No, it doesn’t matter. Blue Shift doesn’t really add anything to the story. We do, however learn that…
[SPOILER for Blue Shift]
Some people manage to escape from Black Mesa.
And HL2 is freakin’ awesome!!! It defenitely lives up to the hype. I’m only up to the “Route Canal” section, but already I can tell that this game is well-polished. It’s got atmosphere up the wazoo. Really, really good game.
As great as the gravity gun is, it’s odd how poorly done it is in some areas. The collision detection isn’t great and it would be fun to pull something from across the room as a baddie is coming at you and have it hit him. Also: Can you not spin the object around to, say, turn a barrel right side up? That is really annoying. I’ve broken a few needed tables from throwing it up in the air too many times.
Got it yesterday and played up to the “Ravenholm” level in one sitting. It is brilliant, worth all the wait and the hype. The sense of dread and desperation in City 17 was palpable, from the faces and body language of the NPCs to the decrepit playground equipment. Racing through the canals was more exciting than the vast majority of hollywood chase scenes. Various “puzzles” feel like an organic part of the game rather than something random or tacked-on. I’m glad they didn’t explain everything in the game intro, I like picking up on stuff through conversations and on bits of reading material along the way.
Valve got one thing right which seemed to escape the Doom 3 developers: the game is actually FUN. Not just fun, a friggin’ blast! Leave aside the great textures and lighting, I had a better time in HL2 playing catch with “Dog” than I did in the entire Doom 3 game. I’m looking forward to finishing the game just so I can play it again.
No, you can’t rotate objects, at least directly. It’s a gun, not a surgical tool. You’ll just have to be creative. 
The gravity gun as taken from Black Mesa East has certain restrictions put on it to keep it from being TOO powerful. I’ve not had any problems with collision detection myself: that might have something to do with CPU power though. I do know that there are cvars which change the collision detection to make certain things that would otherwise pass through each other not pass through each other, at the expense of CPU cycles.
Trust me though: the gravity gun is the fucking bomb. Wait till you get to the end of the game, then come back and let me know if you agree.
You’re killin’ me, Apos. I wanna get to the end so badly. On the other hand, I don’t want it to end!
Question: (weapon spoiler)
What’s the deal with the secondary on the Pulse Rifle? I haven’t had enough ammo to really test it out. I can’t tell, does it charge up if you hold m2? Best way to use it?
It’s not even that. It’s an industral tool used in a creative fashion. Kinda like fighting with a spot welder. Or a crowbar. 
Re the gravity gun: (eh, spoilerbox, what the hell)
[spoiler]It’s cool using it in some clever strategic way to get past a part, and then I wonder just how clever I am. That is, did Valve intended for you to beat some segment using that strategy? For example against those sentry guns in Nova Prospekt, picking up a phatty filing cabinet and using it as a shield as you walk up to the sentries. And then, WHOMP!, you bowl it over using the very thing protecting you. I tried once using a mattress to do the same thing and the physics were unbelievable. The thing was flapping wildly as it absorbed the autogun fire. I swear I could feel it pushing back against me.
Anyway, this is obviously an intended use, but it’s cool how it makes me feel all smart for employing it. [/spoiler]
Well the first chapters were absolutely amazing, then it got progressively worse and worse down to an absolutely abysmal ending. Hardly the game of the century, though I’d be willing to give it November. I understand why they had to cram all the good stuff in the beginning, given the hype, but it really leaves a sour aftertaste for me now that I’m done 
Final 3-4 chapters include:
-Annoying sidekicks that do nothing but get in your way and takes 10 seconds to kill a headcrab (yes, I timed it). And boy do these guys EVER get in your way.
-Jumping puzzles galore
-Infinitely respawning hordes of the exact same enemy doing kamikaze runs directly into your grav gun.
-Said grav gun being your only weapon for the entire two final chapters
-Final boss that doesn’t even shoot back.
-Insultingly unsatisfactory ending. No story development, good guys may or may not have won, the chick may or may not die, hints at possible explanations in HL3 instead
Basically, it’s a shot that rebounds: any living tissue it touches is vaporized, and you can bank it off walls and such. I don’t think it charges. It’s basically like an alien grenade the same way your conventional machine gun has a grenade.
