I hate Half-Life, and here's why.
See, the thing is, I totally get where people are coming from. Valve are excellent at videogames. I love the shit out of Portal, and Left 4 Dead. I would probably love Team Fortress 2 if I could get it to run.
But I hate Half-Life.
There's a couple of reasons. First, it has first person platforming, something that I am morally opposed to. It just doesn't work, dug. Maybe if you're some kind of hideous creature that plays FPSes non-stop full tilt alla the time, but even the Mirror's Edge demo made me angry (wall-jumping from a first person perspective!? WALL JUMPING FROM A FUCKING FIRST-PERSON PERSPECTIVE!?!?!?). There is a reason, a very good reason, that platforming is not a factor in modern-FPSes. Sure, maybe you can pull off some sweet stuff with a well-placed jump to gain an advantage, but there is very little in terms of bottomless pits or fall-damage deaths. For damn good reason. It just doesn't work. It works in third person games because you have a pretty damn good idea of how your character is positioned relative to the environment and you have a bigger scope of periphery vision. Imagine trying to do parkour with a viewmaster, periscope eyepiece, or otherwise-vision constraining device strapped to your head. That's what it feels like. And that's bad.
Beyond that, there's the story. See, Half Life 1 was a pretty revolutionary game when it came out, yeah, yeah, I get it. But it's 2011 now. And the people clamoring for a new Half-Life game are delusional if they think that Valve can really take the generic alien invasion hijinks and implausible nerd heroics of Half Life and spin it out into any more interesting than "good...for a videogame." This is for many reasons. First, let's consider Gordon Freeman and his status as a mute. Why? I realize that some people consider having a first person game where your character talks is bad for immersion, but is it any worse where everybody talks to your character and he just sits there, stone silent like some kind of psychopath? There's a reason the Left 4 Dead people talk, and it's not just to have good gameplay barks that give better situational awareness to your co-op teammates. "But Oni" you might say "The chick from Portal doesn't talk either!" You know why? Because she's dealing with a bunch of psychotic motor-mouthed computers that probably wouldn't care for anything she had to say. You're not going to talk a killer AI out of killing you, unless you have one hell of a paradox in mind.
But there's more to it than Gordon's bizarre stoicism. Consider the cartoonish super-scientist character of Kleiner. Or the simple meathead characterization of Barney. Alyx Vance is frequently held up as good example of female characters in videogames, but that's more because she's competent and keeps her clothes on than for any real character reason. She is the most generic of girl-next-door type. These are the same people who gave us glaDOS, the Red and Blu teams, Francis the world's most hateful zombie apocalypse survivor, and people really want them to go back in visit the cast of a typical alien invasion shooter from the late 90s????
I think I'll make my final complaint my most personal one. I straight up don't like most shooters. The idea of being able to shoot a monster to death seems strange to me. I mean it's one thing if you have a high powered rifle, or some kind of alien blasto-ray, but bullets? It's not really a monster if you can kill it the same way you'd kill some kinda shady ass home invasion guy, is it? There's a reason that Freddy Jason and Michael Meyers don't stay dead, see? But even beyond that, there's a lot of other stuff that bothers me. The crowbar, that most beloved icon of Half Life, is a piece of shit. Gordon swings it like a robot (leading further credence to the psychopath theory) and aliens react to it in the exact same canned way, every time. Valve managed to make first person melee feel good to me for the first time with Left 4 Dead 2, and Monolith supposedly was doing similarly great with Condemned five years ago. What's Half Life's excuse?
Now granted, there's a chance that the next Half-Life game could be Half-Life 3, and it could totally evolve the series and fix all of my complaints listed above. Fair enough. But I kind of doubt it. And the frustrating thing is if they did bring out Half Life 2 Episode 3, and not address any of my issues, the fans would happily swallow it as long as it had another two or three cool set pieces.
But I hate Half-Life.
There's a couple of reasons. First, it has first person platforming, something that I am morally opposed to. It just doesn't work, dug. Maybe if you're some kind of hideous creature that plays FPSes non-stop full tilt alla the time, but even the Mirror's Edge demo made me angry (wall-jumping from a first person perspective!? WALL JUMPING FROM A FUCKING FIRST-PERSON PERSPECTIVE!?!?!?). There is a reason, a very good reason, that platforming is not a factor in modern-FPSes. Sure, maybe you can pull off some sweet stuff with a well-placed jump to gain an advantage, but there is very little in terms of bottomless pits or fall-damage deaths. For damn good reason. It just doesn't work. It works in third person games because you have a pretty damn good idea of how your character is positioned relative to the environment and you have a bigger scope of periphery vision. Imagine trying to do parkour with a viewmaster, periscope eyepiece, or otherwise-vision constraining device strapped to your head. That's what it feels like. And that's bad.
Beyond that, there's the story. See, Half Life 1 was a pretty revolutionary game when it came out, yeah, yeah, I get it. But it's 2011 now. And the people clamoring for a new Half-Life game are delusional if they think that Valve can really take the generic alien invasion hijinks and implausible nerd heroics of Half Life and spin it out into any more interesting than "good...for a videogame." This is for many reasons. First, let's consider Gordon Freeman and his status as a mute. Why? I realize that some people consider having a first person game where your character talks is bad for immersion, but is it any worse where everybody talks to your character and he just sits there, stone silent like some kind of psychopath? There's a reason the Left 4 Dead people talk, and it's not just to have good gameplay barks that give better situational awareness to your co-op teammates. "But Oni" you might say "The chick from Portal doesn't talk either!" You know why? Because she's dealing with a bunch of psychotic motor-mouthed computers that probably wouldn't care for anything she had to say. You're not going to talk a killer AI out of killing you, unless you have one hell of a paradox in mind.
But there's more to it than Gordon's bizarre stoicism. Consider the cartoonish super-scientist character of Kleiner. Or the simple meathead characterization of Barney. Alyx Vance is frequently held up as good example of female characters in videogames, but that's more because she's competent and keeps her clothes on than for any real character reason. She is the most generic of girl-next-door type. These are the same people who gave us glaDOS, the Red and Blu teams, Francis the world's most hateful zombie apocalypse survivor, and people really want them to go back in visit the cast of a typical alien invasion shooter from the late 90s????
I think I'll make my final complaint my most personal one. I straight up don't like most shooters. The idea of being able to shoot a monster to death seems strange to me. I mean it's one thing if you have a high powered rifle, or some kind of alien blasto-ray, but bullets? It's not really a monster if you can kill it the same way you'd kill some kinda shady ass home invasion guy, is it? There's a reason that Freddy Jason and Michael Meyers don't stay dead, see? But even beyond that, there's a lot of other stuff that bothers me. The crowbar, that most beloved icon of Half Life, is a piece of shit. Gordon swings it like a robot (leading further credence to the psychopath theory) and aliens react to it in the exact same canned way, every time. Valve managed to make first person melee feel good to me for the first time with Left 4 Dead 2, and Monolith supposedly was doing similarly great with Condemned five years ago. What's Half Life's excuse?
Now granted, there's a chance that the next Half-Life game could be Half-Life 3, and it could totally evolve the series and fix all of my complaints listed above. Fair enough. But I kind of doubt it. And the frustrating thing is if they did bring out Half Life 2 Episode 3, and not address any of my issues, the fans would happily swallow it as long as it had another two or three cool set pieces.