HL2: Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 go live at midnight PST. Post your impressions here.
Those who have been playing the TF2 beta already know that it rocks. I’m most excited about Portal, even more than Episode 2.
Wait, midnight PST on the 10th? I thought it was the 20th! …but I have dinner plans tomorrow night. And work. All day! :eek:
Not released here for another week, alas. I’m with you in that Portal looks more interesting than Episode 2 (though i’m looking forward to that too).
However, since i’ve preordered and already have them, I have a totally free gift version of Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode 1 to give away to anyone that wants them. All you need to get is Steam.
anyone got a cite on the midnight PST as opposed to EST?
I don’t feel like waiting up till 3am, but so far TF2 is very impressive (though my god, its taken forever!) and I’m excited about Portal.
They used PST for the HL2 release.
And we’re off. Time to go visit my pal Gordon.
Play Narbacular Drop and you got Portal for free. Not as spiffy looking and no gun but same idea and free (actually I think they hired the person who did Narbacular to work on Portal…might be wrong about that though).
Personally Narbacular Drop gave me a headache. Found it more annoying than enjoyable although I’ll admit it was clever.
That’s in shops, no? My copy, bought through Steam, is decrypting as I type.
Edit: and yes, the Narbacular Drop guys were bought out and employed by Valve. I’d imagine they’re feeling quite happy right now.
Steam files decrypting in Ireland as well through Steam.
Hurray up! I want to get a game in before lunchtime is over.
Yep, they’re decrypting for me too. Hooray for being wrong!
Portal ending spoilers;Best. Ending. Ever. More games should end with the evil/insane A.I. serenading/taunting you. Now I just need to get an mp3 of that song.
Requested item from the spoiler above:
Don’t download it, if you haven’t beaten portal.
Thanks a lot! 
Yep. Portal is officially Fucking Brilliant.
[spoiler]Hilarious was the last thing I was expecting it to be, though.
“Remember when I was all like ‘we’re going to burn you’ and you were all like ‘no way’?”
Awesome.[/spoiler]
Portal is making my head hurt, but in kind of a good way. Going to have to be careful walking around my house since I’ve gotten used to walking through walls whenever I please.
Crap. You mean I have to get ANOTHER game?
I’m downloading Episode 2 at 600 kb/s and it’s still gonna take awhile. We’re finally going to be able to see if VALVe has any idea what they’re doing with the story direction or if they’re just making things up as they go along.
Definitely going to check out Portal later…
Well I stayed up all night playing it because I am amazing like that and WOW! It did not disappoint. The ending was not only extremely disturbing and expertly executed but it also changes the dynamic of the series. Also, they pulled the curtain aside to reveal the perspective of the G-man…just a little bit, but what we see is more than enough.
The HL2 saga is continually carried on the back of Alyx Vance’s spectacular voice acting and facial expressions. It’s been a long time since a video game has made me feel so connected to a digital character, but VALVe has pulled it off again. HL2, Ep1, and Ep2 would be hollow without her presence. All of the characters, from Eli to DOG, are bursting with personality and fan love, but Alyx is the corner stone. I hope VALVe is paying her handsomely.
On a lesser note, a new addition has been made: “achievements.” These are little objectives you can do throughout the game and I think it’ll add some decent replay value. They range from the expected (kill x amount of enemies by driving them over) to the absurd (launch a gnome statue into outer space). I’m not sure if a reward is given but I’m just glad to see something like this added either way. Except for the one which wants me to crush 300 some worm things. That’s just gonna make me want to dig out my eyeballs with an ice cream scoop.
I haven’t played through with the developer commentary yet, but if it’s as good as Ep1 then it’ll be a must see. Or must hear.
Minor/humorous points (tiny spoilers, not that big a deal):
[spoiler]1.We see Lamar towards the end of the game. He is playing around the rocket. Before it launches, either Kleiner or the new scientist (Magnusson, sp?) notes there’s an extra eight pounds but it’s dismissed as being within acceptable parameters. LAMAR WAS ON THE ROCKET! HE’S IN OUTER SPACE! Poor Lamar…Kleiner will be crushed. I hope he’s OK up there…head crabs can live in acid and on Xen, so maybe a vacuum won’t be too bad. It’d be hilarious if we ever go into space in ep3 and Lamar randomly comes out of somewhere to save the day.
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There’s a good scene where you and Alyx meet up with Eli where he says that, you know, since the repression field is off and women can become pregnant that it might be a good time for a certain couple to get busy. Much uncomfortable laughter follows.
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A Vorti in a lab coat? Works for me.
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Paraphrasing, “Me? Why, I took out 10 or 20 Hunters a day with my bare hands back in city 17. I just punched ‘em out. Yep.”
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I like the new blood effects. Way better than the old ones.[/spoiler]
Large spoilers of my favorite bits of the game:
[spoiler]1. When Alyx got stabbed in the belly and then thrown around like a ragdoll by the Hunter I was like “WTF?!” It just totally surprised me. I’m really happy she didn’t die.