All I can say is that if you didn’t enjoy the final couple of chapters, FPS gaming is probably wasted on you.
Spoiler for the very end:
[spoiler]The super-grav gun is teh awesome, and decimating hordes of troops with it is precisely the point of that fun. I want to go back and play the game with it again having it from the start.
The idea that there are tons of jumping puzzles at the end is bizarre: all the jumps that there are easy and obvious: not tricky “oops, you picked the wrong millisecond, so you die!” stuff of Xen in HL1. It’s just “keep your ass moving and jumping, hero” type stuff.
The allies never really got in my way, and of coure they move quickly whenever you bump into them: you are supposed to order them around to provide yourself with cover fire, not let them bunch up around you for no purpose. While they generally didn’t last long, they were still fun and atmospheric to have around: a true big battle type experience.
Yes, there is no real final boss: just the gunships. While I guess it might have been fun to destroy some final extra baddy, I don’t exactly feel like it was a huge loss. The whole point of the final chapter is the fact that maybe Breen is right: maybe what you are doing is, again, like in HL1, perhaps a lot more morally questionable than you’d realized. Tearing apart Breen’s machine isn’t meant to be a challenge, but a slaughter that’s slightly uncomfortable with lots of chances and warnings about what you are doing perhaps dooming the world.
And the ending. I like it. Would you really want a “Gordon shoots G-man in the face and has teh sex0r with Alyx while everyone cheers!” ending? For a HALF-LIFE game? That’s just not how Valve tells stories: at no point is someone supposed to jump out and explain everything to you: you learn about your world gradually, through inference and observation and piecing together snatches of conversation that you overhear, sometimes on just the margins. The ending of the game is all about raising the stakes: the G-Man is definately something more than just a government flunky with a teleporting suitcase. The events going on around you are in fact something much deeper and scarier than you had even before realized. Answering a lot of these larger questions outright with some dumb “yep, he’s an alien gas!” would be a letdown: as it is, the mystery is intriguing. And yeah, it’s a cliffhanger. Valve said it would be, right from the start. Did you do the right thing? Are you a hero or a genocidal fool? Humanity’s savior, or its undoing? Leaving that chilling and troubling question open is preciely the HL way, and any pat answer like “teh sex w/ Alyx!” would have been a letdown.
[/spoiler]
I just finished the game.
I am…in…awe. Speechless.
Now that I can go back and read Apos’s spoiler box, I agree with everything 100%. The ending was perfectly suitable. No disappointment whatsoever.
Re: the last two levels/chapters:
[spoiler]The super grav gun is unbeliveable. I felt like a GOD. Flinging bodies, disintegrating people. Suddenly these burly combine dudes (esp the white ones), who I’ve been battling all game, are nothing more than than fodder. Definitely adds to the feeling as Breen tells you about all the damage you’ve done and you question your morals. Am I like Anakin brutally slaughtering all the sand people?
[/spoiler]
The adventure is over. There is no more.
Back to Counter-Strike: Source.
I touched on this in my own HL2 thread (plug) but what concerns me about the ending is that [spoiler] it doesn’t really conclude anything from Half-Life, it just adds more loose ends. Which is fine, if they eventually resolve them somehow. I’m not disappointed in the ending to Half Life 2, because it doesn’t really have an ending. But the longer these sorts of stories go unresolved, the greater the chance of the ultimate resolution sucking hard. Remember the series finale to The X-Files? That’s what I’m worried about.
I’m also not terribly thrilled at the prospect of waiting until 2010 to find out how this ends. I hope they wrap up this story in a sequel using the same engine, and not make us wait for Half Life 3. Actually, I’d really like to see Valve turn their attention to a whole new property, instead of always returning to the same well over and over. I’d like to see what happens when they turn their formidable talents to somethng different.[/spoiler]
It does actually make a lot of things in HL make sense though.
