Half life episode 1 and 2Honestly this game just feels like a really well polished tech demo
It's a single player shooter developed by valve, about a guy with a crowbar defending humanitry from an alien invasion, the actual story is pretty basic, yeah it has some element of mistery near the end because half life 3 was never released and we never saw the continuation to the plot of g-man and stuff, but it's clearly not the focus of the game, the focus of the game is the shooting at aliens, and it does a pretty good job at that.
Half life is actually developed under the havok engine, and they wanted to flex it as much as they could, the most interesting part about havok are the physic calculations it could do, and half life is built from the ground up with the idea of that phyisic based gameplay. In many parts you will have to move objects, jump on seesaws, and in half life 2, use a antigravity gun to literally pick up objects around you and throw it to the enemies
it was more a "look at we can do" rather than "this will fit really well in the game" tho, for example, until the very end of the game, I found the gravity gun, which is like the big thing of half-life 2 pretty underwelming, it's a very situational weapon (since you couldn't use it in certain enviroments) that can do ok damange and often blocks your own vision with the object you're carrying. Not only that, but if you were to pick up something like a explosive barrel, enemies could shoot at you, hitting the barrel and doing WAY MORE damage than they would have done it. It was never really worth it to use a explosive barrel than the rocket launcher. If the ammo economy was tighter it could have seem some use, but the game makes sure you have all the ammo you need in every part of the game to make sure you don't get stuck
They're very wacky at times, and if you make a mistake and don't realize the intended solution to a puzzle, the game just doesn't really work. I rememberi n half life 2 a segment where there was a seesaw and you needed to put barrels on one side of the seesaw, underneath so they were to float up in the water and push one side down, but instead of putting the barrels underwater, I put them on the opposite site of the seesaw on the ground, and that solution did not work, had to google to see what was I doing wrong
Half life 2 also introduces steam achivements, which was a brand new feature at the time. and again, they just added them because they wanted to show off the techonoly, not because adding steam achivvements could make the game better. They're often "reach this part of the game" or "collect x many thigs!", they're not achivements that feel cool to obtain and if you were to 100% the game, it would become a pain real quick
There was actually a story by the developer of antichamber, where valve reached out to him sayign "hey add steam achivements to your game, it will probably boost the sale numbers", and he went like "achivements would contribute nothing to my game" so he didn't, and that was the correct choice IMO
A game that has good steam achivements in my personal opinion would be a game like BTD6, where they turned a lot of community made challenges like "beat chimps with only 2 towers" into an actual ingame challenge, or games like isaac or picayune dreams where you can restore your savefile by looking at your steam achivements, since each achivement is tied to an unlock.
The level design in half life 1 and 2 is as good as it (probably) could be, both games constantly make you feel like you're in danger, there is no time to actually explore every bit of the map, everything wants to kill you and since killing enemies doesn't actually give you a reward, if skipping a fight is an option, it's likely the correct option
Even while rushing through the maps at max speed you normally don't get lost, the game pushes you in the right direction most of the time (sometimes you have to backtrack and that isn't quite clear and or you just don't see a door tho, that felt annoying), however, I feel I didn't get lost often mainly because I have been playing videogames my whole life, I was using stuff like ammunition packs and things like that as markers of where the game wanted me to go, but someone who is newer to gaming may not pick that up and get really lost
The game features f6 f9 gameplay, it allows for quicksaves to be done and loaded really quickly, which changes the gameplay completely compared to our more modern checkpoint based gameplay. By having mistakes only cost you a few seconds instead of having to retry a mission, you play a lot more reckless. If you're playing a modern game you may often go slower and play more tactical since well, you're doing so well in this mission and you don't want to start over, in half life since that danger doesn't exist you can just try as many dumb and dangerous ideas and you can
I think this fits very well with the feeling half life is trying to push, it makes you feel a lot more powerful and it's faster paced gameplay allows for that feeling of danger and haste I described earlier
anyways yeah half life alyx exists but I don't have the means to play it since valve is again trying to flex their technology again and made it what I think is the first ever AAA VR only game, which is neat, I love VR, more people should support the technology so it gets cheaper, but until that happens, I cant play alyx
Placed in A rank, it still was fun even if I really shat on it LMAO
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No game left for me to play
Haven't started the tv shows