Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
3rd International Volunteer Brigade (Hexbear gaming discord)
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or just talk about the games in general. Is Black Mesa better than the original Half-Life? What is the best Half-Life game? Why are the games still so good? How about the post-soviet setting? How about how cool it is that most of the main enemies are cops and troops?
It's funny to go back to it now after years of player characters that can mantle and slide and so on and find yourself as a little quake guy just vibing out. pingin around the environment like a perfectly capsuloid collider with only ladders and vehicles as your intimate companions
The movement and gunplay are the main parts that feel like it has aged, and not in a bad way. You move so much slower in modern games. Maybe it stands out more in the half life games because you're a quake guy in tiny realistic corridors
Im old. Got HL1 on a CD ROM IIRC. Amazed the first time I saw a bullet hole in a wall behind where I had shot. That was so revolutionary!
When HL2 came out it was one of the first games I bought on steam. Took the day off work. The dystopian beginning, the cop telling you to 'pick it up' as he knocks the can off the garbage. Just so ground breaking. Terrifying. Don't even get me started on ravenholm lol.
When Alyx came out, again day off work and again a total light year ahead of all video games in terms of content and interaction. The only thing missing is Alyx 2 goddamnit. Gabe I know you're on lemmy, throw us a bone!
Would be interesting to see gaben on hexbear
I want to believe
The creatures from Xen had a right to defend themselves
Episode 2 is the only well designed game of the three HL2 games.
Half Life Alyx has way better writing than any previous games in the series.
It's really not a big mystery why Episode 3 never came out and it's good that it didn't. Whatever they'll make next in the HL universe will be better than whatever they would have put out in 2010 or whenever.
It's really not a big mystery why Episode 3 never came out and it's good that it didn't
Gabe himself even said that there was no reason for Episode 3 to exist at the time. They could have easily made another episode to wrap up the story but couldn't come up with any particularly unique ideas for it
black mesa made some weird decisions I don't like. For example, they removed the detail of Nihilanth third hand being grafted for seemingly no reason. And the canonization of Eli and Kleiner felt like pointless fan-service
And the canonization of Eli and Kleiner felt like pointless fan-service
That was already retconned by Valve in Half Life 2:
Now, let's see. The last time I saw you, I sent you up for help after the resonance cascade.
good point. I forgot about this dialogue
The first time a fast zombie attacks you in Ravenholm is the scariest thing that's ever happened to me in a video game.
Episode 1 stinks
My hot take is that the episodes were when Half-Life fell off. It should have been a direct sequel called Half-Life 3 and there should have been no episodes. Gameplay wise Episode 1 is kinda mediocre and Episode 2 is better, but neither have the cohesive themes, pacing, and story of Half-Life 2.
Yeah but they added bloom! I did like episode 2 a fair bit and I come back to it often. It wasn't revolutionary like the original HL2.
Oh and fuck manhacks worst enemy ever put into a game and on my shitty celeron laptop them exploding would drop me to like 1fps.
Another take is I actually love HL Alyx a whole lot more I don't think any gaming experience can top that one. I was kinda annoyed with all the people who complained it wasn't like bonerworks and didn't contain full 360 cock simulation or whatever I think they made a VR game so accessible basically anybody can play it.
Jeff section was top tier, it doesn't replay well cos ofc its the same thing every time but for a one off experience nothing has really hit the same heights of genuine fear for me. Also helps I'm tiny so Jeff towered above me I actually had to take the headset off cos i was crying 
Oh and my favourite way of replaying HL2 is on the original xbox it just feels more cool to me
I didn't play the first one when it came out and feel like I kind of missed the boat on it. I grew up on Quake and Quake II and played HL2 at release so I never feel like going back to HL1 like the others
I thought Xen was mostly great.
I thought that the original version of Interloper was better than the one in Black Mesa. Still not great, but it was shorter. Also, the original On A Rail is fine.
I've only played Half-Life 2 and it's good but clearly been Seinfeld-Effected by the industry in the twenty-odd years since release, to the point where I'd feel weird recommending it outside of "it's very cheap and pretty good but nothing jaw dropping"
The gun play in HL2 is weak. Without the gravity gun making up for it the rest of the arsenal is lackluster. The pistol has terrible sound design for a gun you are forced to use at anything medium range. Puff puff puff.
Otherwise it has a fun campaign. Drags in a few places with the urgency of the plot getting slowed down by vehicle segments.
