly fitting tagline for the half-life games quake and doom our run shoot live but half-life is run thinks you live I like that you got to be a bit more thoughtful with how you go about winning a half-life game anyways we do that elevator puzzle and we get another great example of something that this mod does right attention to detail and awarding attended players when we activate this bridge our ant lion comes crashing in clearly his bulletproof skin beat the combine however an APC comes in and almost instantly kills the ant lion remember back in the first room untested with energy weapons well there's your test along with the rebel corpse flying at us we have a pretty good idea of this game sense of humor thanks to this that pretty much wraps up the first map and it does an absolutely perfect job setting up everything that this mod is about it teaches you to pay attention to signage more than you usually need to in half-life it teaches you to think outside of the box and not be afraid to get creative and to teaches you the sort of detracting humor that most of the mod uses taking thing is that seem important and quickly destroying them with little to no fanfare so on to the next level we've used antlions in combat before in fact Gordon leaving the outline horde into Nova Prospekt to overrun the prison is my favorite section in the whole half-life series and we've used snart's to plush people out and draw away their fire in half-life 1 but what we've never done is use a zombie to clear a path for us as we enter the next room we see that there's a horde of headcrab zombies outside and a single zombie in the room with us inside a bat of neurotoxin reading the sign indicates that experiments made the zombie extremely hostile to humans and Necromorphs alike so we can use the conveyor belt to carefully move the dangerously fragile bat of neurotoxin outside and open the bat to make the experimental zombie clear the outside and kill itself in the process again it's funny but in a violent yet detracting way this thing has so much pent-up anger that it combined with the neurotoxin can kill us in a second if we mess up but as soon as it goes free at rampage is so hard that it blows itself up I'll stop with the play-by-play of the entire mod here and just give you some of the highlights as the first 15 minutes do an utterly fantastic job is setting the mood for the entire mod this section with the experimental zombie reminds me of another one of my favorite moments you pressed this button and realized that your way there's enough to keep this elevator in the down position so you have to lure a legless zombie onto it and quickly run past giving him slap on the ass and climbing up the ladder to get behind the elevator the poor little guy has no chance of fighting you and you take advantage of his enthusiasm to essentially make him stand on a button for you this is just hilarious and it's made even funnier in the next room you climb up this ramp thing and it falls as you jump across but regardless you'll notice a chair blocking the door to the previous room you dislodged that door and that same sad little zombie keeps crawling after you you have to use his weight to hold down the other side of the seesaw here to get on top of the vents and then once you do it breaks dropping a couple explosive barrels on the poor guy killing him instantly I love this that zombie probably had the most humiliating screen time of any character I've ever seen and on the now broken-in screen you see a ton of combine forces chasing you followed by one legless zombie just crawling down the road hoping to catch you someday in the cramped corridors of Ravenholm these legless zombies can be kind of dangerous but here it's the least threatening enemy since the zombies in doom 2016 this mod is totally willing to forgo gameplay conventions for a little bit of humor and I love that when it's done right speaking of humor there's a section where you have to put zero-point energy cells and especially calibrated microwaves to create what I can only assume are small temporary black holes I don't think the physics check out but when you put in the second one you see that the combine are trying to blast their way into this room so when the energy cell goes off you get to watch a couple combine soldiers get stucked disintegrated very nice here I noticed a problem when talking about this game I said I wasn't going to do a play-by-play but while it wasn't in order I've gone over every single puzzle in the game that takes more than 10 seconds I seriously loved every second of this game but I don't want to just go over every single puzzle and explain what's fun about it there's one little puzzle room shortly after the latest section I've discussed that's a lot of fun and you get the gravity gun I was going to talk about that but then the next section I wanted to talk about is immediately after that one it's just one noteworthy thing after the other from beginning to end but this video is already getting about as long as something like this ought to be I said I was only going to talk about highlights thinking I could compress things here but literally every moment is a highlight let's just move forward a little bit I want to leave at least a couple things for you late adopters to discover if you didn't heed my warning about giving away the puzzle solutions we get a little puzzle in which we have to use our new gravity gun to destroy some pipes so that we can redirect the flow of hot steam away from us we have as much time as we need to do this and get used to the mechanic and we even get to see that some of the pipes aren't directly accessible and that we'll need to use explosives to damage them but then after the slow-paced introduction to the mechanic we get on a cart and move