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Knew it from the previews of course, but it’s just good they finally made us go through an antlion hive. Although, no ant lion queen…but the hive itself was pretty nice, very pretty, and the acid spewing enemies were fun to battle. At one point a guardian was about an inch behind me as I dove into a hole and that messed with my heart beat a little bit. Also, I had a little bit too much fun manipulating some of the bloody, defleshed human skeletons and I have pictures to prove it.
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That huge fight with the two guys to protect the Vorti healing Alyx…wow. Lots of action and bonus comic relief. Plus an appropriate Bush reference: “You think we misunderestimated?!”
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The woodsy outdoor areas were gorgeous, great sky textures. I love me some overcast. Some rain would’ve been good here and there, but oh well.
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The part where you fight the Hunters for the first time…scary.
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I had a lot of fun driving out with Alyx. When I first got the car I was messing around, looked over at Alyx, and she winked at me. I don’t know if that always happens towards the very start or if it’s totally random but it was a nice touch. I tried to replicate it later but no go.
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When you’re just chilling in a little village and there’s a massive ambush of like 15+ soldiers and 3 or 4 hunters and you have to run into a house, that was well executed. It was scary fighting the hunters in the basement since there was hardly any room to hide.
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I like the hunters in general. Every game like this needs a big scary enemy which makes you conserve ammo for the more powerful guns (magnum, bow and arrow, and then RPG). I thought hl2 and ep1 in general missed that sort of dynamic.
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Helicopter fight was good, it reminded me of a Zelda boss actually. Helicopters are familiar, the bombs are familiar, but it took me a minute or two to figure it out because the situation was unique – you never had the opportunity (or reason) to pick up the bombs with the g-gun and you never faced a helo without the means to destroy it with either the RPG or a big ass machine gun.
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Dog vs. strider?! I’ve seen everything now. Definitely a moral booster.
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The last major battle was heart pumping. There’s something bad ass about throwing a bomb on the back of your car and then speeding over a hill to show the striders what’s up.
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Combine advisors are psychic pokemon. Which means they own everyone except DOG, apparently.
[/spoiler]
Major plot spoilers which affect the series, do not highlight unless you’ve beaten it!:
[spoiler]Well, what did this game tell us?
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Portal and HL take place in the same universe. I haven’t played Portal yet, but the Borealis is apparently a major plot element from it.
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The G-man is a shrewd, calculating bastard. He’s seemingly not on our side or against our side, either. We don’t really know who he’s working for. He saved Alyx in the Black Mesa catastrophe and the Citadel explosion against the wishes of his superiors, which is good, but he must “balance it out” by assassinating Eli Vance. And the only reason he saved her is because he has some sort of plan and design for her. That’s bad.
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Alyx is still wholly unaware of the existence of the G-man. The G-man whispers something into her ear as the Vorts save her and later, towards the end, when Alyx and Eli are talking Eli is shocked to hear her say “unforseen consequences” because that’s exactly what the G-man said to him in the lead up to HL1 when the G-man gave him that Xen crystal which started this whole sheebang off.
I might have to play through it again and play close attention to the dialogue, but does this imply also that the G-man DOES NOT want to see the Borealis destroyed? That he wants to use it for some nefarious purpose, damn the consequences for Earth?
- That’s the other bombshell, of course – the G-man has been visiting Eli just as much and even longer than he has you.
So the combine Advisors who killed Eli…did they get help from the G-man? It seems heavily implied. How else could he “balance things out”? Or maybe he just let it happen, promising the Combine he would not interfere like he did when the Citadel’s core exploded at the end of HL2 vanilla
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The Combine now know everything that Eli knows, which means everything about the resistance, as was foreshadowed earlier. And in HL2 vanilla, too.
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The Combine are completely cut off from Earth, for now.
[/spoiler]
Wherein I predict the general flow of Ep3:
Well, it seems kinda obvious. Alyx is going to be a woman scorned and out for revenge in the worst way. Eli Vance’s final wish was for the Borealis to be destroyed, not used. Therefore, after they rescue Judith, that will be their goal. Probably. Unless the G-man has something to say about it?
Like the OP, I stayed up all night playing it the moment it was unlocked and I’d also had it preloaded. Well, that’s not true, I actually don’t know whether the OP stayed up all night, but I did stay up until 2AM CST for the unlock. I actually went to bed early after I got home on Tuesday, woke up around midnight and stayed up all night playing through to the end (not counting the break I took to play through Portal). By the time I was all finished it was Wednesday afternoon. How did I do all this and not end up being a wreck at work on Wednesday? Simple really, I took a sick day. Does all this make me more amazing, or just more pathetic? 
