The great thing about Half-Life 2...
Is that it completely recaptures the feelings you got when you played through the original Half-Life.
Seriously. The game is not so revolutionary in it's technicalities as it is in its execution. What did Half-Life do for the FPS genre, anyway? Sure, I could list a few things, but compared to Wolfenstein 3D or hell, Quake, it didn't actually offer up so much NEW stuff as it did GREAT stuff.
And Half-Life 2's kind of the same way. We've seen some physics in games, we've seen total first-person control with absolutely no breaks before (actually, probably only in Half-Life 1, but Deus Ex came close, too), we've seen vehicle segments break up running-and-gunning (see Halo or maybe Perfect Dark), and we've seen some great animation (Wind Waker, Beyond Good & Evil...).
But no game melds all these aspects - better than they've ever been before and quite probably the best that we'll see in gaming until, well, Half-Life 3 - like this one. The physics are not only there, they're prominently there. You can pick up damn near anything you'd expect a normal human to be able to and throw it a logical distance... and when you get the gravity gun, you can pick up pretty much anything and launch it with a surprising but totally believable force. The character models are unbelievable - it seriously takes some convincing to tell yourself that these are not just ones and zeros in a line of code. Everything from their facial expressions to the realistic voicework would have you believe that this is as real as people get. And, well, the vehicles are at least as interesting as in Halo because you drive them all from a first-, not a third-person perspective. You literally never leave Gordon Freeman's point of view, just as in the first, and that adds a tremendous amount of... magic, or something.
Anyway, yes. It's bigger, it's badder, it's better, it's not perfect. It makes me happy just like Half-Life, it's addictive like Half-Life, and yes, Counter-Strike still manages to be peculiarly fun despite its simplicity. In many ways it's just like Half-Life, but that's also because it is extremely ambitious, innovative, and pulls it all off without a hitch.
Somehow, it all works, and it's all great.
Seriously. The game is not so revolutionary in it's technicalities as it is in its execution. What did Half-Life do for the FPS genre, anyway? Sure, I could list a few things, but compared to Wolfenstein 3D or hell, Quake, it didn't actually offer up so much NEW stuff as it did GREAT stuff.
And Half-Life 2's kind of the same way. We've seen some physics in games, we've seen total first-person control with absolutely no breaks before (actually, probably only in Half-Life 1, but Deus Ex came close, too), we've seen vehicle segments break up running-and-gunning (see Halo or maybe Perfect Dark), and we've seen some great animation (Wind Waker, Beyond Good & Evil...).
But no game melds all these aspects - better than they've ever been before and quite probably the best that we'll see in gaming until, well, Half-Life 3 - like this one. The physics are not only there, they're prominently there. You can pick up damn near anything you'd expect a normal human to be able to and throw it a logical distance... and when you get the gravity gun, you can pick up pretty much anything and launch it with a surprising but totally believable force. The character models are unbelievable - it seriously takes some convincing to tell yourself that these are not just ones and zeros in a line of code. Everything from their facial expressions to the realistic voicework would have you believe that this is as real as people get. And, well, the vehicles are at least as interesting as in Halo because you drive them all from a first-, not a third-person perspective. You literally never leave Gordon Freeman's point of view, just as in the first, and that adds a tremendous amount of... magic, or something.
Anyway, yes. It's bigger, it's badder, it's better, it's not perfect. It makes me happy just like Half-Life, it's addictive like Half-Life, and yes, Counter-Strike still manages to be peculiarly fun despite its simplicity. In many ways it's just like Half-Life, but that's also because it is extremely ambitious, innovative, and pulls it all off without a hitch.
Somehow, it all works, and it's all great.
posted by Toupee @ 1:24 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home