Half-Life 2 reviews?

[Jason1]

And youve got to remember, Half Life came out in 1998. It was pretty groundbreaking stuff back then, not so much when you played it on your PS2.

[KillerGremlin]

I've been playing Half-Life since 5th grade. I was in 5th grade back in 98', when it came out, meaning that I've been playing the game for roughly 7 years.

I'll call myself one of the biggest, if not the biggest, Half-Life fan here, because, I've played through most of the mods and I've seen about all that there is to be offered by Half-Life. :P

Half-Life was groundbreaking back in 1998, mainly because of the way the single player game was set up. It wasn't all that ground breaking in itself......it took a doom-type scenario, and it tied it together with a nice story, and added some awesome scripted events. If you dissect Half-Life, you can pull out several fairly simple First Person Shooters, but it was the unique way the game tied all the elements together that made it revolutionary (Another game that isn't as revolutionary as it's credited to be is No One Lives Forever; NOLF is just tied together by the BEST STORY IN ANY SINGLE PLAYER FPS,[considering its time] and has enough scripted dialogue and events to make it enticing).

What kept Half-Life interesting was really the variety...you where constantly being thrown into new situations, and you constantly had to think what you where going to do: you'd go from crawling through air-vents, to getting attacked by marines on the surface, to swimming through underwater tunnels with water-aliens in them. That was pretty damn intense, especially for 1998.

But I'm not going to lie...and there are plenty of cases like me out there...I didn't get Half-Life for its single player. I got it to play online. I had so much fun playing Quake, when I heard there was a new game coming out using a super-charged Quake engine with graphics that would blow Quake out of the water I was captivated. And that's where I started. I was playing Deathmatch and TFC before I was playing Half-Life's single player game. TFC was and still is one of the most fun mods for Half-Life. In fact, I'll go as far to say that TFC is the best Capture The Flag game that has ever been made [considering its age].

I did get around the beating Half-Life though, and I had A LOT of fun doing it, and I've played through the game several times since, because it's so damn fun. Half-Life is hard to play though, because it's beginning to show its age. I'd much rather play through No One Lives Forever.....but Half-Life's single player still holds a place in my heart.

I still play the many Half-Life mods online to this day. I play a lot of Counter-Strike, and I still play a consistent match of Team Fortress Classic. And every once in a while I dust off Day Of Defeat, Battlegrounds, and Natural Selection.

No other game has gotten multiplayer right the way Half-Life has. I'm not sure why that is, but it is.

I hate STEAM though, and I really have lost lots of faith in Valve since 1.6. I understood the reason to make the push to 1.6, for the downloadable content and whatnot, but I do not think it was necessary to phase out the 1.5 servers.

For starters, Half-Life remains the cream of the LAN, and connecting to STEAM to play a LAN game of Natural Selection is Grade A Bull****. Second, it's retarded that I need to fire up STEAM to play a single player game of Half-Life, but that's just my opinion. And third, STEAM has an ass-load of problems, like:
1. The hacker problem has not been solved
2. It is considerably slower (more laggy) then 1.5 servers
3. The Downloadable content is Bull****
4. STEAM likes your RAM
5. Valve focused on STEAM and updating a 4-year-old mod opposed to focusing on HL2, ultimately delaying it for a while
6. It's harder to run 3rd party mods on STEAM: AKA Desert Crisis. I'll give free BJs to the person that can tell me what Desert Crisis is, because I have a feeling I'm the only one who has played it

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Regarding Half-Life 2, I think it will be good. I'm not sure that it is going to be worthy of a 9.8/10.....because that would have to be a pretty damn revolutionary game, but who knows.

One thing to keep in mind is that there are a ton of Half-Life 2 fanboys reviewing the game right now. You need to wait a few weeks so you get some less biased reviews.

I'm excited though, about Multiplayer. My PC can't handle Source or HL2 right now, but I'm building a new one next year, so I have no problem.

CS: Source looks amazing. I can't wait to get that running on my PC.

[Jonbo298]

Your PC can't handle HL2/Source? What's the specs of it?