Episode Two’s technical improvements combined with the narrative advances make it an incredibly progressive chapter, and all the praise is deserved. I suppose it would be a stretch to say that Episode Two is more like a sequel than Episode One, but that’s probably due to the fact that by comparison, it’s certainly fresher because it isn’t “more of the same” in City 17. The new particle-based blood effects look great, though they might be a bit excessive. They reminds me of the movie 300; nothing bleeds that much the second it gets hit with a projectile but alas, this is a game, and it acts as a much better indicator of whether you’ve actually landed a hit.
I can’t say enough about the Hunters. They’re awesome …
[spoiler]Fighting them is more like going against a real player than an AI. You can’t get a drop on them, you can’t hide from them, and it’s virtually impossible to take one down without getting banged up in the process. They make Zombines look like headcrabs by comparison. Hunters are bright enough to jump out of the way of your car as you speed at them, and clever enough to chase you into and/or around a structure with cunning speed. They’re tougher than any other adversary in the HL universe thus far, and are as fun as they are frustrating to take down.
I liked the fact that, like marshmallow mentioned, the Hunters have changed the supply dynamic of the game, making it a regular occurrence to go into hairy situations with much less than a full stock of ammo. For the first time in the HL universe, I was running low on (or completely out of) ammuniiton because of the Hunters and found myself frantically running away from them backwards while desperately tossing things at them with the gravity gun. The sequence in the White Forest Inn shootout had me running all over the house, down into the basement with one set of stairs, and back up using the the other set of stairs in a desperate attempt to throw them off as I panicked over where to get more ammo. I resorted to using the Magnum revolver (a weapon I almost never use) against them several times. Anything that forces me to use that many weapons and resources makes for some damn cool gameplay. Also, the method with which the Hunters were slowly introduced (stalking you around the countryside and peering at you from behind) was enough to make the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.[/spoiler]
I think Valve took some inspiration from, and made reference to, a few movies:
The sentry gun standoff in the mine shafts at the beginning of ‘This Vortal Coil’ reminded me of the action sequences from Aliens, as well as one part in ‘Freeman Pontifex’ where you’re ambushed by a Fast Zombie in a very dark, very quiet warehouse. There’s absolutely no ambient or environmental sound in the warehouse, but you can hear something scuttling in the darkness, knocking into a container or bumping into a box. You just know there’s gonna be a jump scare, and then as you’re crawling underneath a big rack of shelves, it comes lunging out at you from the long end of the tunnel as you’re crouched in the darkness with your flashlight. The scene with Vasquez fleeing in an air duct as an alien came flying towards her instantly came to mind. I also thought the idea of blowing up the giant auto gun in ‘Under The Radar’ seemed like an homage to Star Wars … a giant laser cannon that you have to evade, infiltrate, and toss a bomb into (rather than at) in order to blow it up.
I agree with most of what you had to say in your spoilers, marshmallow, particularly how the motives of the G-Man are slowly starting to take shape. My take on the G-Man?
[spoiler]By his own admission, he “plucked” Alyx from Black Mesa, saving her life despite “objections” from his associates/employers that she served no practical purpose. Perhaps he knew somehow (by travelling through time?) that she was special, and while he states he would’ve liked to silence those objections, doing so was “out of the question” and that he could only ignore them. He realizes that his “investment wasn’t squandered” with Alyx because she’s invaluable in the struggle against the Combine, an entity I believe he’s somehow at odds with. By allowing the death of her father under the guise of “unforeseen consequences”, he’s essentially flipped the kill switch on her. Alyx’s character arc will take a major turn in Episode Three, and I think she’ll become a much different person, perhaps so blinded by rage that she may do something more drastic than we’d expect from her. G-Man probably could have prevented Eli’s death, but why should he when he can use her as another manipulated pawn against the Combine?
He waited until he could fully leverage his investment in Alyx against the Combine. He could have allowed it to happen at any time, so why did he wait until now? Good question, but I think he sees that the Combine is particularly vulnerable now, and he is orchestrating the major players on both sides.
Isn’t G-Man a genius?[/spoiler]
And by the way, Portal is friggin’ brilliant. Thank you so much, Palooka, for the MP3 from the end credits. That song had me grinning from ear to ear.
[spoiler]I realized within the first few levels that there something not quite right about that voice taunting me through the levels and that the facility, in a very creepy way, seemed to have long since been deserted. It’s been awhile since an artificial intelligence reminded me of System Shock’s Shodan, but this one’s passive aggressive comments also reminded me quite a bit of my ex-girlfriend, who could always be relied upon to not say what she actually meant. I also absolutely loved the turrets, whose apologetic comments after being defeated had me giggling.
If you ever get stuck, just remember … if at first you don’t succeed, you fail. And then you don’t get cake.[/spoiler]
Has anyone had any problems with sound in The Orange Box? I played all the way through Portal, and got fairly far through HL2E2. Now, however, when I start either one of them up, I get sound in the menus and in the movies… but no in-game sound at all. It’s driving me nuts.