Sulphur on 10/11/2013 at 08:55
That's a good one, actually. I loved HL1 but I couldn't muster more than a 'meh' for HL2 in the end. I can appreciate the level design and the physicality, but the formula's too scripted and rote in HL2's design for me; you could predict the pace of most story beats and never be surprised by what the game threw at you -- it's only the end that really shook things up a bit.
demagogue on 10/11/2013 at 09:37
I'll second HL2. I really wanted to like it and it started off so well, but to me it basically inaugurates the contemporary era of game design where designers are just too blatantly catering to an ideology of fun and the consumption of an entertainment experience. By the time you play ball with the robo-dog I was turned off to it -- still having "fun" naturally -- but the magic was gone, and there was a kind of resentment I recall from that itself. But I felt I needed to finish it, and I recognized this is probably going to be the FPS model from now on and I wanted to see how it plays out.
Edit: HL1, I hated how hard it was to control the character, and since so much of it was fine-character control, yeah, screw that... But I finished it too. The pacing and MO was really well designed, and the visual storytelling forgave pretty much all. It has a special place in my memory despite the issues, but there's a lot about the clumsiness of it as a game I didn't like (granted it was the early days), so still good for this list.
june gloom on 10/11/2013 at 09:49
I don't agree about Half-Life 2. I think most FPS games these days follow a model that began with Call of Duty 4 -- which came out 3 years after HL2. HL2 was at its heart more Half-Life -- in many real ways, it was simply an understated extension to the original Half-Life 1 model (a model that many games in the intervening years would emulate to sometimes very poor, overcooked results, which makes HL2's being simply more Half-Life, just quieter and colder, all the more appealing to me.)
Muzman on 10/11/2013 at 10:28
The Half Lifes great achievement for me, in terms of levels, was in making me not care at all to really break the game up into levels in my head. HL2 has fairly distinct sections of course. But HL1 was less so. It was only really when fans analysed the hell out of things using the chapter names that I really noticed "yes, such and such part was a load of crap" (and that name is Residue Processing)
It'd be interesting if they didn't name them at all.
Anyway, the other feat was making people forget about the bad stuff. I have mostly fond memories of both games to this day. But I replay them every few years and every single time I stop at several points and say "Was this always in here? This is terrible!". Which is kinda fascinating.
HL2 wasn't aided by the fact that I really didn't care for the gravity gun. They were obviously betting the farm on that and mostly they were right (to my endless disappointment with gamers). But I am the guy who groaned at being inevitably saddled with that thing only. Me and John Carmack I think. Pick the thing up...fling the thing...pick the thing up...fling th ****yaaaawn**** fling the thing....
While we're skewering sacred cows:
I don't really agree that T2s levels were all that bad (not that agreeing is the point here or anything). I remember some of the T2 first crowd slagging off T1 quite a bit, but making some pretty salient points along the way. The Haunted Cathedral for one isn't particularly good. They were right. Strange Bedfellowes isn't that fab either. Much they tried was more than the engine could chew at the time. But you can't really underestimate the power of really concrete purpose and cohesive story in driving things along. There's a real sense of delving into mysteries in the first game that the second just doesn't have (or is rehashing). That elevates everything enormously. I think that had an effect on the level design to. There's more spaces where you're not conscious of something having to be a sneaking challenge. It's just there to make things more interesting from a world building perspective. When you're designing more to the story I think that's easier.
They tried in T2, but I suspect its harder when it goes : Levels -> arrange -> write plot to fit -> doesn't quite fit -> iterate levels a bit -> iterate story a bit and so forth.
T2 does have quite a lot of all time great levels though; Shipping and Receiving; Framed is quite nicely put together; The City level they use a couple of times is pretty cool; The Bank is one of the all time greats- guiding you down various interlocking paths without you even knowing they exist; LotP goes without saying; Cargo is a bit Bond, but that's cool!; Kidnap doesn't work as well as it should, but I think the level itself is pretty cool; I'm the guy who loves Casing - I will never never never get the hate for playing it twice (the amount of people who were surprised by this after the game told them it was going to happen is one weird thing. But whatever. ) The map is really nice and quite enjoyable so I don't care.- And Soulforge's criticisms make sense, but I still don't mind it. What's interesting about it, is it's so vast and filled with irrelevant stuff it's like they were trying to shoehorn back in the progressive sense of discovery, revelation and adventure to this one level that was missing for much of the game up to that point. Sadly it just made it interminable for a lot of people, plus you're supposed to be hitting your urgent climax right about then.