The urban combat against the alien overlords and their cop minions as you spearhead a rebellion against them was great, though.
The Pistol sound really bad and it looks like a toy gun
Hot Take: HL2 is probably one of my favorite games ever, but the time gap between then end of HL1 and the beginning of HL2 feels very much like "our game made too much money and so we had to make up some shit" in a way that is less a continuation and more like an entirely different story.
But HL3 confirmed, its coming, i'm camping outside valve headquarters already.
Honestly, I'm a slop enjoyer. My favorite parts were the Gearbox spin-offs to Half Life 1. They were short and fun. I won't say they're better than Half Life 2, but if I have to tell you what I expect to replay from the series the next time I do...
Opposing Force was my fav
HL3 confirmed
Isnt that a HL2 screenshot? Anyway that water level in HL2 fucked my FPS as a kid and I never got past it.
I tried playing HL2 once, got to the airboat section near the start and then got so motion sick from it for multiple hours that I have accidentally Pavlovian conditioned myself to never want to try another Half-Life game again
I love HL1 and the expansion packs, and I also love the many mods that the HL community developed over the years. I really dislike how HL2 makes Gordon/You a messiah like figure, and the vehicle sessions suck. Other than that I think HL2 is a really good game with some fun mechanics.
I played HL2 for the first time when it was free recently. It was fun, definitely dated, but not in a bad way. Valve really cooked with the gravity gun.
HL1 > HL2
The Half-Life games are Fine™ but I wouldn't really recommend them to anybody today.
Make me, punk 
Using ladders in half life sometimes can get very annoying.
heheh crowbar go FWAH FWOH SWOOF WHUUF BONK BANGK DONK PTANMPF
Love the Half-Life games, although I definitely prefer 2 over 1. I dunno, I've never really got the takes that the games are outdated, I really wish I lived in the world where they were because I'd fucking love to have more games like this, but I really don't see anything that has surpassed HL2 (I can see it to some extent with HL1), there's just something about it. Even with the whole boomer shooter trend, most games seem to be taking inspiration from the earlier generation of shooters, few true HL2-style games around.
Black Mesa's alright, but I really don't like a lot of the changes that were made. Never understood the On A Rail hate (especially when, like, Residue Processing exists, no way On A Rail is worse than endless fucking conveyor belts), I actually genuinely love all the vehicle segments and wish more games had that "road-trip where you occasionally stop to explore a little or deal with something blocking the path" vibe, Metro: Last Light had its own On A Rail style section and it was pretty good. So that getting cut down was kind of annoying, and Xen I just really don't like - it drags way worse than the original ever did, that one cable puzzle just comes up again and again, and aesthetically, while the whole space jungle thing is kind of neat (and the "Sauron-eye tower as landmark to indicate how close you are to the end" is really cool, although of course HL2 did that with the Citadel too to some extent, but I just love shit like that, give me less minimaps with objective markers and more massive towers for me to inch towards), the barren wasteland (or really, little pockets of floating mini-wastelands) of the original Xen makes it feel so much more unique, and, well, alien. I've had several Black Mesa playthroughs which just fizzle out at that point - maybe the final section is better, but I've played through it so few times because my spirit was drained by cable puzzles that I can't really comment on what happens there.
How about other mods? There's just so much amazing stuff, HL1 in particular basically has several extra expansion packs thanks to mods - Echoes, Field Intensity and Delta Particles are all amazing and I would pretty much consider them on the level of the actual expansions (maybe even better than Blue Shift, tbh), maybe short of voice acting but that's understandable for free mods. Plenty of great stuff for HL2 as well.
They should've put melee akin to Dark Messiah in 2 it, it works so good!
Half Life 1 & 2 are the most overrated games ever, rivaled only by Metal Gear
why?
I think it was the first fps with a decent physics engine so for over a decade it got treated like the second coming of christ. It was a good game, don't get me wrong but I don't think the game was near as meaningful as the engine as far as its impact.
I'd agree on the last part but I'd also claim that both HLs acting as tech demos for their respective engine does make them incredibly important and meaningful as games. Like it all seems sort of trite now downstream of what happened, but I don't think it would've happened if they didn't do it
The first game was okay. Never got around to playing any of the others, they looked pretty generic.
I like source engine games a lot but when I tried HL2 recently I didn't like it at all. It just makes me run through messy, confusing environments trying to find the one place I'm allowed to go next whilst I'm constantly being shot. Horrible, stressful gameplay. I liked the can thing though.