It explains who the Xen aliens and final boss probably were, and it explains in part why they were attacking us. What it doesn’t explain is the who and the why behind it all, though again, HL2 gives us a heck of a lot more tantilizing hints, as well as raising the stakes even higher than they seemed before. And we known there IS some other race/things behind it all, which explains a lot of the crazy things Nilihanth said in HL1. We don’t know where the Gman fits in though, as usual
First attempt at a SDMB CS:S game server at 9pm eastern tonight (40 minutes)… see details here
Ok, I finished the other day. The last two levels kick ass and were flat out fun. The ending was “eh” - oh boy, didn’t I just go through this with Halo 2? The game was exceptional in some ways - NPCs, attention to detail, levels, and atmosphere, but it’s missing something that I can’t quite put my finger on. I think it’s that I just couldn’t get into the main character this time. They didn’t really flesh him out, and it felt more like directing Freeman rather than being him - if that makes sense.
Anyone know the code to get the super grav gun? I’d like to play with that the whole way through.
I’m still only about 1/2 hour into the game and I think its the best fps game I’ve ever played.
I did have a couple of questions:
The game stutters a lot for me. My system isn’t the highest -end but its not mediocre either and i bought it brand new <6 months ago. Can someone provide a non-msg board link or suggestions on how to reduce this?
And…
How concerned should I be about the annoying little machines that fly around and snap your picture. So far I’ve been making an effort to eliminate them as soon as possible thinking that might reduce the response time of the enemy forces. Am i wasting my time?
JCorre, there’s supposed to be a patch available [valve guy Erik Johnson]no later than tomorrow[/valve guy Erik Johnson] to fix the stuttering problem. Check Steampowered for more information. There’s a 67 page thread concerning this issue over at the half-life2.net forums.
As for the flying cameras…I was doing the same thing but it didn’t really seem to make much difference. I still destroy them if I see them of course, just on principal y’know.
I just got through with HL2 and liked the story mainly because I dug around for every possible piece of information and listened to every conversation… But what I really liked were the characters. I certainly hope that Alyx, Barney, Drs. Vance and Kleiner survived the collapse of the Citadel… I thought they were really well done.
It did lose points for lack of a payoff…
I was really wanting to see the Citadel fall. I wanted to see the Combine forces lead through the streets in front of a cheering public, and the characters who’d suffer so much finally get to be happy. Even if Gordon got whisked away on the next “contract” set up by the G-man, it would have been nice to see the other characters stories resolved. So it loses a couple points for that aspect, but I still thought it was a really fantastic game.
And… Be sure to stay tuned through the end credits… Just like some movies, there’s a small but amusing clip at the conclusion.
EZ
[SPOILER]The first kind of flying camera you see may not alert nearby forces of your presence - at least, it’s not very obvious if it does. I destroy them anyway though, because they sometimes have suit chargers inside.
Later in the game, there are larger, white-bodied cameras with miniature searchlights. When these snap a picture, nearby forces (like striders or gunships) will emit a roar and come chasing after you. Sometimes this is actually useful to you - if you haven’t got a clear shot at a strider from your cover, let a camera snap your picture, and the strider will move - maybe into a better position for rocket.[/SPOILER]
Was anyone else surprised at how much music and how many sound effects were recycled from the first Half-Life? The steam “Ksh-kshhhhhhh” sound, the alarm klaxon, and many other environmental sounds seemed awfully familiar. And many of the action music themes seemed to be unchanged.
Not that I’m complaining, but I would have expected everything to be new after such a long gestation.
I finished the game on an 800MHz Pentium III with an ATI Radeon 9600XT video card. This is far below the “required” 1.2GHz CPU spec, and as a result, the game is very much CPU bound. (I had planned to upgrade when HL2 came out, but my financial situation has changed since I got my HL2 voucher.) On the upside, I can run the game at a fairly high resolution, with special effects like 4xAA and 4xAF, with essentially no speed penalty. It looks amazing.
Most of the game is very playable on this system, with framerates (according to the built-in framerate display) in the 20s or 30s. There are portions of the game where the framerate never goes above the teens, which is bad, but not completely unusable. Then there are one or two scenes where the framerate hits 5-7FPS or so for several minutes at a time. Those scenes are hard to get through, as aiming is nearly impossible and even moving accurately is difficult. IMHO, that wasn’t enough of a drawback to ruin the experience as a whole, though.