[Null]

Originally Posted by KillerGremlin

No other game has gotten multiplayer right the way Half-Life has. I'm not sure why that is, but it is.

that part stood out. not entirly correct. Many games have gotten multiplayer right. Quake, UT, Battlefield....

the difference is the sheer number of people. more people that are there, more mods are made to keep it alive, which draws in more people. once you get that cycle going, one of the few and only ways to break it is to bring in the sequal which often snaps the community into 2. oens who like the new sequal better, and one who dont.

Thats one of UT's main problems right now. UT04 was a great game, but theres many stubbern people who refuse to switch from the original UT, which cuts the amount of people in half. meaning less mods, and when a mod does come out, less people to play and keep it running.

and that and 80% of the 70,000 playing HL are playing the CS mod. it would be interesting to see what woulda happened to HL without that mod.

[KillerGremlin]

Originally Posted by Null

that part stood out. not entirly correct. Many games have gotten multiplayer right. Quake, UT, Battlefield....

the difference is the sheer number of people. more people that are there, more mods are made to keep it alive, which draws in more people. once you get that cycle going, one of the few and only ways to break it is to bring in the sequal which often snaps the community into 2. oens who like the new sequal better, and one who dont.

Thats one of UT's main problems right now. UT04 was a great game, but theres many stubbern people who refuse to switch from the original UT, which cuts the amount of people in half. meaning less mods, and when a mod does come out, less people to play and keep it running.

and that and 80% of the 70,000 playing HL are playing the CS mod. it would be interesting to see what woulda happened to HL without that mod.

The original Quake was good, I'll admit, but I dislike UT. But then that's just me. Battlefield is fun as well, but it's a blatant rip-off of Tribes, and if I want to play a game on that scale, I'll bust out Tribes, or just wait a few more days till Halo 2 comes out.

Quake reigned multiplayer king for a while, with it's awesome rocket launcher.....because let's admit it, Quake's single player sucked. Quake 2 lacked multiplayer, which really gave Half-Life the opening to take over multiplayer on the Internet, and I think that is why Half-Life took off. And by the time Quake 3 and UT came out, the genre had already begin to shift towards more realistic gameplay (TFC,CS).

My gripe against Unreal Tournament, and even Quake 3 to avoid biases, is the sheer lack of realism. I'm not saying that I need to be playing a game where every gun can achieve a headshot, but I think it is retarded to run around the map and be able to blow someone up with every single gun. To be fair, I was hooked on Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 for a few months, but I eventually made the transition back to Half-Life to focus on TFC again. Unreal Tournament probably beat Quake 3 as far as balance went, because you could rip someone to pieces with just about every gun in Quake 3, and Unreal Tournament attempted to incorporate some balance with the guns. I probably wouldn't be so against UT if it wasn't for UT2K3/4, which I think is a horrible sequel that really lacks ambition, aside from the graphic power. I thought that UT2K3 and 4 both dumbed down gameplay of the original game, and brought very little to the table.

Unreal Tournament is still fun on the occasional LAN, but there is no way I would make that my multiplayer game of choice........

Battlefield can be fun, but it's by no means an original game, and I think it receives way to much credit for what it does.

I do respect the fact that it took the ideas of Tribes, and made them more mainstream however, because Tribes had a pretty narrow fan-base.

But hey.....who am I to complain about Battlefield. Halo leeched off of Tribes too......so yeah. That's been the gaming industry lately.......recycling ideas over and over again.

*sighs

[Null]

Tribes wasnt original either. and IMO, battlefield does much more on its own then tribes did. battlefield did indeed take things from tribes, but tribes took things from other games, and newer tribes games borrow even more.

aside from original game elemets, idea's for this and that. All FPS games are a rip off of the first FPS game. They all take the same idea and add thier own twists. nothing can be done about that.

As for UT series, 2k3 wasnt much a sequal and was dissapointing, but 2k4 is very much better then the original. and had some very good creative idea's put into it. the whole Onslaught idea in 2k4 will have many games taking that idea for years to come. (only certain attack points open at a certain time.)

But ya, its very easy to go around each FPS game and point out what they took from another, and another. but most add thier own ways to make the taken idea's thier own in a way.