through a pond of toxic sludge and this is when we have to put that knowledge to work the common viewpoint I see online is that reflex based arcade skills don't mesh well with puzzle games and I generally agree but combining the two can make for some exciting action puzzles as we see on this cart this is the exact opposite of being able to take a puzzle at your own pace and so the puzzle side of things is toned down slightly to accommodate as we ride through the real danger is the zombie drone AIDS and the combine soldiers chucking their grenades at us if you're good with your timing you can take out the combine soldiers by throwing the grenades back but you don't have to the more pressing issue is the hot steam which will push you into the sludge if you don't redirect it by destroying pipes in time really other than a few small exceptions the closest thing to a puzzle here is just juggling a handful of different things simultaneously before the car moves into the next hazard earlier we were introduced bulletproof panes of glass that the gravity gun can hold up to act as a shield and sure enough those come into play too and just as with the litmus zombie earlier it's just plain fun to make these combine soldiers look and probably feel like idiots all this advanced alien tech at their disposal and they can't handle a scrawny nerdy up a sheet of glass hell you can even go above and beyond in a few sections and take out a sniper or two with explosives if you really feel like driving home that you've got the combine under your thumb it's just endlessly fun taking the piss out of these guys who are great at taking over planets but not so good when it comes to individuals anyways things mostly carry on like this slow paced puzzling where danger is nonetheless all around followed by a short little climax before the next slow part where you can calm down a bit eventually however you get to what has to be my favorite part the final climax at one point you follow instructions on a whiteboard to put together the evacuation improvised self-constructed rotary action tactical offensive rover the Eviscerator an incredibly dangerous jalopy with a lawnmower played in the front about a foot away from the driver's face this thing is clunky but in the best way possible it's awkward to drive easy to mess up and and all in all just kind of stupid and I love it to death the level design during this explosive escape sequence is just perfect to keep you driving kind of fast but also being careful to avoid explosives and slow down for sharp curves it's this sort of inner battle between wanting to go as quickly as possible and as slowly as necessary you can mow down tons of enemies with this thing but if you make a mistake you have to hop out and reattach the lawn mower blade it's so half-life and this section has some other awesome ideas too at at least one point you're pretty much guaranteed to get snatched out of your car by a barnacle and without a weapon your first instinct is that you're screwed if you can't find some explosives to fling at it but with none in sight you realize that there's a Hotwire hanging loose from the ceiling and if you pull it your way with the gravity gun you can touch the live end of it to the barnacles tongue and instantly fry it I was panicking when this first happened to me but I felt so smart when I survived the encounter this is just great anyway is moving forward you find a nitrous upgrade to attach to your Eviscerator and can really start going quickly in spite of the consistently awkward controls you turn the corner do a sweet jump and then BAM the Strider comes in and starts using its warp cannon to try to destroy you and inadvertently giving you an advantage in the process it opens up the way to a series of ramps and you can try to handle the clunky controls to launch your Eviscerator into it cutting up its chassis with the lawnmower blade the camera even takes these sweet third-person angles and slow motion to show the carnage do this three times and you're done with the game feeling like the ultimate scientist badass seriously Gordon Freeman doesn't have anything on the burr tag in this mod then you ride off into the sunset combine and pursue like thief 2x shadows of the middle-aged Rd is a perfect example of everything I love about fan made content aside from the fact that half-life to source engine is still being used to run a ton of popular games it's what keeps games like half-life soo alive and relevant all these years later matboard Ally know like many half-life fans saw the things that have 5 - does that no other game has really managed to match and so he made a mod that exemplifies everything that's specific to his memories of half-life 2 while that game has a fantastic story good punchy feeling combat some awesome set pieces and a lot of nice horror and sci-fi elements what it didn't know what their game is done was integrating physics into the combat and puzzle solving so fluidly the entirety of half-life 2 is special but if I had to point to any single thing that made a unique it would be that screw the crowbar half-life 2 is all about the gravity gun if mr. bored Alena wanted to make a combat centric mod he probably should have done it in a game like doom or quake or half-life 1 for that matter where the combat is what makes the game what it is but for half-life 2 mod there's no better example of taking inspiration and evolving the source than research and development [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Leadhead

Views: 60,133

Keywords: mod, half, life, source, mods, Matt, bortolino, puzzle, game, analysis, discussion, episode, essay, explained, pacing, combat, gravity, gun, combine, antlion, headcrab

Id: obe5-cPJG1M

Length: 15min 4sec (904 seconds)

Published: Mon May 27 2019