Huh, interesting… I guess I could see it, but I never quite thought of Gordon Freeman as the Jason Bourne type. I always considered him more of a Prince of Persia (1, 2 and 3) type: an unwitting participant who ended up in a situation he hadn’t trained for, who was lucky as much as he was skilled. HL2 empowers Gordon quite a bit, but in the original I always imagined him as a poor sod who happened to be both highly intelligent and highly lucky, who had the dubious honor of being the most physically fit of his fellow pasty, underground-dwelling scientist brethren.
Not to say that he didn’t kick all kinds of ass in the original, because he did. But I always felt that his participation was significantly less enthusiastic than that of his contemporary protagonists.
All true, and I agree … he wasn’t an elite soldier and was mostly just lucky and a little more fit than the rest of the dopes around him. Something still tells me that people would still want to see Gordon kick some ass with a crowbar. I can already picture the scene as he is being stalked down a darkened Black Mesa corridor, dimly lit with red emergency lights and little white strobes rhythmically pulsating as a headcrab sees him in the darkness and slowly ambles toward him. He backs against a wall and looks down, noticing a crowbar lying on the ground next to shards of broken glass being showered by a broken water pipe from the sprinkler system. He slowly bends down and reaches across the glass to get ahold of it, dragging it back towards him across the tile with a slow metal-on-ceramic-and-glass scraping sound. The steel resonates in the darkness with a crisp “clang” as he picks it up off the floor. He eyes the crowbar and readies it in his hand, turns back to the corridor where the headcrab was slowly crawling his way and … it’s nowhere in sight. It has disappeared and, in classic jump-scare style, the music slows to a stop as Gordon walks out in the strobe-lit corridor, crunching on broken glass sitting in little puddles of water, his crowbar raised and ready to strike, when all of a sudden …
Oh, surely! I’ve gone and gotten carried away with cinematic fanboy dreams again. Did this remind anyone of the infamous Med Lab Facehugger scene?
to Anamnesis: Eh, I’m sure there a plenty of good reasons behind why videogame movies are still in the hell-scape that plagued comicbook movie adaptations until the last decade, but I’m still in shock over the fact that the man most responsible for the Doom movie, which had none of the characteristics of the actual game Doom, has somehow been tapped to make a new Street Fighter flick.
If you f***-up a Doom adaptation, maybe you shouldn’t get any more videogame adaptation jobs! Is that unreasonable? It’s an action series about marines being sent to a lost colony on Mars and discovering a portal to some sort of Hell-scape. How the heck do you fail at that? It’s like taking a swing and missing at tee-ball!
…
As for Gordon’s capabilities? I always chalked it up him being young(er), like early to mid-thirties, and stuck at a military research facility in the middle of nowhere. What’s he gonna do with his spare time? Hang out with the security &/or troops on base. Probably learns how to handle guns at the firing range, maybe jogs around the perimeter to kill time. I realize it’s a stretch, but it always seemed to me that in this day and age at least one scientist out of a couple dozen would be somewhat athletic.
Umm… yes, I’ve played Episode One and plan to follow the series to its conclusion. I’ve heard that they’re going to continue doing episodes for a good while, but I didn’t know they’ve completely dropped the possibility of a third game. Cite?
And I know why they say they’re keeping Gordon silent, but I still think it’s lazy storytelling. Gordon not talking is on the same level as a character saying “it’s complicated” when faced with a tough question. Compelling maybe, but also a cop-out. The only time a playable character should remain silent is when it represents a generic, nameless “you.” But that isn’t the case - Gordon has a name and a backstory. He isn’t supposed to be the player’s avatar, so he can have a voice. Half-Life isn’t alone in this; Bioshock pulls the same bullshit.
I’m not saying that Half-Life is a bad game by any means. I think it’s one of the best, if not best FPS series of all time. It’s not without its flaws, though.
Gordon isn’t godlike. Take away his ability to quicksave, and he’s headcrab meat. My first death in HL1 was right after the Black Mesa incident, when a lab machine sprung from the wall and landed on my head. That’s how far the real Gordon would have gotten.
Gabe Newell talks to Eurogamer. That’s the interview the wikipedia article cites for it, but I seem to remember it popping up once or twice elsewhere. Best I could do though.
I don’t disagree with you that they ought to just bite the bullet and write the voice of Gordon, I was just saying what their reasoning for it was. I’ve seen more than a few people express a preference for it, actually. But yeah, I’d like to actually have him interact more with the other characters.
My only other criticism is that I also would like to see games like Half-Life and Halo start to incorporate the manuevers (pressing against walls, peeking around corners, leaning around corners to fire, etc) that have become standard in tactical shooters. Provided they don’t do it in a manner like Gears of War did. I know that once you’ve learned it, you can generally do it without a lot of problems, but it’s a damn awkward control scheme and too prone to stupid mistakes imho.
Other than those two things, I love the Half-Life games.
It’s an immersion device. System Shock did the same thing, probably because they didn’t have a choice. It ended up working and that’s probably where Valve got the idea. I think the concept is that the player inserts his owns dialogue in his mind. Or, as when jumped by a poison headcrab, out loud in the playroom. It doesn’t fit for everyone, but it’s a conscious design decision and it definitely works for me.
Just want to pop my head in and thank muldoonthief for the Concerned link. Like the OP I finally got to play HL2 only recently – took me that long to get a PC with the right specs – and I loved it. So I’ve come late to Concerned too, and my goodness, it is HYSTERICAL! Chris Livingston did an amazing job with the technical, artistic, humorous and writerly aspects of the strip. How does one guy get so good at so many different things? I actually got to feel some sympathy with idiotic Gordon Frohman.
Also hilarious are his “To the Death” bouts in the website’s “Extras” section. This is where he uses Garry’s Mod to pit various NPCs against one another. My favorite was three Isaac Kleiners and three Gordon Frohmans (or “Frohmen” as Livingston calls them) against sixteen antlions. Livingston’s play-by-play here. Damn funny.
Anyway I loved HL and HL2, and have played Lost Coast and Ep1. I’ve yet to find the courage to play multiplayer, unfortunately.
Any favorite single-player mods out there you guys might recommend?
I actually started not to like HL2 after a while. It wasn’t that it was bad, but that it really didn’t stack up to more modern FPS games. Many of them have better stage design, more flexibility in choosuing weapons, and increased RPG elements. HL2 isn’t bad, but it’s just not quite as good as HL1 in pure action. Call it a case of being “the best of the old school not matching the new school.”
Oh for goodness’ sake… I just got past the turret sequence in Entanglement, where you and three crappy turrets have to hold off oodles of grenade-wielding, body-check happy Overwatch? It was a neat idea, but it played as if someone had intentionally designed it to exemplify every outstanding issue the game had with clunky controls and the awkward grabbing/moving/throwing interface.