Anyway there's only about two or three levels in DS that I think hold a candle to T1, never mind any of those. But that's another matter.
And I can still waffle about Thiefs. Good-o
demagogue on 10/11/2013 at 10:30
Understated is not the word I'd use with Halflife2.
I mean, understated games don't have personal bug armies.
But that's my interpretation of the term & my experience playing HL2.
The one time I distinctly remember really being alone in HL2 without "fun" rushing at me, or in justified expectation of it coming soon, was when I ran the boat into a beach and got off to take in the scene for a moment; there were some power lines going off in the distance silhouetted against the sky that gave me a feeling of being finally really in its world for a moment.
Edit: Creeping through the dead of night in Stalker and feeling the desolation, and that something may or may not come, is what I think of as understated design, and it had it in spades.
june gloom on 10/11/2013 at 12:26
Quote Posted by demagogue
Understated is not the word I'd use with Halflife2.
I mean, understated games don't have personal bug armies.
That's the weird thing. Despite the fact that you get up to some serious shenanigans throughout HL2 and especially the episodes, there was a restraint to it all. It lacked the bombasticness of this post-CoD4 world we live in now.
That's actually something that stands out to me about HL, Portal and even L4D -- their level of restraint compared to other games. They saved the really crazy shit for the finales and turning points.
Thirith on 10/11/2013 at 12:34
I'd definitely agree with that. For me, it's pretty much Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2+ = Michael Bay, Half-Life 2 = Christopher Nolan.
ZylonBane on 10/11/2013 at 13:56
Cannon Fodder.
Kuuso on 10/11/2013 at 15:03
Cannon Fodder was just rage-inducingly idiotic game that I still love for some reason. Good pick.
Starcraft 2 singleplayer, especially Heart of the Swarm. By this point it has descended into a fake-RTS diablo-clone that is a cheese-fest that could cast Rihanna as Kerrigan for the next part and it would actually be an improvement. There's also no question about me buying Legacy of the Void (the final expansion to SC2), when it comes out because CONCLUSION.
DayZ: It's a fucking mystery how such a horribly built game/mod can even exist with every single aspect of the game constantly breaking apart. It was still really awesome experience.
Legend of Grimrock: It's a fucking boring game, but still I spent way too many hours on it.
Muzman on 10/11/2013 at 16:09
I remembered one. Unreal 2!
Yeah somebody had to play it. It's kind of a fascinating trainwreck. It's trying soooo hard to be a good game. It really is. It shoehorns in every vaguely buzzy element from the era: you can walk around the ship between missions and talk to your crewmates, with their well developed characters that are completely forgettable; your guy is even a well spoken black man so carefully written he manages to be all but free of personality; your engineer is female with a complex, tortured and morally conflicted past (and wearing next to nothing and has tats and upsidedown cleavage. Everyone thinks people talk about this stuff too much now, like complaining is a sudden development. Well back before tumblr feminism, Live journal and Anita Sarkesian even hit puberty (probably) there was this! Which means even joe shooter fans thought this was stupid, because who the hell else was there on the internet then? QED).
It's got a complex and morally complicated plot (it thinks) and it tries really hard to be a showy FPS, fun adventure and tie the whole Unreal universe together (yes even Unreal Tournament. Why we don't know). However the levels are small, the shooting a taste of things to come and it's pretty much everything the first game wasn't. Oh it's pretty, but you can't go anywhere. And everything is dialogue heavy and extremely overstated. Few of the very odd guns though, if I remember right (I think there was one of the first black-hole/singularity guns at one point. But you only get to use it once or twice)
The only fun thing I can remember are the addition of these point defense segments, about three of them I think, where you and a couple of npcs hold back waves of enemies. They were pretty good, I seem to recall.
Other than that it's mostly fascinating for how sincerely it is trying to be all things to all people and succeeding pretty much nowhere.
It was a similar feeling to watching that certain strand of bad sci-fi actioners like AvP, the Resident Evils, the Doom movie etc etc. At the end al you can muster is a "Whell, that happened I guess"
